Elisha Rex

by E. C. Ambrose

  The sword tipped in Elisha’s grip, its polished blade casting off crimson glints. Among the glints, a reflection shivered and returned, lit by fire—a man’s face, surrounded by the blood-streaked locks of a woman’s hair and framed by the shreds of flesh that once had been Queen Rosie’s cheeks.

  Chapter 19

  “What’s the matter with you, Madoc?” Elisha shouted. “Don’t you know enough to bow to your queen?” He raised up the sword as Madoc jerked his eyes back to Elisha’s face. Another magus, even Elisha, could be fooled by projections and by blood that captured another’s presence, but a desolati like Madoc had only the evidence of his physical senses. Elisha had been so bound up in his magical awareness, his recognition of Rosalynn’s pain, that he hadn’t looked hard enough at the actual figure that approached.

  The flaming brand trembled in Madoc’s grasp.

  “Don’t, Elisha, I don’t need that, not now,” said the voice outside, and Elisha clamped his teeth together to keep from screaming. Fabric rustled against the door, and Madoc’s eyes twitched to the side, toward the town.

  “Goddamn it, man, you saved my life at Dunbury Ford—I expected better from you.” He threw the sword at Madoc’s feet. “He’s no mancer, Rosie. Mancers have more backbone.”

  “Forgive me, yer Majesty,” Madoc murmured, and dropped to his knees, the sword lying between them.

  Elisha struck his hands together as if wiping away the issue, desperate to stop his shaking as Rosalynn’s face flashed before his eyes—her face whole and happy in Thomas’s presence—then torn in half with this stranger glaring through. Elisha turned and the mancer retreated out the door, back into the darkness where the truth could be concealed a while longer. “Rosie, wait.”

  “You saw his face, Elisha, you saw how he looked at me.” The voice shook with tears. “You mustn’t see me, not like this.”

  Elisha tried to slow his heart and stop the rising bile that stung his throat. Behind him, Madoc retched. The flickering light of the torch sputtered and died.

  Swallowing his fear, Elisha moved slowly from the porch, his mind racing as fast as his heart. “I can help you, Rosie,” he said softly. “I’m a healer, you know that.”

  “This is beyond healing—you saw the look on his face!” The stolen voice verged upon hysteria and Elisha shuddered. Now that he knew the truth, he could hear the falsetto, the man adopting Rosie’s manner in an attempt to make his disguise more convincing.

  “He’s just an ignorant peasant.” As his eyes adjusted, his mind filling in the details of the monster before him, Elisha said, “If you will not let me help you, then tell me what I can do, Rosie. Where’s Thomas?”

  The figure, swaddled in a heavy cloak, wavered. “Oh, Elisha, it’s so awful.” It gasped, then lurched to one side as if it would fall.

  Elisha took a half-step forward, then snatched back his hand, the mancer’s own words ringing in his ears. “Don’t let it touch you.”

  As he stood, his knees tensed for a leap he could not bring himself to make, the air took on a sudden breath of heat and the figure raised its head.

  From the muffled form emerged a chuckle, low and languorous, sliding from the high-pitched imitation of Rosie’s terror to something deep and dangerous. Elisha tucked his hands under his arms, shivering, the armor of Death long since shattered about him, leaving him exposed. Slowly, the figure rose, rolling its shoulders, tossing back the tendrils of bloody hair that snapped in the breeze around it.

  Elisha reached for the chill power he had abandoned, but Rosie’s presence swelled up through the ground and lashed him through the wind. Distracted, he caught snatches of her dying—the knife cutting open her belly, violating her womb, carving up along her throat to stop her stupid babbling voice. His flesh pricked as if by a thousand needles, he almost heard what she was screaming. Then the wind snatched it away, and his relief at being saved from that vision shamed him, flaming along his cheeks.

  “But you are not ignorant, are you, Elisha Barber?” drawled the strong voice of the man behind the mask of murder. “Not ignorant at all, nor a peasant any longer, Your Majesty.” He swept into a bow, then straightened. “But should I curtsy instead?” Again, he laughed, then sighed. “No, there’s no purpose to the game. What gave me away? Was I not as absurd as the queen? I thought I captured her tones very well myself. I broke your guard with the first sound of tears and nearly had you at my side just now. I could feel the leap of your compassion through the darkness.”

  Elisha’s jaw clenched. Without Madoc’s brand to light his vision, he might not have seen until it was too late. Now, Madoc hurried around behind him. The church at his back grew brighter moment by moment, until Madoc had lit enough candles to cast the glow of stained glass out into the street, staining the mancer’s robe. The mancer hoped to lure him out into the darkness, where his projection could hold a little longer.

  “And your friend, what is he? Just a peasant?”

  Swallowing the nausea that filled him, Elisha told the truth: “My bodyguard.”

  The new wave of laughter knocked him back a step with its rich appreciation. “Oh, Elisha, how you delight me! I see now why Morag worked so long to win you over and why he failed to harvest you. Even if one could possess you, yet some of the joy of you would be gone. Joy does tend to scatter during the harvest after all.”

  For a moment, Elisha felt the edge of Morag’s knife against his throat. He reeled, catching himself upon the doorframe. His shadow danced after him, leaving a swath of golden light that cut the blackness. The voice, the manner, and the mention of Morag resonated with a sudden certainty. Here, at last, stood Morag’s master, the one who cowed Prince Alaric, the one who appeared from a wound in the fabric of the world, and vanished there when he was done.

  The mancer lifted his robes with a delicate touch—no longer womanish, but a gesture of long habit—and walked three steps forward into the light. He walked quickly and Elisha dodged out of arm’s reach, but his enemy dismissed this with a twiddle of his fingers as he halted, his face to the light.

  Rosalynn’s skin showed pale with the purple-gray of bruises and the hollows where her eyes should have been. The ill-fitting skin draped awkwardly along the wrong bones beneath. Her full cheeks sagged, and one ear jutted up higher than the other, a red line of blood oozing down alongside it like another strand of the dark and tangled hair. When the mancer smiled, her lips stretched in ghastly imitation. He opened his mouth, the cut beneath the chin gaping open a little, and he stuck out his tongue, waggling it this way and that, flicking the tip into the crevice between his lips and hers, bulging the cheek and letting a trickle of blood spatter the ground.

  Elisha’s stomach rolled. For an instant, he shut his eyes, then snapped them open again. Madoc was right, he must not turn his back on this. He straightened and forced a smile. “Why not step inside and see each other clearly?” He mounted the steps to enter the church, bright with candles, rich with the dead.

  Madoc stood to the other side of it, his back pressed against the wall and his sword drawn. He glowered and gave a twitch of his head as Elisha stepped inside.

  “Desolati are fools, every one,” said the mancer. “Let him do what he will, it might amuse us.”

  Lifting his chin, Elisha strode into the room and faced the door. “Do not act as if we are together, you and I. That was Morag’s first mistake.”

  “But don’t you remember how he made you feel?” The voice carried the promise of such belonging and power that it brought a rush to Elisha’s loins. The sensation spread through his body with seductive golden warmth.

  Elisha forced himself to meet the mancer’s gaze, the eyes shadowed by Rosalynn’s brows above them. Already, as he faced the reality of Rosie’s murder, he calmed. The tendrils of the dead rose up, misty, and he drew them in.

  “You see?” said the mancer. “We are not so different after all.” He spread his h
ands, Rosalynn’s empty fingers wrapped over his own and bound with bits of thread like poor embroidery. “Oh, yes, I can feel you reaching.”

  The warmth drained away as chill death seeped up to take its place. Gore edged the places where Rosie’s skin wrapped the stranger’s body, staining the cloak that concealed most of them both, and Elisha seized the frigid pain that washed through him. “No. I value more the life in men than what their deaths might bring me.”

  “Then why do you call upon these poor souls to aid you?”

  “You do not know me.”

  “On the contrary,” the mancer said, reaching up toward his face. “It was I who elevated you.” With a careful curl of his wrist, he peeled back the face that hid his own. With long fingers he swept away the gore that decked his skin, and grinned. “But you guessed that, didn’t you?” He drew a kerchief from his cuff, his doubled fingers wiping his brow and down along his nose as if cleaning himself were his only concern. He moved in shadows and fear and hid himself at the center of the kingdom, the king’s own confessor, one man Thomas and his wife would trust beyond all others, for he was, after all, a man of God. The archbishop shrugged the skin back over his shoulder, the hair spattering blood against the wall.

  Elisha flinched at the gesture. He reached inward, gathering the cloud of Death and giving it shape by his anger. “And Thomas? What have you done with the king, Your Grace? Is he, too, nothing but a pelt you torture for your own ends?” The words hurt even to say. He wounded himself with that image of Thomas, though he refused to believe it. He had to refuse, or he had nothing left.

  By the door, Madoc tensed, his knuckles white on the hilt of his sword.

  “When you presented yourself at the gate, stigmata on your hands, a willing army at your back, a few miracles already achieved—my God, it was a gift! What better way to play you than to set you in the center of the board and let you watch the kingdom dissolve beneath you? Such a pleasure, to snap the bonds of loyalty one by one. I thought, with you distracted, the barons might have their chance at you, and clear the way for . . . other things. I underestimated you and your little duke. And now, will you have victory over France? They should praise you to the heavens.” His lips twisted sourly. “Long live the king.”

  “Where is he?”

  “All that was his is yours, Barber, why concern yourself with him?” The mancer began to unfasten his cloak, then paused, holding his hand before him like a lady showing her new ring. He rippled his fingers, and Rosie’s skin wriggled against its bindings. “Well, almost all.”

  Unfurling the lash of Death, Elisha snapped his knowledge like a whip about the room. Rosie’s spattered blood steamed against his extended reach and his awareness leapt through it to the skin that draped the mancer’s shoulders, revealed as he lowered his cloak.

  In a swirl of fabric, the archbishop spun into the room.

  Madoc ducked and thrust out his sword, only to be fouled by the wild cloak, flung free on a wind of no god’s making. Madoc cried out, enveloped by the fabric, tumbling toward the wall and hitting hard, his sword slashing in a silver gleam from the dark that concealed him.

  Still spinning like a mad dancer, the archbishop flicked his hands, and Rosie’s hands flew free even as Elisha seized control through his knowledge of the murdered woman. Her fingers writhed into the air, making for the mancer’s throat.

  Elisha’s fury gave strength to the skin as he urged the flesh to remember what it had been. The empty hands curled and flexed, but reached only to brush against the mancer’s throat, a gesture almost loving.

  The archbishop fell silent, his eyes darting. He spun to a halt, clasping the hands in his.

  The heat of that grasp knocked back Elisha’s power, a blast of arctic air as Death howled its frustration. Elisha’s own fists knotted, urging on the hands that he had claimed.

  “You will not catch me that way, Barber.”

  “Shed your skin, you serpent—I will have you.” Elisha half-crouched, the rush of his control fusing inside his skull with Death’s proud laughter.

  Dropping the dead hands, the archbishop scrabbled for the face that hovered by his own and swept the skin from his shoulders. The skin’s face turned toward his, its arms reaching. With a shriek, he flung it across the room and Elisha cried his victory as he raised one hand to snatch it from the air. Rosie’s breasts slid over his arm as he clasped what remained of her, the pitiful thing falling limp against him, threatening to slip away.

  The archbishop lost all semblance of fear, and stood watching, as if he’d meant for this to happen.

  Instinctively, Elisha drew the skin closer, then screamed as Rosalynn’s last moments flashed through him. Agony burned through Elisha’s power as Rosalynn’s memory wailed her killer’s name. Her dying voice pleaded for mercy or a miracle as the outrage of betrayal shattered into despair.

  Someone raped her. Someone ripped her womb. Someone kissed her as he cut her throat. A monster who claimed Elisha’s face.

  Elisha staggered to his knees, clutching the skin to his chest where his brand burned anew. It could not be—it had not been! Swathed in the chill of Death, Elisha opened himself to Rosie’s memory.

  Stripped to her shift, Rosalynn stood bound by the wrists, her eyes swollen shut with bruises. She ducked against the stone of her prison as the salt breeze slapped at her hair. Thomas deserved better from her—she was the queen, and finally showing her magical heritage. He bore his own torment with the strength she loved so well.

  “Rosie!” called a voice.

  Rosalynn caught her breath, and felt the presence; strong, compassionate, the healer’s strength and the magus’s power.

  “Rosie, thank Heaven I’ve found you.”

  He touched her then, the sudden heat of contact making her flinch.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to frighten you, not that way.”

  But he did not withdraw his hand, and she felt sure she knew that touch, hope surging through her from her bare feet to her tender wrists. “Elisha, dear Mother Mary, can it be you? Truly?”

  She shook back her hair, and his strong, quick fingers helped, every stroke along her skin sending that reassurance she counted on from him, the warmth that radiated through his skilled hands. Tears stung her bruised eyes, and she swallowed as if she might clear her dry throat.

  “How did you find us? Have you freed Thomas? I don’t know where they keep him. Sometimes they bring him up to walk—” She rambled, her voice a mumble through parched lips, and she forced herself to stop. Thomas must be as patient as a saint to endure her.

  “Hush, you’ll understand everything soon,” his voice murmured at her ear as he reached up to loose the chain that held her. She sank into his arms, her knees unable to support her.

  Though she knew how unseemly it must be, for the queen to be so embraced, neither could she stir herself to withdraw. Truth be told, she wanted little more than to curl into his strong peasant arms, her face tucked against his beating heart, and simply be held. He seemed so tall and strong. The tears flowed freely.

  Elisha, caught up in the vision, stopped the rising nausea that churned in his stomach every time the imposter touched her—every notion he had of himself through her sensitive flesh. He had not been there. That fact remained despite all that he felt.

  Briefly in her weakness, Rosalynn’s cheek snuggled to her rescuer’s chest where his heart raced almost as hers, cushioned by the softness of the dark, curly hair that peeked from the neck of his shirt. As her rescuer lifted her, she turned, giving up the comfort of him, her awareness sweeping the courtyard, her memory filling in what she knew of her surroundings as they stepped out from the roofed corner where she had been held, the corner still reeking of horse dung. She sensed the three mancers lounging by the gate, warm in the sunlight. She frowned. Had he tricked them somehow, in order to get through? Then, with the frayed edge of her awaren
ess, she caught the presence of Thomas. “Elisha, there’s Thomas! Can you see him?”

  Another pair of the monsters carried Thomas between them, and she could feel the strain in his bound body. They dropped him to his knees, but he did not say a word. Thank God he had learned that lesson. After her last punishment, they both had.

  Rosalynn’s memory shied quickly away as she craned her neck, struggling to see him with her own battered eyes. “Tell him we’re fine now, Elisha. He needs to hear your voice.”

  But he wouldn’t hear Elisha, not Thomas—without the contact of one magus to another, he would believe his senses, and he would know the truth.

  “He’ll know soon enough,” spoke the voice through her flesh. Her savior carried her across the yard, retreating from Thomas’s presence. Where were they going? To the table? What happened there, she could not say, for they kept her face to her own wall, but the screams had been enough. Once again, she turned her thoughts away.

  “I don’t understand. Do you need me quiet? Tell me how to help. I haven’t any talisman, or I should have tried something,” again, her voice caught, and she whispered, “No, I shouldn’t. The things they’ve threatened, Elisha, not against me, but him. Dear Lord, I couldn’t risk that they should hurt him. They’ve kept him bound, of course, but they’ve not touched him. They are evil and yet even they dare not harm the king.”

  They dare not, Elisha knew, because the slightest scent of blood might bring Elisha down upon them like the Wild Hunt of Faerie. He grit his teeth as the vision moved, the mancer lowering Rosalynn onto the table, and pulling her toward the center.

  “Elisha?” She struggled to master her quavering voice. The cold of the stone struck her through her thin chemise, and she shivered. “I do wish you would tell me the plan,” she said, softly in case she might disturb his work, whatever that might be.