Taken aback, Elisha said, “Wait a moment—you think he’s such a great witch that he can travel to places he knows well, with no more contact than familiarity?”
Her face lit as she tossed back her hair. “He’s very powerful.”
No wonder her mother craved the marriage as much as she did. “And you felt no fear when he took you through the Valley?”
“The what? You mean the passage when we went from the palace?” For a moment, the worry returned. “It was a little frightening, but I’m sure he did not mean it so. He said I would get used to it, that it was only the newness that scared me.”
Even from a foot away, Elisha felt the rising heat of her body. Bardolph shielded her from the Valley somehow—likely with her desire for him. She sensed the fear but wanted him so badly she ignored it. When they married, would Bardolph reveal what he was? “Why at that moment, Fraulein, when you waited on her majesty’s court?”
“He’s away so often on the emperor’s business, we must take our moments when we can.” Gretchen’s dagger glittered in the spreading sun of morning. “You really believe that he nicked my skin on purpose, just so he could lure you to the meadow? To our private place?”
“Your private place that was already ringed by archers, Fraulein.”
One of the sailors passed by, and she dropped her voice even lower. “You must be extremely arrogant.”
Elisha burst out laughing. Arrogant. By God, he had been, long ago, arrogant about the skill in his hands—but the skill he now commanded terrified him. Any pride he took from his talent for death rested in his ability to fight back against the mancers. He laughed so hard that he wanted to weep.
Gretchen and the sailors stared, perplexed.
“Gretchen! Who—?” The lady’s voice called, and Elisha swung about to face her, stifling his laughter. The prayerful mancer he had spared on the night of his slaughter stood there, all blood draining from her face. Elisha just had time to leap up before she fainted into his arms.
Chapter 18
“Margravine Katherine!” Gretchen leapt up as well, brandishing her dagger at Elisha. “What have you done to her?”
“So far, I’ve prevented her from falling,” he snapped back, then gathered the limp stranger into his arms as a few other women peered around the pavilion. “Is there a comfortable place to settle her?” he asked as they blinked at him.
“Doctor!” Empress Margaret’s expression moved from surprise to delight. “Here, use our bedding.” She put out an arm to hold back the canvas wall, but two of her ladies took hold, allowing her to precede Elisha into the pavilion. “Do put away your knife, Gretchen. Footing is uneven on ship.”
Elisha did not see if she obeyed. He lay the fallen woman on a pile of blankets where the empress indicated, and set his fingers at her wrist to check her pulse, but her eyelids fluttered and she started awake with a gasp. He drew back his presence in an instant, but let his hand linger there for the sake of their witnesses.
“I did not think to see you so.” Deep gray eyes regarded him from a handsome face, wisps of silvered hair escaping her skewed veil. She felt warm beneath his touch, but a hint of steel lurked below. Her voice, soft and despairing, stung his flesh. “You’ll wish you had killed me.” Then she gulped a breath, withdrawing her hand and holding it close.
Elisha gaped at her, glad that no other could see his face, but the thought had been so fleeting, he wasn’t even sure she’d meant to say it.
“What’s the trouble, Your Majesty?” asked the gruff voice of one of the physicians, edging between the stricken Margravine Katherine and the wall so that he could scowl at Elisha.
“My dear Katherine, are you quite well?” Margaret stood by, tried to stoop, and groaned, pressing a hand to her back.
“Please, Your Majesty—” Elisha began.
“Don’t, Your Majesty—” said Katherine at the same moment. Their eyes met and glanced away.
“It was the sight of him,” Gretchen said, as she brought forward a seat and helped the empress to be comfortable. “She merely looked at him and fell, as if he’d struck her.”
Elisha wet his lips, but Katherine said, “We met at church, Your Majesty. To see him here was a surprise.” She managed a smile. “Not an unpleasant one, Your Majesty. It’s only . . . I feared he had heard my confession.”
A few of the ladies laughed at that, and Katherine fluttered a hand, dismissing their laughter. “Even a widow has her secrets.”
At the empress’s side, Gretchen knelt, her hands clasped upon the arm of the chair. “Your Majesty, you are not hearing me. This man is a danger.”
“If good Brother Gilles is to be believed, this man is a miracle.” The queen’s round face and prim lips held both humor and curiosity. “We did not think to see you here, after yesterday’s misadventure.” The smile left her, something of her husband’s hardness taking its place.
Elisha took a deep breath. “My task remains undone, Your Majesty.”
The empress crossed herself, the jewels on her finger glinting. “The abbess Hildegard once said something similar, when she returned from a trance in which she was taken for dead. She attributed the words to the Holy Ghost.”
Shaking this off, he plunged ahead. “Your husband faces dangers he does not understand, Your Majesty.” Tentatively, he spread his awareness again, hoping for a sign from Katherine before he said any more. Did she repent of turning mancer? Had they truly lured her in by way of her husband’s murder? He sensed the cold well of her husband’s death entwined deeply through her presence from the talisman she wore bound under her tight bodice, pressed beneath her breasts.
“So you did not offer to attend me for my own sake,” the empress replied, then the smile returned to her lips if not to her eyes. “As the consort of an emperor, I have come to expect that.”
Chastened, Elisha bowed his head, but she reached out—Gretchen’s presence shooting with tension—and touched his face, drawing his gaze back to her. He felt her concern, the weight of majesty as heavy as the burden of the child she carried. “Forgive me,” he said.
“Do not trouble yourself, Doctor. You may not have come for my sake, but I shall jealously keep you for your own. You have already rendered me service.” Her fingertips just reached the furred edge of the cloak she had given him as she withdrew her hand.
Turning on her side, Katherine propped herself up. “Shall we play at courts of love, Majesty? He is a handsome one.”
Elisha caught his breath, suddenly worried over what the empress had meant about keeping him. A net of feminine laughter rippled around him, trapping him on the barge, committed to his mission. Gretchen’s anger and suspicion barely penetrated.
“Gretchen, bring my looking glass! Surely the doctor should see his own face—he is the very image of shock.”
An unaccustomed heat warmed his cheeks, and he stammered, “I fear I haven’t the stomach for such a game, Your Majesty.”
“The stomach? Is it not the liver where love resides?” asked another of the women, a blond with crooked teeth. She waved to the physician. “Doctor von Stubben. Does not love emanate from the liver through the eyes?”
Withdrawing from his examination of Katherine, the physician scowled all the more. “I recommend a drink of wine while you recover, my lady. And that you do not trouble yourself for games of love.”
The other women clapped their hands, beginning to rearrange their cushions and seats to cluster around the empress. “Doctor Emerick, have you an opinion?” Empress Margaret addressed the second, younger physician, and he moved forward with a bow.
“Well, Your Majesty, the effect of the gaze upon the object of love is well-known, of course. It can create all manner of sensations—”
“Like fainting?” asked the blond, with an arch of her brows toward Katherine.
“Indeed,” said the physician. “Fainting is one of
the primary symptoms of the dart—” he went on, raising his voice as the women laughed yet louder. “At the sight of the beloved, the heart may go still, or it may race as if during a great exertion—”
Beyond the tossing heads and ribboned headdresses of the laughing ladies, Elisha glimpsed the running water and considered springing up from his place to throw himself from their company. Good God! He had heard tell of Courts of Love and such games as noble ladies might play, but never imagined they might be applied to himself. The more the physician spoke, the more the ladies laughed, and Emerick’s own grin threatened to interrupt his monologue: clearly, he enjoyed being the expert while the grumpy von Stubben muttered and returned to his chair at the far end of the pavilion, ostentatiously opening a scroll.
A light touch against his leg brought Elisha back from fantasies of escape. “Forgive me, Doctor. I should not have distracted them so.” Katherine. “I didn’t know you would take it so ill. You are not used to such attentions.”
Not since he had left the whorehouses where he used to work as a barber—and then, he had known how to take the banter of whores. But of ladies so high-born he should not even be among them? “No, I’m not.”
“I imagined with your bearing and your skills, that you must be surrounded by flattery. Forgive me twice over for placing you in such a position.” The warmth of her voice, the regret and amusement, lent a sexual cast to the word “skills” that only deepened his embarrassment.
Elisha put up his hands. “Your Majesty, your humor at my expense denies the urgency of my message.”
Katherine’s touch withdrew, and she sat up, scooting forward on the blankets, taking a moment to flick her skirts down over the stretch of her leg. “The doctor is a foreigner in our midst, my friends. We must not take advantage.”
A few women covered their smiles with long, pale fingers, rings—and a few eyes—winking. The empress clapped her hands for silence, and the giggles finally ran down, the young physician bowing and retreating. “Katherine is correct, of course. Later, the doctor and I shall discuss his message—” She gave a little gasp, a spasm of pain crossing her face, and everyone stilled at once, leaning toward her. After a moment, her face relaxed, her hand lifting from her pregnant belly. “No, not yet, my friends, no need to worry.” She took a sip from a goblet Gretchen held out, then continued. “Later, the message. For now, I feel weary. I think a story would serve me better than a game. Agnes?”
The blond with the crooked teeth began a tale of a minstrel who lost his love when he succumbed to a mountain enchantress. She had a rich voice and accented her telling with fitting gestures and expressions. Still, by the time the minstrel sought repentance and was denied by the pope himself, the empress’s chin rested on her chest, sleeping gently. Gretchen stared at Elisha, but said no more against him as the day wore on. At Nones, the bargemen pulled in to shore where the party of soldiers paced them, and a group of women from a local village came aboard to lay out cold meats and cheeses. The doctors fussed over Margaret’s choices, but she pointedly asked Elisha’s opinion, and he did his best to supply a good one, encouraging the health of both mother and child. She did not seek his company, nor ask him any further about his message. The journey to Bad Stollhein would take four days or more. Four days of stories, laughter, and revelry. Elisha might have to leap into the river after all.
These sour thoughts accompanied his preparation for bed, taking his allotted blankets and cushions outside the pavilion where the men would sleep on deck while the ladies bedded down inside. The evening’s chill stung his face as he curled onto his side, draping the empress’s cloak over him so that the fur warmed his skin. Just as carefully, he extended his senses over the sleeping sailors, the ladies both restless and peaceful.
He woke with the moon high overhead as Gretchen crept toward the mooring lines. She sat on the edge of the boat, turned to lower herself onto the bumper, and Elisha slipped forward, silent as death, to catch her arm before she could dip her bare toes into the water. “I beg of you, Fraulein, do not betray me.”
Her arm taut with fear, she stared up at him, her foot swaying over the water. “If you are as innocent as you claim, then let me go.”
“If my enemies find me, they’ll kill me—you know that.”
“As you would have killed Bardolph.”
He felt the sudden spark of her excitement, then she started screaming, beating at him with her hand, twisting against him. Astonished, he let go, and she plunged into the water, flailing and shrieking. On the shore nearby, lanterns flared and soldiers shouted.
Her arms thrashed as she struggled to keep her face above water, gasping, then disappearing beneath the surface. Again, her face appeared, wreathed by tangles of dark hair. “Help! I can’t swim!” Her pale arm waved. Elisha tensed to jump in, but the dark water reminded him of the Thames and she did not want his rescue—never mind the fact that he could not swim either. Was she willing to die just to get him arrested? “Fraulein!” he shouted after her.
One of the soldiers leapt in, splashing as if he had little greater skill than she did in the water, his arms reaching for her. She flailed toward him, and he caught her wrist, dragging her closer. Dark water washed over their heads, then the soldier pushed her up again, taking her head on his shoulder as he floundered toward the bank. His fellows on shore leaned down to help, and she coughed violently as they pulled her up the bank. Elisha let himself breathe again. Gretchen alive could still cause him trouble, but he did not wish her dead.
“He pushed me!” she cried as her savior patted her back. “He wants to drown me.”
Lights shone over his shoulder, then Katherine caught his arm. “Good gracious, again? Gretchen, my dear girl. I cannot conceal you any longer.”
“What is it, Katherine? What’s happened?” The empress, wrapped in furs, appeared beside them, squinting.
“It’s Gretchen,” Katherine sighed. “She walks at night, as if in a trance. I did not want to alarm you, so I have hidden her affliction.”
Across the short span of water, Gretchen turned from her soldier-rescuer, waving an arm. “Your Majesty! That mad English doctor threw me in!”
“Oh, dear. She must have disturbed the doctor, as well as myself, and a good thing, too—I saw him try to stop her falling overboard! I should have foreseen the difficulties for her on a boat.” Katherine leaned toward the empress and whispered, “I’m sorry I did not tell you before—I did not wish to spoil her prospects.”
Empress Margaret’s eyes narrowed. “Indeed, but she is now to marry Bardolph, one of my husband’s messengers.”
Katherine faced the empress squarely. “Of your mercy, Your Majesty, do not tell him. Surely, with no ill having come of it, she is not too wayward. Please—I should never have revealed her except for her accusations against the doctor.”
“But you don’t think she is a witch?”
“No,” said Elisha at once, overcoming his surprise at hearing Katherine’s pleas. “Your Majesty, I know that Gretchen means well.” He stopped short of confirming Katherine’s lie, but neither could he bring himself to deny it. “She has taken against me because of my difficulties with her betrothed, but there is no evil in her.”
The empress murmured, “There have been so many problems with the pregnancy, that I have wondered if someone close to me intends me harm.”
Katherine said. “If it worries you at all, then simply send her home. Surely a good husband will tame her wandering.”
“Very wise, Katherine.” The empress smiled broadly. “It shall be as you say.” To the shore, she called, “Come, bargemen, bring us near that I may alight and speak with the girl.”
The shore crew pulled the lines and the sailors pushed the plank between so the empress could walk down it. She greeted her maidservant, taking her hands, and speaking to her in a hushed tone. Gretchen’s cry of upset echoed across the water—failing to shake the empre
ss’s cool resolve. Problems in pregnancy and accusations of witchcraft all too often wove together, but it was to Katherine that Elisha looked. Gretchen might love unwisely, but she did care for her mistress—she should not lose her position and reputation because of her suspicions of him.
He set his hand firmly on Katherine’s shoulder. “My lady, you’ve as much as accused that girl of witchcraft.”
“You would rather have been expelled from the barge? And what of the mission you mentioned?”
“You know the truth of my mission, lady—you were almost a part of it.”
“And I may yet be,” she answered, turning to face him, covering his hand with her own, strengthening the contact. “Don’t withdraw, Doctor, I can feel it in you. I worry you. I am of your enemy, and yet I defend you. You don’t trust me, as well you should not.” Moonlight limned her face, tears glinting in her eyes. “Repent, you told me, and sin no more. By God, I am trying. I am trying so very hard.” She shook her head, flicking away the tears, then pressing the back of her hand against her mouth. “It’s never been a struggle for you, has it? Using death, but only in service to life.”
Elisha’s throat felt dry, her hand almost as cold as his own. “Do not think me so pure, lady. That night I hunted your kind—”
“Murderers!” She clutched his fingers. “Why do you think I took you for an angel? We deserve to die, we who kill for power.”
An angel. He was anything but, and yet . . . she saw him, that night, saw his purpose, not merely that he wielded death, but that he did so in the cause of life. “Truly, lady, is that why you killed?”
She did not answer, but withdrew her hand, covering her face, shaking beneath his touch. Elisha sent her comfort, strength, the will to turn away from evil. In two small steps, with a sway of her skirts, she leaned against him, her forehead to his shoulder, weeping. “Help me,” begged her tears, “Be the angel of my repentance.”
He thought of Rowena, Brigit’s mother, using the power of her death to transform into an angel as the flames of the stake rose around her. His cheek warmed as if at the stroke of her golden wing, the touch that turned his life and set him on the course of healing, and of killing. Were all angels at once so bright and so terrible?
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