Elisha Rex

by E. C. Ambrose

  “Get up, they’re coming!” Sabetha urged, the glamour finally leaving her eyes.

  Wrenching his feet free of the stained shoes, Elisha rose up again, barefoot.

  Dirt erupted before them with a shriek. They fell to either side, and Elisha turned wild eyes upon the grave, expecting to see a corpse lurching toward him. Only earth, he realized, touched by the spattered blood from some unfortunate. Across the new hollow, Sabetha scrambled toward the low wall and freedom. Good—let her escape.

  As Elisha picked himself up again, his arm numb from the second impact, Brigit stared down at him. “You see? They have been teaching me. And it was one of their German allies who came for me when you were slaughtering them at the mine.”

  “Halt in the name of the king!” Shouting and drawing their swords, the two watchmen bounded through the graveyard.

  “Be careful!” Brigit screamed, in a bold imitation of terror. “It’s Elisha Barber!”

  Dirt erupted behind her off to the left. The guards cried out as the mancers struck, and Elisha did not know what they did, but the cries broke off abruptly. Mastering his alarm, he stepped back and breathed deep. He drew up death through his naked feet, up into his veins so that every pulse of his heart throbbed with power.

  “Do you really think to challenge me in a graveyard, Your Majesty?”

  Brigit patted her belly. “I know you too well, Elisha. I have no doubt you’d strike me down, but to kill your own child? I don’t think so.” The sinuous heat of her presence rose up, steaming from the earth at his feet and circled around his cold limbs.

  Clamping his fingers into fists, Elisha managed to control his response. “Don’t bother, Brigit, I don’t care anymore.”

  “What, you care only for your king? But I should thank you for playing your part in helping me to win him over. If the French invasion failed, I was to ride in and save him. It worked perfectly for me to have you arrive in the flesh, urging his death. Even if he doubted that you slew Rosalynn, your own words shattered him, Elisha.”

  Death still lingered with him, but shivers of panic enflamed the wound in his belly.

  “Poor barber,” Brigit crooned, strolling nearer. She lifted her face to his, her breath stroking his lips. “You wanted so much to help and to heal and to make people whole. You wanted it so much that you destroyed yourself, and the man you desire.”

  Chapter 32

  Elisha turned his face from hers.

  “Do you know the tragedy, Elisha? I only went to them to find you. When the priests exhumed the empty coffin, I searched for you.”

  “For love, Brigit, or because you wanted to make a talisman of my corpse?”

  Her hand cradled the back of his neck. “They had the power you refused to share. Yes, I did make a bargain, to defend all the magi—for a little while, even you, in case you could be swayed by reason. The only thing I regret is my mother’s prophecy that won’t come true.” Her breath carried more than regret, something like worry. “I would have liked for you to be there. You were to lead us home, my mother said, but it seems the task must fall to me, to show the desolati we are not to be abused. But then, prophecy is always such a tricky thing. Myself, I take inspiration from the past.” She slid her arms around him.

  “I’ve tried,” she said through his skin. “I’ve tried so hard to convince you. You have a talent that you squander on the ignorant—a talent you would never have had without my mother. And now all that remains is for me to kill you.” She pulled him nearer, one hand wrapped into his hair, the other pressed to his back as she tried to kiss him.

  Elisha wrenched away and fell, retching into the dirt.

  “You might have died with my love upon your lips, Elisha Barber, but perhaps this is more appropriate.”

  As he stared up at her, the moon outlined her form, the growing shape of his child within. He sought desperately for some spell beyond death, but found none so well-practiced, none so easy to control. None that might not harm the baby.

  The mancers hemmed him in, one of them drawing a fleshing blade, asking a question in French.

  “Don’t kill him yet,” another one answered. “We’re better served if he lives and half the kingdom still worships him.”

  “Your invasion failed,” Brigit snapped, pointing at the Frenchman. “The archbishop’s usurper here succeeded too well, and you can’t create a civil war when your rebel figurehead is in love with the king! I’ll bring the kingdom to heel, I told you. By tomorrow night, there’ll be none left strong enough to hold—” Suddenly she shrieked, tumbling headlong over him to land in the dirt. Elisha scrambled out of the way and leapt to his feet, nearly colliding with Sister Sabetha.

  “Run!” shouted the nun, still wielding the long-handled shovel she had used to strike the queen.

  Scanning the nearby mounds, Elisha cut a ragged course, dodging this way and that to avoid the splashes of fresh blood from which mancers burst out like maggots from corpses. They stumbled to a halt and ran in another direction, at every turn showered with dirt, and once, something that clattered like bones. Sabetha began to scream, a long sustained wail of panic.

  Brigit rose up to one side, a queer silhouette, long and jagged. The rake she held dripped blood, and Elisha whirled to meet her.

  “Did I break her? I only meant to scratch her back.”

  Sister Sabetha sprawled at her feet, a series of puncture wounds dotting her back. She gurgled blood.

  “Go on, heal the little nun. I’m curious, and I could use the time.”

  While he mustered his power, Elisha pulled the nun to his chest. He staggered with the weight of her, and Brigit swung the rake down, forcing him to stumble aside. She leaned on the handle, a callous farmwife with a vicious harvest. “You won’t let her die, will you? That hardly seems like you.”

  Elisha sucked strength from the graves and the death that hovered all around them. Even Brigit hesitated, her face sharp and pale in the moonlight.

  Quick as death, strong as eternity, Elisha made the final dash. Five strides, four, three, and he leapt to the grave. Half his concentration kept the woman alive, searching her wounds as her blood spilled over his arms. Pain stabbed his own back over and over as he showed her flesh how to heal. With the other half of his strength, he escaped.

  Together, they spun through his brother’s grave, into the maelstrom that was the Valley. The world ripped open like the gash across his brother’s throat. Elisha tried to conjure Biddy’s peace and found it mirrored around him here and there, but not enough to stop the tide of remembrance from his brother’s death. Remorse flooded in.

  Dead voices howled, although a few of them sang. The din built up inside his skull, and Elisha cried out, struggling to shield Sabetha even as he healed her. The Valley shocked him with its force, a raw surge like a thunderstorm. Elisha made for a patch of light and let himself reach out, drawing from that river, drinking it down and making of it what he needed.

  Slipping free of the Valley, he sank to his knees before a roaring fire. The chill of the floor, where his brother had died, ebbed away as he released the wonder and the power, and the woman stirred in his arms.

  “So beautiful,” she murmured, her eyes still shut. “Let me stay.”

  “No,” he answered, “not this time.”

  “Well, hello,” said a gruff voice behind him. “The very man I’ve been awaiting.”

  Elisha choked. So recently from the fight, his muscles beginning to tremble from his exertions, he doubted himself capable of more than weeping. To come so far, to escape an enemy bent upon his ruin only to fall into the lap of another—he should have known. If soldiers watched his brother’s grave, they must guard this workshop as well, and keep a man outside his brother’s house. The duke went to war for his daughter’s virtue. What would he not do to avenge her death?

  Nausea swirled in his guts, but Elisha forced it down as he
lay Sabetha on the ground, and she slowly sat up. Elisha gathered the shards of his strength, his muscles twitching, and started to rise.

  A firm hand planted itself on his shoulder. “Naw, don’t get up on my behalf.” A ruddy man came around and squatted down before him, grinning through his beard. “So there y’are, Elisha.”

  Elisha cupped a hand over his mouth as he blinked up at the welcome face of his one-time bodyguard, Madoc. “It’s you. God, but you had me worried.”

  The stocky man patted his shoulder, and his grin widened. “Aye, and ye don’t look as if ye’d stand much more worry tonight. Rest, rest, and keep you quiet. We’ve the duke’s men sleeping on our doorstep.” He raised shaggy eyebrows at the nun. “Who’s this, then? Never known ye to be keeping with the women of God, though I know there’s nunneries not so holy.” But he broke off as Sabetha glared.

  “I’ll thank you, sir, to keep your jests to yourself,” she whispered, dusting herself off as if she could wipe away all that she had seen. Her dark eyes met Elisha’s for a moment, then glanced to the side as her hands kept dusting. Her eyes roved over the place and focused beyond Elisha’s shoulder. “They can’t . . . come that way, can they? Those witches, can they come up through the floor, through the Valley, I mean?”

  The bloodstains on the floor had long been scraped away, covered over with fresh straw, but the place still held all that happened there. “I think not. They need fresh blood, slain by their own hand. This journey was more personal.”

  “It was your brother’s grave that opened for us, eh?”

  Jolted, Elisha gave a nod. “But how did you know?”

  “You were holding me, like, and I could feel what happened in you, this powerful fear, then the strength—then a faith like no other I’ve known.” She plucked at her skirt. “I could’ve stayed there a long time, even with the howling and all.”

  “I tried to shield you,” he said.

  “Aye, well. I’m sure there’s things you felt that would’ve been the end of me, but that sense of,” she stopped and screwed up her face. “A sense of being with you, joined, neither living nor dead but a part of it all. Is that what it’s like for you, this power that you have?”

  Elisha shook his head. “Mostly, it’s terrifying.”

  “Well, then, I’m sorry for that. That union, I think that’s what the priests get from God. They find their faith through solitude, by devoting themselves to the Lord. Maybe you’ve come at it the other direction, by devoting yourself to the flesh.”

  “I am the least holy person you’ll ever meet. Twenty years ago, when I watched them burn an angel, I turned my back on God. I’m a sorcerer at best, a heretic by some accounts, and by others, the devil himself.”

  She stared straight at him until he fell silent. “I’ve met worse, and that just today.”

  “So then,” Madoc put in, holding out steaming cups of cider to both of them, “you’ll likely appreciate your surroundings.”

  Elisha sipped the sweet, spiced liquid, grateful for the way it cleared his throat if not his mind, still trying to place himself like a priest in relation to God. It was not until Sabetha burst into laughter that he looked around.

  His brother’s workshop had been transformed. The broad hearth remained from the tin smithy he used to run here, but otherwise Nathaniel would not have recognized it. Rugs and a few benches stood at one end, along with a pile of blankets where Madoc had evidently been sleeping. An altar faced these on the opposite wall, a simple stone, with a bit of carving—shears, a razor, curls that might have been hair, a variety of surgical tools. Atop this, candles of various heights, some still burning, reflected from a bronze basin brimming with water. For a moment, Elisha imagined it was his own basin and the breath froze in his lungs. He pictured it brimful of blood, his brother’s life drained out by his own hand in this very room.

  Above the altar with its basin and candles, offerings covered every inch of the wall. Some took the form of charms for “Saint Barber.” Others, made of metal or crudely carved from wood, resembled hands, legs, even torsos and skulls, with a full-figure here or there, dangling like a doll among a carnage of its fellows.

  “All healed by you, or by this place,” Madoc supplied.

  “It can’t be. This whole thing is preposterous, as it has always been.”

  “Maybe so, but they believe it.” Madoc nodded, gazing up at the wall. “I believe it, too.”

  Elisha rounded on his friend. “But you’ve known me since they hauled me off to war. You saw me nearly die.”

  “Aye, but ye didn’t. And so I witnessed your very first miracles.” He wagged a finger in Elisha’s direction. “And don’t say they’re not. There’s witches, sure I’ve seen some strange things before and after, but they can’t do the things you can.”

  Elisha’s head dropped to his scarred hands, his empty cup forgotten. “Oh, I am sick of this argument,” he groaned toward the floor. He ached all over.

  Madoc lifted the cup from the floor and re-filled it from his pot on the hearth, then set it back again, letting the spiced steam rise up to work its own magic. After a moment, a small loaf of bread lay beside the cup, topped by a chunk of meat.

  Leather creaked as Madoc settled back on his haunches. “Someday, when you and I are old men sharing our houses with sheep and children, you’ll tell me all, eh?”

  Elisha murmured, “I don’t know that I’ll ever be an old man—or maybe I already am.”

  “Eat something.” Sister Sabetha nudged the food a little nearer. “You look about ready to shake to pieces.”

  “Sister, here, let me show ye this,” Madoc said, drawing the nun down toward the altar.

  After a while, with their soft speech barely penetrating his growing exhaustion, Elisha raised his head. He sampled the meat, then the bread, and before he knew it, both had been devoured. It settled his stomach and allowed a beam of clarity into his mind. He huddled in his new cloak, watching the fire dance, and thought of Thomas, the light of his laughter as he came down the steps with his daughter in his arms. Brigit must already be making her way home, slipping in past the late mass, thinking of excuses in case Thomas caught her about—then exuding her glowing sexuality as she slid into bed beside the king, recalling the dreams her mother forced upon him so long ago.

  He had never before hated anyone. He could not have hated her so much if he had not once believed he loved her. And she him. “God forgive me,” he said to the fire.

  “Sorry?” said Madoc, coming nearer.

  “I never killed the last queen,” he told his friend, “but I pray I might kill this one.”

  Sabetha held up her hands. “Nearly forgot.” Plucking at her finger, she handed down a ring, a narrow band of old gold delicately inscribed with flowers, but Elisha could feel Brigit’s foul touch upon it. Even that stain failed to hide Thomas’s lingering presence, a sense that hummed against the lock of hair he carried.

  “However did you manage it?”

  Sabetha shrugged again, but her lips turned upward. “In the dark, when she offered her hand. Thought she’d taken me in, didn’t she? Before they sent me t’convent, I was rather an ill-mannered girl.”

  Slipping it on his little finger, Elisha grinned up at her. “Thanks. I’m glad of it.” Then his smile slid away. “Someone’s coming.”

  Elisha lurched to his feet and turned as someone knocked once on the door before opening it.

  “She’s asked me to bring you some wood, though why—” The woman froze.

  “Sister Lucretia, please, let me explain.”

  Arrested by the sight of him, his old friend stood framed by the doorway, an armload of firewood tucked against her hip, lips parted. “It’s you.”

  “Aye,” he whispered, acutely aware now of the guards who snored outside. “Come in, and let me explain.”

  “Explain?” Lucretia’s voice rose. The
load of wood tumbled from her grasp, save the one log she held in her hand. “I knew you were the devil’s spawn, since that night in the dungeon—no matter what the archbishop said, God rest his soul. When he knew the truth about you, you killed him. A man of God! And him—” She pointed the log in Madoc’s direction. “Helena should never have let him use this place, no matter what he pays. To have them come here, denying what you are, still pretending you’re a king or even more.”

  Wincing, Elisha held out his hands, palms up. “I know what a trial this must be for you, for all of you, God help me, I—”

  “You dare to think that God might help you? When you profane the wounds of his son to steal the throne from his anointed?” She jabbed the firewood toward. “And what of the queen? Did you flay her?”

  “No, the archbishop did, that’s why I had to kill him.” He stepped forward. “He claimed me for king to send this nation into chaos. Lucretia, please.”

  “Guards!” she shouted. “Get up, you!”

  Elisha stumbled another step. “No!”

  She screamed and flailed.

  The piece of wood slammed into the side of Elisha’s head, knocking him against the wall and into nothingness.

  Chapter 33

  “Get to the king, Madoc,” said a woman’s voice from the beating blackness. “You’ve got to!”

  “Oh, Sister, I mistook you for one who believed in his lies.” Another woman’s voice drifted over him.

  “We’ve sent a runner already, sisters. The queen’ll know soon enough, don’t you worry.” The owner of this voice—a man—tugged at Elisha’s belt.

  “The king!” the first woman shouted. “Not the queen, she’s a monster!”

  Elisha lost the voices, every sensation briefly silent. He woke again, feeling colder, his teeth chattering. Nausea oozed through his aching belly, and his head throbbed in pulses like bolts of lightning.

  “Just to the bridge, that’s the duke’s order,” a man was saying, a young, strong voice.