He raised a hand, first two fingers up, and waved the soldiers away, nodding to the one in front. The soldier’s jaw dropped, but he shook his head and produced a key from the small satchel draped over his belt. He promptly disengaged the simple shackles, and they fell to the muddy ground. Another soldier quickly snatched them up and disappeared behind us.
“Archdeacon of Canterbury, Thomas Becket,” the man said, offering his hand to me. It was decked with ruby and emerald rings of all shapes and sizes.
I panicked. There was nothing in the textbooks about how to greet a bishop or whatever he was. Remembering how the queen had offered her hand to me, I figured it was a common gesture. I took it and kissed the back of his hand. He nodded and did the same to Jules and Piers.
I waited. I was terrified I’d address him wrong, and he’d have us dismembered, or some other fucked up medieval shit. He waved the soldiers away, rattling in French too fast for me to catch. They scurried off and disappeared into the crowd of people pushing toward the entrance of the keep.
“The queen has requested your presence in the great hall,” he said in halting French. With a flourish of his robe, he spun around and strode toward the gates of the towering keep before us. The crowd molded around us, each peasant pausing to bow and scrape out of Becket’s way.
Jules looked at me. I shrugged, briefly translated, and motioned for us to follow him. There was something strange about his French. It sounded almost … English. Translating had been difficult at best, but I knew Becket’s words would be even more of a challenge. He had used the word swene for queen, instead of rienr, beagsale instead of the French salle for hall. I already knew my translations would need translations! I knew French had changed considerably over the years, but I had no idea it was this much. In fact, as I listened to the shouts and cries of the peasants behind us, they seemed to speak a form of English and that almost closer to Latin than to French.
Gill, you are in way over your head, I thought. How in the world do you translate the bastardized form of modern French? Some of the words were very similar, but some so foreign I only had to guess at context. I was an alien dropped in a foreign nation where no one could really understand each other. I never longed for English as much as I did at this moment.
As we followed Becket into the keep, it opened into a grand hall, filled with such luxury that it made the courtyard outside look like a prison camp.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” Jules breathed next to me. “Look at this.”
Red and green tapestries hung from every window, tacked back by nails to let the remaining sunlight in through stained-glass windows. Even some of the stonework across the walls had red and green dyed bricks. The stone floors shone crimson and yellow light from the windows. Above the windows, an intricate painting of men at war, women at court, and even children and dogs at play lined the walls, the gold, and tan weaving illuminated by the last rays of the sun. At the far end of the main room sat a wide table about forty feet long, complete with carved and ornate chairs. Between the table and us, however, close to a hundred people milled about, talking in hushed tones behind slim hands that occasionally pointed our way.
We were no match for the level of royalty in the room.
They were all dressed in the same finery of the queen – women in blue and gold etched gowns, their hair in ridiculous, unnatural forms and stretched into beaded, triangular hats adorned with both fur and feathers. Older men had fur-lined robes as well, rounded loose-fitting hats. A few younger boys around my age wore loose shirts with wide, puffy sleeves and short pants, shiny boots with pointed toes. It looked like a bad costume party where the participants had picked the most outlandish outfits they could find. I chuckled. I could imagine the ladies and men dressing for this event: Does this match? No? Great, I’ll wear it to greet the queen!
Odd, I thought, that the queen had just arrived moments before us. Why would court be held, without a royal present? Had they known she was coming?
Well, shit, I couldn’t figure it out, and at this point, I didn’t really give a flying fuck, or a normal one, for that matter. I was exhausted, dead on my feet, dressed in a dingy and dirty peasant shirt, black pants torn at one knee, and shoes I knew they had never seen before. My sister at least fit in a little better, even though her dress hung from one shoulder and was ripped across the other arm. Piers, of course, was still dressed like the page he was, or something. It occurred to me I didn’t even know what he was, really. His clothes were a little better shape than the rags worn by the peasants, but still pretty bad. A tan sack over tight pants and fitted with a belt, he was only elevated slightly above that of a serf.
The crowd parted for Becket, who strode through the crowd with the air of the religious figure he was. The queen was nowhere in sight. “Boy, there’s food in the kitchen,” I heard Becket murmur to Piers, his thin finger pointing to the arch on the other side of the room. Piers’ face lit up at the suggestion and disappeared into the kitchen. Becket stopped by a doorway at the end of the hall on the right, motioned us to follow him, and ducked through the arch.
Jules tugged on my arm, and we hurried through the court, skirting around much like a courtyard, carefully avoiding mangy dogs and random piles of shit. Court wasn’t as glamorous as the books had led me to believe, I thought. It was literally a game of playing at being royal, and these people had no idea how to play it. Of course, court was still in its infancy, I reminded myself. Jules followed Becket under the arch.
Then, I saw her.
My lady in red.
Just before the archway where Becket had disappeared, the crowd dispersed and revealed a young woman, sitting at a slanted makeshift desk built into the side of the wall; it more closely resembled an easel. Even the seat of her chair, plain and wooden, was slanted. Both certainly stood out in the room of royal fashion and didn’t match the brightly painted, squared, simple chairs around the table. Her desk faced the raised dais set behind the table, the one where a throne would normally sit, I thought. Her face was turned away from me, so as we approached, all I could see was the crimson gown she wore, much darker than Becket’s, but somehow more glorious than any of the women in the room. The sleeves were attached with leather thongs, and a white headdress covered every inch of her hair – a wimple, my brain screamed at me, which startled the fuck out of me.
“Hello,” I greeted her in French, stopping and curtsying in front of the lady as we turned toward the arch. What the fuck? I had done a lot of bowing lately. I never bowed. The world was my goddamn oyster. Yet, surrounded by relatives of the king and queen, or barons or dukes or some shit, I found myself acting a complete fool. “I am Sir Guillaume, at your service.” I hoped she understood my awkward attempt at old French.
She blinked up at me, and I saw the ragged quill in her left hand pause above the parchment in front of her. The letters she had been scribbling were most decidedly Latin, I saw. Latin? In the French court?
“Marie,” she said, ducking her head and picking up her quill again.
“Marie,” I repeated back, rolling the name around my tongue. The delicate, almost ethereal name didn’t match her face.
Okay, so first of all, when I got sight of her, I saw she wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t a butterface, but she was just, well, plain. She reminded me of a bit of Bethany, a girl I went to high school with. Bethany transitioned from a shy girl in thick glasses and mousy brown hair our freshman year to a dark and brooding goth by the time we were sophomores. Her pale cheeks and lifeless blue eyes had looked like death under white face paint, black lips, and thick dark ringed makeup around her eyes. Marie looked a bit like Bethany; pale and tired, but without all the black makeup everywhere: what Bethany looked like before her transition.
I remembered when I’d shoved Bethany into a locker the last week of school my freshman year, because Jessica, the girl who I’d lose my virginity to that very next week, asked me to. Jessica, her little evil fucking minions, and I had laughed at Bethany when she dropped her book
s, glaring at us as we stood across the hall, making fun of her coke-bottle glasses. She had glared at us, which made us laugh even more. After summer ended and her transformation was complete, however, no one fucked with her. We thought she’d cast a spell or some shit on us, and no one ever teased her again. I remembered the rumor she had transformed one of the football players into a frog for the day, just to teach him a lesson.
“You’re staring,” Marie said, pulling me out of my memories of Bethany. She was still looking at her parchment.
“Excuse me,” I said awkwardly, again surprised that my suave was having problems engaging. “What are you writing?”
“Gill,” Jules said, poking her head around the corner. “Gill, you have to come.”
“Just a second,” I snapped at her in English, a little harshly. She frowned and disappeared again. I turned back to Marie. “You were saying?”
“A lais,” she said in a whisper. She looked up at me finally, and I was surprised to see dark brown eyes tucked under long, delicate lashes. Her face was soft and round, and a half-smile played on her face but was gone in an instant. Her lips were stained a dark crimson, almost black, a start difference from the other courtiers that wore no makeup at all. She was young, I realized, about my age, much younger than any of the others at court. The red dress she was wearing buttoned up to her chin, shining pearls for buttons, with white fur around the edge of her collar.
Like I said, she wasn’t beautiful, but there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“A what?” I asked her.
“A story,” she said, frowning. She stared at me. Her head cocked to one side. “A poem, if you will.”
“What is it about?”
She gripped the quill in her right hand now, and hastily covered the parchment with her left. “Nothing of interest to you, Sir Knight.”
“Try me,” I said.
She sighed. “Of something you would know nothing about, Sir Knight.” She tucked the quill into her red robes and carefully rolled the parchment, tying it shut with a piece of red ribbon. “Excuse me,” she said, standing. “I have duties to attend.”
I backed up, allowing her to stand, and for the first time noticed her ample breasts hidden under her yards of robes. I watched her cross the hall to the archway opposite where Jules and Piers had followed Becket a few minutes ago. It was hard to tell anything about her figure with what she was wearing, and to my shock, I realized, I didn’t even care. I set out to follow her, find out more about her. What story was she writing? What wouldn’t I know about? Why was she dressed so elegantly, so queenly, yet, so demure and quiet?
“Gill!” It was Jules then, her hand wrapped around my wrist. “Where the fuck are you going?”
“Marie …” I motioned toward the other arch.
“This is no time to be chasing tail!” she hissed in my ear. “You have to come … now! We have a major fucking problem on our hands.”
I turned to my sister. Her face was pale and her eyes bloodshot, and I knew she was as exhausted as I was, but I could hear the agitation in her voice. “What’s wrong?”
“The prince,” she whispered.
“Yeah?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh, fuck.”
I pushed her through the arch, leaving the memory of the mysterious Marie behind for a moment. It wasn’t until I followed Jules that I realized Marie had spoken to me in English.
Not Old English, a dead language with elements of Latin, French, and Norse sounds, but American fucking English. Even her accent was strange. Not French like Queen Eleanor, not British like Becket’s, but a mixture of both.
She spoke English.
Chapter Three: God Has a Sick Sense of Humor
“Jules,” I said, freezing in the middle of the arch and running a hand through my still damp hair. “Jules, that woman…”
“Save it,” she said. “Come on.”
“But—”
“Gill!” she shouted over her shoulder.
I followed her up a twisting, circular staircase, shaking my head. I couldn’t get Marie out of my head. What was going on?
It was time to switch places again. My brain was screaming at me. I knew the prince was in bad shape. I knew he was bleeding out. My gut told me from the beginning in the chapel that he wouldn’t survive. I’d done all I could.
My EMT instructor’s voice boomed through my head: Ninety-five percent of your patients will survive, no matter what you do, three percent you’ll save, and two percent will die no matter what.
The prince was one of the two percent, and I knew it.
The top of the staircase opened into a grand room, almost as large as the hall beneath us. A fireplace with square chairs sat to the left, the flames burning and sparking bright, filling the chilly castle with warmth. At the far end of the room was a bed bigger than anything I’d ever seen, draped on all sides with thick crimson curtains. Queen Eleanor was kneeling beside the bed, her head buried in the bed sheet. Becket stood on the other side, holding an ancient book to his chest, his head bowed. As Jules and I approached slowly, I saw the queen was holding the prince’s hand. The crackling fire was drowned out by her soft sobs.
In the window, just behind and to the left of the grand bed, a white bird alighted on the sill. It was the strangest fucking bird I had ever seen. It startled me so much I nearly collided with Jules as we entered the room. It wasn’t any bird I had ever seen, read, or heard about. Immaculate white, it had a long, wide body of a goose, a slender, thin neck of a swan, but rounded head and the oval shaped face of an owl. Even the eyebrows and eyes were identical to an owl. It was the platypus of the bird world or some shit.
I nudged Jules. “What the fuck is that?” I whispered.
“Is that a goose?” Jules whispered. The warble in her voice told me she didn’t even think she was close.
It locked eyes with me, and I saw it had bright orange irises just like an owl, but there were strange purple pupils dead at the center.
I blinked. Was that thing … real?
Was I high? I felt like I was high. Did they put something in the air? What the fuck was going on?
The goose-swan-owl thing scanned the room but seemed to ignore the bed where the prince lay. It kept looking at me, ruffling its feathers and squatting.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” I stared. We didn’t have those in history books. Or any books, I’d wage.
Becket followed our gaze and turned to look at the bird. It looked away from him immediately and began to ruffle its feathers. “Caladrius!” Becket gasped.
The Queen looked up to see the bird on the sill and covered her hands with her mouth. “Henry, no!” She cried.
As if startled by the queen’s outburst, the bird shifted, spread its long wings, and then flew away.
“Weird,” I murmured to Jules.
Becket reached down toward the prince and began to shake him, his head lolling to the side. He dropped him back on the bed and turned to look at us. His face was even more drawn than before and an ashen color. He yelled something at me urgently, but I couldn’t understand his strange mix of English and French. I did, however, recognize one word: dauphus. An ancient form of the word for dead.
The prince was dead.
“The Caladrius didn’t heal him,” the queen said in French amidst her sobbing. “Why didn’t the Caladrius heal him?”
“We can—” Jules started.
I pushed past her, ducking around Becket. The prince’s face was blanched white, his eyelids shut and unwavering. I reached for the prince’s other hand, pressing my first two fingers to his wrist.
Shit. No pulse. I shouldn’t have been surprised because I knew if his spleen was gone, he has less than twenty-four hours to live. And it had been about that. The horseback ride likely shortened his time on earth.
Jules stood next to me, whispered in my ear. “AED? Shock his heart? Something?”
I shook my head. “Spleen,” was all I said. My
medically trained sister knew exactly what I meant. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her wander aimlessly over to the fireplace and slump into a chair. My lie to Piers came back to haunt me: Yes, he will live. Why had I even given them hope?
That’s what you do, Gill, you give the hopeless hope. That’s why you became an EMT out of high school in the first place. You save them to see another day. That’s why you wade through blood and shit to help people take their next breath.
For good measure, I checked the prince’s neck.
Today was not that day.
The queen lifted her head, eyes red-rimmed and tear-filled. I shook my head at her. Her sobs filled the room.
Becket’s heavy hand landed on my shoulder, gripping lightly and pulling me from the side of the bed. I sat heavily in the chair next to Jules, running a hand through my hair absently and massaging the side of my forehead. The gig is up, I thought, now they’ll know we aren’t healers at all.
Becket stood in front of the fire, his impressive robes nearly blocking all the light from the room, especially with the sun disappearing over the horizon. We’d been in the past for a full twenty-four hours. I could hardly believe it was real. The rabbit hole was a hell I hadn’t even fully experienced. War, blood, death. Was this all the middle ages were about?
I realized the priest was talking to me, but I couldn’t understand him. His language was so far removed from French it might as well have been Chinese. He was speaking quickly and was clearly agitated, waving his hands around, pointed at both of us. I muttered back in French, he frowned, unable to understand my modern dialect.
Marie (The Curse of Lanval Book 2) Page 2
