The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  “An old friend,” I said softly, never taking my eyes from the woman sitting alone in the auditorium. She had finished her drink and begun chewing ice cubes, and the crunching sound made me wince.

  Jillie lingered a moment, cast a venomous glance toward the object of my attention, and swept off toward the dressing room she shared with the other women in the act.

  I allowed myself a fraction of a smile. I’d done Jillie a favor she could not begin to comprehend or appreciate by spuming her naive affections. Would that I could be so gracious with my Lady Brenna.

  I had shed the cumbersome cape as soon as the show ended, but I was still wearing my tuxedo when I finally forced myself down the steps at the side of the stage and along the aisle.

  If I’d had a living, beating heart instead of an atrophied vestige of one, that organ would have twisted at the sight of her watching me approach. She was helpless, like an animal dazzled by light; I knew that and used it to my advantage.

  Fate is cruel, in my experience—except for the modem haircut and clothes, she looked just as she had in each of the previous lifetimes in which our paths had crossed. Her hair was a coppery-gold color, thick and lush, and her eyes were green. Even her face, with its delicate bone structure and impertinent little chin, was the same, right down to the faint smattering of freckles across her nose.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, caught up in a spindrift of emotions, and when I looked again, she was staring up at me. Her throat worked, as if she’d attempted to speak and failed, and she offered me her hand. She seemed bewildered, afraid, and perhaps just a bit enchanted.

  Her introduction was woven of pure bravado. “Daisy Chandler,” she said, offering me her hand. “I’m a homicide detective with the Las Vegas Police Department.”

  I was taken aback by this flood of information, and arched one eyebrow as I enclosed her hand in my own. I wondered if she felt the chill in my flesh, and puzzled over it. Although I can usually read a mortal mind with embarrassing ease, hers has always been veiled from me, except for a few shifting flickers of discernment here and there—perhaps because I care so much. Creation can be perverse in that way, so often withholding from us the very insights and objects we desire most.

  “I am pleased to meet you,” I managed to reply, though I have to admit I was as nervous as Daisy. I was just better at hiding what I felt than she was, that was all. I’d had a long time to practice.

  She frowned, her pretty brow knitting for a moment in consternation. “Do I know you?”

  The answer to that question was better saved for another time. “No,” I replied, missing a beat or two. I knew that, deep in her subconscious, she remembered me, and everything we’d been through together, in minute detail. The human mind is a superlative scribe, missing nothing, trundling its uncountable impressions from one lifetime to the next.

  Daisy rose, somewhat shakily, and only thought to remove her fingers from mine after she’d gained her feet. She was wearing tight jeans that had seen better days, and her white summer top was airy and ruffled, inviting the eyes to her finely shaped breasts.

  I felt a rush of jealous irritation, a downright silly desire to fetch one of my capes and cover her with it. I had had to share her with others when she was Elisabeth Saxon; I could not do so again.

  “Your show was fantastic,” she said with a tentative smile.

  I merely inclined my head once, in acknowledgment of the compliment. There was—and is—no false modesty in my makeup. The performance was indeed “fantastic,” and more; my audiences paid for magic, and they got their money’s worth.

  She looked about, noticed as I did that the waiters and bartenders were gone, replaced by the cleaning staff. “I guess I should be going,” she said with a sort of cheerful desperation, and I felt a pang of regret because I knew Daisy wasn’t normally a timid person. I was frightening her, and I hated that.

  “Yes,” I said quickly, at last releasing the mental hold I had taken on her earlier. “Good night, Miss Chandler.”

  She studied my face, and for a breathless moment I thought she consciously remembered me. In the next instant, however, the pensive expression in her beautiful eyes vanished. Daisy waggled her unmanicured fingers in farewell and dashed out of the showroom without looking back.

  I went to my dressing room, where the mirrors were draped and the lights were dim, and stood in the middle of the floor, struggling against the rage and frustration that had arisen in me. I didn’t want to go through it all again, loving her, wanting her, losing her, and suffering the soul-crushing consequences once more, but I knew the curse some passing devil had cast over both of us would run its course. The ring would arrive, and Daisy would die.

  I was standing there, outwardly still, but with all hell breaking loose inside, when a soft tapping sounded at the door.

  My first reaction was fury; I was grieving and did not wish to be disturbed. But then the door opened, and I saw my caller.

  Daisy had returned, looking uncertain, as if she’d reached the end of some invisible tether and been drawn back by it. She gripped one of my colorful, printed programs in her right hand and wore a determined if still-fragile smile. There were no photographs of me in the publication, of course, only reproductions of paintings, and she had the booklet open to one of these.

  “I was wondering…” she began, her eyes straying around the dressing room, taking in the shrouded mirrors and muted lights.

  I was so glad to see her that it required the utmost restraint on my part not to wrench her into my arms. “Yes?” I prompted, perhaps sounding the least bit patronizing. My friends, as well as my enemies, tell me that a certain arrogance is native to my manner.

  She shoved the program at me, along with a cheap plastic pen. “Would you autograph this, please?”

  I did so with a flourish and handed both the booklet and the pen back to her.

  Daisy bit her lower lip, and I felt a rush of arousal so keen that I writhed in the core of it, like a man in flames. “Thanks,” she said. She hesitated, then went on in a tumbled hurry of words: “I know magicians never tell their secrets, but that carriage trick was—well, it was impossible. You couldn’t have used wires or platforms. So it had to be some sort of mass hypnosis—”

  “Or,” I interrupted gently, “it might have happened exactly as you saw it. By magic.” I smiled and spread my hands.

  She frowned, and I wanted to kiss the place between her brows where the skin creased prettily. “Something weird is going on here,” she finally blurted out. “Who are you?”

  I wanted to tell her; it would have been the most delicious relief to explain it all, but I couldn’t. For one thing, the story would have taken hours to relate, and for another, I didn’t want to frighten Daisy off forever. “You’ll understand it all in good time,” I replied with resignation. I was beginning to feel restless, agitated; I needed to hunt and feed, and perhaps prowl a bit, before retiring to my lair.

  “I’m coming back,” Daisy announced, still frowning.

  I took a printed pass from the top drawer of my dressing room bureau and handed it to her. “Be my guest,” I said.

  Daisy accepted the special ticket, nodded her thanks, and left, looking as befuddled as ever. I suspect it wasn’t me or my magic that made her thoughtful, but her own unexpected captivation with both. She was clearly not a person given to obsessions and strange fancies.

  After she’d gone I mourned her, for even when we parted briefly, I was invariably bereaved. I stood with my forehead touching the door and my hands gripping the woodwork on either side, remembering. Suffering. Loving.

  The Lady Brenna

  Dunnett’s Head, Cornwall, 1348

  They were facing each other in the courtyard, Brenna Afton-St. Claire’s father, the baron, and Valerian. The autumn sun, though fiercely bright, felt cold, and Brenna shivered.

  Her father had been practicing his swordsmanship, though it was unlikely the king would ever again call upon him to serve as a soldier,
given his age. For all his four and forty years, however, the baron was strong.

  “The bootmaker’s son,” the baron said, assessing Valerian and at the same time using the hem of his tunic to polish the steel blade of his sword. It caught fire with daylight and flashed like a mirror.

  Brenna held her breath, watching Valerian’s face. Jesus, she prayed silently, make him hold his tongue. If he doesn’t, my father will surely kill him, and with pleasure.

  Valerian only inclined his head, and Brenna nearly swooned with gratitude. The baron’s anger was violent, burning hot as the fires of perdition, but it died quickly when it was not fueled.

  Sweating profusely from his exercise, the baron held the sword up, between himself and the bootmaker’s son, and then pressed the point to the pulse at the base of Valerian’s throat.

  Brenna gasped and started to bolt toward them, intending to intercede, but Challes, her tutor, gripped her hard by the arm.

  “Stand fast,” he warned in a whispered hiss, his grasp tightening when she struggled.

  Valerian stood still, surely aware that the baron could kill him easily, with no penance forthcoming, looking almost insolently calm. Even from several feet away, Brenna could see that the expression in his eyes was fearless.

  With a silent wail of despair Brenna realized that Valerian was courting death—he wanted to perish! She tried to cry out, but the only sound that came from her throat was a hoarse, senseless whisper.

  The baron broke the awful silence, his words as cold and hard as the blade of the sword he held. “Why did you lay your hands to my daughter, peasant? How dare you touch a noblewoman?”

  Brenna squeezed her eyes shut, terrified.

  “I forgot myself,” Valerian replied. There was no trace of subservience in his tone or manner, but no mockery, either. He was simply stating a fact.

  Brenna put one hand over her mouth and swayed slightly in Challes’s now-gentled grasp. Her eyes burned with tears as the full measure of her ardor for Valerian Lazarus came down upon her, crushing her spirit as surely as a fallen wall would have done her body. In that terrible moment she knew that she had loved Valerian as long as she had known him, which was all her life, and that they had been together before the stars were born.

  “You are bold,” the baron remarked, lowering the steel only to beckon to his squire, who was yet trembling from his own encounter with the nobleman. “Fetch a second sword,” he told the servant.

  Brenna’s heart seized with the knowledge that her father meant to challenge Valerian. There could be no contest—despite the lad’s youth and strength, he had no experience with weapons. The baron, on the other hand, had wielded heavy swords daily, from earliest childhood. He was a seasoned warrior.

  “No!” she managed to shriek. Challes tried to hold her, but in her desperation of fear, Brenna broke free. Her face streaked with tears, she clutched at the sleeve of the baron’s tunic. “Don’t do this, Father,” she pleaded. She dropped to her knees then, grasping his clothing with both hands now, her knuckles white with the effort. “Don’t kill Valerian,” she pleaded. “Oh, please—I’ll do anything—”

  Her father’s face was terrible, flushed with rage and chagrin, and Brenna did not dare to look at Valerian’s. She knew, too late, that she should have listened to the tutor, that she had made a grave mistake in revealing the extent of her devotion.

  “You would beg like a street whore,” the baron seethed in a vicious tone, “for the life of this—dog?”

  Valerian stiffened; Brenna felt it, though she still lacked the courage to look into his eyes. It was bad enough meeting her father’s condemning gaze.

  “I love him,” she said.

  The baron backhanded her then, so hard that she went sprawling backward into the dust of the courtyard. Valerian made a growling, inhuman sound and lunged at her father.

  A furious bellow spilled from the baron’s throat, and over it all Brenna’s own sobs could be heard, as well as the frantic peace pleas of poor Challes.

  The baron raised his sword and neatly sliced open Valerian’s poor garment, along with the flesh beneath. The baron laughed, the sound echoing off the inner walls of the keep, like the ravings of a madman. “So you dare to go for my throat, do you?” he roared as the squire returned with the extra sword. “You are brave, as well as insolent, like so many fools.” At a gesture from his master, the servant handed the second blade to Valerian. “Well, upon this day, you shall die.”

  “No!” Brenna screamed, clawing at the ground with spread fingers in her effort to get to her feet and fling herself upon her father. But this time Challes succeeded in forestalling her; he wrapped an arm around her middle and dragged her backward into the shadows. When she shrieked in protest, the tutor slapped her, but it was the words that followed that quieted her, rather than the blow.

  “God save us all, my lady, you’ve already doomed your beloved with your imprudent ways! Will you see him sundered at the joints as well, like a fowl to be served at supper? In the name of all that’s holy, be still, and perhaps some passing angel will show us mercy!”

  Dirty and broken inside, Brenna sagged against her teacher, weeping softly, and he held her.

  Valerian took the sword, and though he was not experienced, he was strong. The battle raged for an eternity, it seemed to Brenna. Her father prevailed for a time, then Valerian. Both men were bloodied, their clothes drenched with sweat and gritty with courtyard dirt. At last the baron swung his blade in a mighty arch, and Valerian went down with nary a cry, with a deep, crimson gash in his middle.

  He did not rise.

  Brenna screamed inwardly, silently.

  The baron, unsteady on his feet, breathing hard and bleeding copiously from wounds in his upper arm and one shoulder, looked down upon the half-conscious lad and raised his sword for the kill. For a long time he stood there like that, prepared to run Valerian through and finish it, and for Brenna all of creation stopped, as motionless as a painting.

  The baron glanced at her, and she saw the utter absence of love in his eyes, and then looked down at Valerian again. Finally the nobleman spat on the lad and flung the faithful sword aside, sending it clattering across the stone pathway that wove through the courtyard.

  “He shall rot awhile in my dungeon, and then hang,” the baron decreed, pointing one bloodstained, filthy index finger at Brenna. “You, Daughter of Eve, shall be witness to the fruits of your whoring, and so shall the bootmaker and his wife, and everyone else in the village who cares to witness the spectacle.”

  “There was no whoring, Your Grace,” the tutor said quickly, stunning them all by what he risked. “The Lady Brenna was weeping, and the tradesman’s son attempted to comfort her. It was no more than that.”

  The Baron assessed the scholar he had engaged some years before, at the behest of Brenna’s late mother, whom he had loved with a slavish devotion. “Get out,” he rasped. “Or you shall swing from a gibbet with this dog’s get.” He kicked Valerian’s prone body once, eliciting the first and last moan from him, then stalked away.

  Brenna ran to Valerian and placed his head in her lap, stroking his blood-streaked hair. “I won’t let him part us,” she whispered, cold with shock. “I’ll die with you—I vow it by all I know of heaven—before I’ll say farewell.”

  Somewhere, deeper within the keep, she heard her father shouting orders. Too soon, men came, wrenching the dazed Valerian from her arms, roughly hauling him away. Brenna did not fight them, because she was afraid of doing Valerian further injury.

  Challes crouched beside her briefly, where she sat in the dust like a beggar, and spoke in a quiet but stem voice. “Go to your quarters, Lady Brenna. Wash yourself, and brush your hair, and don a clean gown. When your father summons you, and he shall, answer his questions respectfully and keep your opinions to yourself. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. She didn’t see what any of it mattered; all she cared about was saving Valerian.

  Then even C
halles was gone.

  Brenna rose after a while and was met at the edge of the courtyard by her lady’s maid, Moll, who clucked and fretted at the sight of her charge. Like a sleepwalker, Brenna let herself be led inside the keep, across the great room, up the broad stone stairs, and along the passageway to her own chamber.

  There she stood still and endured while Moll stripped away her gown, along with the shift beneath it, and scrubbed her with chilly water and a rough cloth. Brenna’s hair was brushed, then thick tendrils at either side were plaited, with narrow ribbons made from cloth-of-gold woven through. She was powdered and perfumed, like a bride being prepared for her husband. Then, finally, she was laced into a green frock, just a few shades darker than her eyes, and steered across the rushes to the looking glass.

  Brenna did not connect herself to the beautiful image wavering upon the murky face of the mirror. She was numb, as insubstantial as a ghost, with no more depth than her reflection.

  She turned to look into Moll’s eyes and clutched the maid’s work-worn hands in both her own. “I must go to him,” she said. “Where is he?”

  Moll’s plain, earnest face paled. “The bootmaker’s lad? I would imagine he’s in the dungeon still, mistress, where the baron had him put, but—”

  Brenna’s mind was beginning to work again. The servants lived in a world all their own; they knew each other’s habits, had their own feuds and romances. Without their help, she could not hope to reach Valerian. “I know Father has already ordered that I am to be closed up in my chamber, after tonight. But you must bring the key and let me out, Moll, as soon as the moon is high.” Moll swayed slightly with fear. “Milady!” she rasped. “Do you know what you’re asking of me? Why, if I were found out—”

  “You won’t be caught,” Brenna interrupted, knowing the promise was a rash one even as she spoke. “Please, Moll—I must go to Valerian. Tonight!”

  “It’s no use, your putting yourself into such danger!” Moll rarely argued, but she did so now, with fervor. “He’s to die one day soon, with the sunrise, is Noah Lazarus’s son! And nothing you can do will save him!” Brenna would not, could not, turn away from her course, though she knew as well as anyone that it was a deadly one. If these were Valerian’s last days on earth, then they would be hers as well. If she must see him step into eternity, in the first flowering of his manhood, then she would follow on his heels, and cross the unseen river knowing what it was to pass the night in her beloved’s arms.