Fury swept through the contact, and the flames flared up again, trapped within the circle of Elisha’s arms. A tiny wind tossed Brigit’s hair, and she bared her teeth at him.
Icicles struck against his back, and Elisha jerked. His fingers twitched, suddenly ringed with cold. He fought the pain, but the images mounted behind his eyes, the layers of skin, muscle, tendon, bone. The mancers fought him, carving into him with blades they tempered in death. They would get her free by any means and leave his hands in bloody bits upon the stone.
Elisha reached again for death, and the hounds leapt howling to his call—the last hunt before they turned upon their master. Already his legs went numb as the ice crept up his spine. He had not the strength to heal himself as well as hold her at bay. He had to end this, to break her plans, no matter the cost.
A mancer wrapped Elisha’s forehead in a frigid grip, trying to conjure his death from the holes that marred his skull.
Elisha roared, pulling away, burrowing his head closer to Brigit, her pulse leaping against his temple. The knife hacked at his neck. For a moment, Elisha relented and broke the circle.
Brigit’s strength shot forth, the flames towering over her, the angel’s shriek thundering through the room. She grappled with the reins of her power and the mancers, too, cried out, feeling the jerk of their renewed connection, like a yoke of oxen lashed again to their labor.
Where Brigit sent, Elisha followed, every pinpoint on her web glowing again as a star of death. He sought the tenuous contact, the glittering shard of Randall’s blade, edged with Thomas’s bright blood.
Desperate to outrace the ravenous power that consumed him, Elisha found contact, and love, the strength to keep himself alive.
“No!” Brigit kicked and spat and her skinning blade broke a point against his rib.
With a thought, he snapped the circle closed and wrested the power from her grasp, claiming her web as his own. He clung to her as the dying cling to breath. He ripped the strength of the mancers, the shock of their combined power lancing through his body, like ice flooding his veins. He arched his back, his throat already too hoarse to make a sound.
Brigit moaned. The fire wreathing her face turned white and singed Elisha’s eyebrows to ash. But he did not let go.
Her mother’s presence, ever re-creating the moment of her execution, blossomed again at Elisha’s command.
Brigit crowed her victory, laughing as she gathered the memory. She called for fire, and Elisha let her have it. She forged again her affinity, the chain that linked present and past.
Gritting his teeth against a force that must tear him apart, Elisha channeled the powers she had joined. The fire danced and cackled as he reached to claim it.
Relaxing in his arms, Brigit chuckled. “You cannot do that. What you’re trying. You aren’t strong enough to take what I have made, not to turn it to your own ends.”
“I can,” he answered. “And I am.” And Elisha threw down his walls. He opened himself completely to the rush of death and power that Brigit had channeled. Pain crashed over him. Knife wounds laced his back and arms, his blood raced and cooled too quickly in the icy wind. The ever-hungry hounds snapped their jaws about him, and he stiffened. Cold slammed into him like an ocean wave, splintering his awareness. His head throbbed with each gulp of air and his lacerated fingers pulsed, still digging into Brigit’s back, mingling their blood.
With a whoosh, the fire exploded, and Brigit clawed at his face with her burning hand.
Under his knees, the altar, frozen by the power of death, cracked in the heat. It pitched sideways and broke, sliding them down, and her father groaned as he hung in his chains. Still, Elisha held her.
Brigit’s own doom coiled within her, the power she forged to slay a thousand rebounding against herself. She lashed out, a searing blast of cold to douse the flames.
Elisha lay crushed against stone. The first time they met, then, too, he flung his arms about her. He wrapped her in his own cloak, to be sure she would not burn in a witch’s fire. When the cold tempest of her desperation struck him full, Elisha drew his last breath. He sucked down the blackness and shadows and spun dozens of deaths into this one.
As the lives he reached for crumpled, one by one, terror burst against the roof of his mouth, like chilled grapes—succulent and brief. The mancers died, the chains they made to merge their power for their queen drawn back along all the wicked ways he now controlled.
Brigit’s body went rigid in his arms. “I loved you!” She scratched the words across his chest and branded them into his bones. She fought to keep him out, sealing the channels of her mind, but Elisha pursued her even there, tearing any sign of her presence. She had to be open in order to share strength with the mancers: too open to shield herself now. He stripped from her the stuff of life, unraveling her presence into threads. He had crushed her power and destroyed her dreams. In moments, she would be dead.
A sharp, hot shock struck through his gut. They gasped as one. He had not the strength, she said? Oh, the power that now rose up through his hands with the death of her and of the child they shared. The power he could have, once he consummated his curse. For a moment he reeled at the edge of a new abyss. There remained but one connection, one last link in the chain of power he had seized in twisting himself into every strength she claimed and every contact she used: He had bound himself to the infant they shared. Elisha’s gut burned, not from the wound, but from this knowledge, from the binding of fatherhood which he could shed only so long as he claimed no contact with the life they had created.
If he killed her, if the baby died now, while he was so thoroughly intertwined with them, he died, too, and she had known it. She dared him to try it, knowing that their magic mingled here too deeply. If he slew her now, sacrificing their child in the hopes of victory, he would be swept away along with their child. And if he died, all that he knew of the mancers, and the quest to stop them, died with him.
The abyss opened, the Valley calling, waiting to take them all: the innocent child, the shattered witch, and himself, the man who bound them together.
With a wrenching effort, Elisha reached out and sealed the breach that beckoned him. The Valley swirled shut. His circle of blood collapsed as he yanked away his ruined arms.
A wicked howl of wind flung up ashes that stung Elisha’s eyes. He saw nothing. Chaos bloomed around him, but it sang with the voice of a distant angel.
Chapter 38
Beneath the drift of burning thatch, Elisha’s eyes fluttered open, and he groaned, rolling to his side. Brigit lay before him, her body tumbled, her skin too pale. He reached out to take her arm, covering the wounds she had inflicted to merge her blood with her father’s and join the present to the past. With a gentle stroke, Elisha told her flesh to heal. In his doubled vision, he saw the golden shimmer of the Valley edging all around her, but she was not dead, not yet. Her chest rose convulsively and fell, her body still warm against his, as if they lay together in the exhaustion after love. Elisha slipped his hand lower, to her swelling abdomen, where the baby still lived, a little echo of life into the eddies of death that swirled around them, but any sense of Brigit had gone. She lay like a thing of straw, too warm to be a mancer, too blank to be alive.
Elisha slipped his arm from beneath her. Pain seared his back and arms. It seeped along his chest in a hundred wounds as he lifted his mangled hands before him. He must look the very corpse of Satan. The old man still hung in his chains, his throat and chest laid open in flaps that fluttered with a shuddering breath. Elisha reached up to brush the skin with the back of his hand, sealing the cuts with his trembling touch. With a murmur of rust, he struck down the chains, and Brigit’s father fell into his arms. Elisha winced, rolling the man aside, curling into himself around his bloody hands.
Prayers and weeping rent the air around him, but there were no more screams, no curses, no pleas for death. The unfinished roo
f, shocked by the power he had drawn, shifted over his head, and a sharp beak thrust inside, then a few more, plucking aside the straw. With the last shreds of cold, Elisha urged his dangling fingers to heal, holding them carefully, eyes squeezed shut. At last, he pushed himself up, making the old man as comfortable as he might, and gathering the shell of Brigit in his aching arms. As he climbed outside, the crows gave welcome, hopping here and there among the fallen, finding the dead mancers and pecking at their eyes. Priests remained upon their knees, families held together, their children confused and crying, spared from the torturous touch of the past but witnessing their parents’ suffering.
Blood dripped from his wounds, but Elisha no longer feared who might find him. If there were any mancers abroad in England, they could not reach him here. Abroad, he thought. They were in Naples and in France. They were in the court of the pope himself, and in the halls of the Holy Roman Emperor. For a moment, he caught his breath, holding Brigit against his chest, and gazed out across the ruin where the nobles of his land struggled to rise. Tendrils of fear drifted out and joined them, each to each. The travails of the dead overlaid them still. Closing his left eye, he saw the living, rising up, giving praise and thanks and love. Close the right eye and all was death—how London would look if Brigit succeeded. How the world would look, if the mancers won.
His head bowed, and Elisha sank to his knees, sobbing. Some of the foreign mancers—an Italian, a Frenchman—had escaped back to their homes and their wicked companions. As those distant mancers learned what happened here, they would never join themselves that way again. They would never make it so easy to strike them down. He was still only one man. Not just any man, but still. His wrist throbbed, then Mordecai was there, leaning over him, kneeling down, his hands upon Elisha’s back.
Elisha’s breath hitched into his lungs, and Madoc came to receive Brigit’s shell. “Food and water,” Elisha gulped. “Her child still lives.”
“We will tend them,” Mordecai said through his flesh. “And you.”
“I have to go,” Elisha said. “I have to hunt them down. Among the Germans, French, Italians. They’ll do this again—they have made kings before, they said. And unmade them.” Then his head shot up. “Thomas!” he cried and struggled up, the warmth of healing left behind.
Stumbling from the shadow of the walls, Elisha searched the wasteland around him. Some of those recovering called out and pointed, crossing themselves at the sight of him, but he moved on, turning. Where had he left them?
“Elisha!” Lord Robert bellowed across the space between them, then he was running, laughing. “You’re alive!” They met in the middle, Robert’s eyes flaring at the sight of Elisha close-to, but he swallowed and gave a quick nod, briefly clasping Elisha’s shoulder. “This way.” Together, they dodged among the clumps of lords and clusters of peasants, the groups intermixed in a way Elisha had never seen before. Father Michael and Father Osbert walked among the citizens, murmuring softly, though the inquisitor’s book stayed closed.
Randall lay on the bloody ground, staring at the sky, and Elisha thought for a moment it was too late. He dropped to his knees, taking the duke’s hand between his: cold, but not icy, not yet. Closing his eyes, Elisha rallied the shreds of his awareness and felt the duke’s exhaustion, his hand tremoring.
“No,” sighed the duke, and Elisha looked into his face. The duke’s chin trembled. His gaze roved away, then returned as he raised Elisha’s hands before his face. Tears spilled down his cheeks, his strength collapsing, his head rolling to the side, blinking at the plain of ghosts as if he saw them, too.
The Valley of the Shadow glimmered into being, its wind growing, its glow near to hand, Randall’s breath misting as he finally met Elisha’s eyes. “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” he whispered. “I am so sorry. So very sorry.”
“All is forgiven,” Elisha told him, sending his goodwill through their grasp, into the hand that would have struck him down. He searched, and found no injury, no hurt but the duke’s tremulous heart.
Randall drew breath, but his voice did not reach the air. “Oh, my dear barber, you were a fine king.”
As the chill shadow rose, Elisha reached with him toward the void. He called up Biddy, and Martin, and Rosalynn, and softened the howls of the damned into a song of angels as he let him go.
With his scarred fingers, he closed Randall’s eyelids, the duke’s tears warm upon his fingertips, then cooling into his skin.
Robert fell, sobbing, to gather the duke into his arms, and Elisha had no comfort for him. He was not death’s servant, nor, alas, its master, and some hurts would always be beyond his skill to heal.
Standing, Elisha left Robert to vent the grief they shared. He recognized Pernel stooping not far away, and would have to tell him about Walter. Then Pernel spotted him, blinking back tears, and Elisha saw that he already knew.
Another man rose up, then, from the gathering, a thin line of blood marking his cheek, his blue eyes keen as he stepped away from his retainers.
“Are we still meant to be enemies?” Elisha said. “I can’t remember.”
Thomas strode toward him. “I don’t care.” Someone had brought him a crown and a fresh cloak. Every inch the king.
Elisha started to bow, only to find his shoulders caught by strong hands as the king regarded him at arm’s length. “Elisha Barber, I pardon you of all charges laid upon you, and I say before this company that you have always been my faithful servant.” Then he shook his head sharply, his mouth twisting. “No . . . my loyal friend. From this day forth, you have the freedom of my lands and kingdom and the blessing of my crown.”
Thomas leaned toward him, administering the kiss of peace, a chaste brush of one cheek, then the other.
“I’ll have to go,” Elisha whispered. “The mancers—”
“I know,” said the king. “And you will carry my blessings and my faith, Elisha. Soon. But not today.”
Thomas’s grip radiated heat, and Elisha gave the slightest nod. Just for now, every spirit lay to rest.
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