Elisha Magus
Page 31
He gagged, wiped his mouth, and crawled a little further away to the fringe of brush around the milestone where he had planned his emergence as overhead, something cawed.
Slumped against the stone, Elisha groaned, pulling his legs closer, curled into himself. “Take him,” he croaked in answer as another bird circled by. “At least, you can’t tell your mistress I left you with nothing.”
“Sundrop knows she was killed for you.”
Elisha bolted upright and grabbed the stone to steady himself as he turned.
“He couldn’t bear to touch her grave.” The crows’ mistress shuffled toward him. With a bob of her head, she sent on her friends, and he could hear the suck and splat of fresh meat being torn by beaks and talons.
“I’m sorry, Mistress,” he tried again, swaying, but she flapped her hands.
“We’re watching,” she said. “Don’t forget us.” She shut her mouth with a click.
“Never,” he sighed.
She shuffled past, crooning to her black darlings.
Elisha straightened slowly in her wake. The cold still lingered, and he drew it upward, taking it in, reluctantly, as a hunter accepts an ugly whelp: it was not wanted, but it was his. The strength of Morag’s death tangled inside him from every tingling patch of blood and every salted, starry tear. Elisha drew a deeper breath and showed his ribs how to heal. He closed the wound at his shoulder, sealed the furrow of the bombardelle’s shot, and eased the ache of his twisted ankle. With halting steps, he approached the scene. His razor lay on the ground, still open, one patch of the old blade clean where Morag’s lips had pressed. Numbing his hand to the memories, both new and old, Elisha reached out for it and shut the blade. He cast about in the gathering gloom, and finally spread his senses, leery of feeling either Chanterelle’s agony or the gory victory of crows. But he found what he was looking for and pinched it close: the lock of Thomas’s hair.
Now that the battle was done, the smoke clearing, someone would come, and he must be gone. How they would explain the fresh corpse at the crossroads—and how much of it would remain—he did not know.
Enough strength lingered from Morag’s death to sustain his walk, and he cast a deflection to keep him safe, though he was so tired that it hardly seemed worth it to try. Thomas was enthroned, with the support of bishops and barons, and soon he would be wed. Rosalynn would have the prince she deserved, faithful and strong. Elisha lived, in spite of his enemies. Truly, it had been a victory. He wondered how long it would take before he felt it so.
His leaden feet kept moving, his aching lungs yet breathed, and so he found the inn as Mordecai said, and the bundle tucked in the rafters there. The clothes were fine but not too rich; plain linen, new and clean. Elisha breathed in Thomas’s concern. He found the packet of food, but could not consider eating just yet, not with the taste of death still there upon his tongue. A belt curled underneath, with a softly clinking purse and Elisha’s medical pouch. Tucked at its back, he found a new knife, short, sharp, its blade with the swirl of metal that showed the smith had layered it over and again. A Damascene blade worth all the rest, and then some. At the bottom lay a pair of boots more supple than any he had ever owned. When Elisha first met Thomas, they had been nearly equals: two men apart from others and barefoot. For a long moment, Elisha gathered his gifts to him and breathed in his gratitude.
After scrubbing away the last of the dirt at a trough by the back, Elisha dressed carefully in the privacy of the stable and stepped out again, refreshed. Before him stretched the road back to London, past the crossroads that should have been his grave. Beyond the clusters of houses and shops, the highest steeples, towers, and walls of the city stood rosy in the last of the sun’s light. And over the gate, snapping proudly in the wind, waved the pennants of the king.