The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  She spurred her mare onto a steep, treacherous path that led down to the water, and though I lunged for the reins, I was too late. There was nothing to do but follow—and shout her name.

  If Brenna heard my calls over the roar of the surf, she paid no heed. Instead she quickened the mare’s pace, driving the frightened beast skillfully between boulders and churning pools toward the jagged shore. My own mount balked at the top of the path and would go no farther.

  I sprang from its back and ran after Brenna, stumbling and falling several times before I gained the beach.

  I screamed again; I can still feel that cry, swelling sore in my throat, lodging there like the pit of some large and bitter fruit. Brenna looked back at me over one shoulder, and I saw intense joy in her face as she rode, splashing, into the thundering waves. She threw back her head and laughed, and though I could not hear the sound, I saw it, and felt its echo in the very center of my soul.

  I dashed toward Brenna, meaning to grasp the mare’s bridle and haul the pair of them back to safety, but my sudden motion only frightened the horse, causing it to rear and toss its head in even greater panic. Brenna fought to calm the animal, but there was no fear in milady’s magnificent face, only the purest concentration. I don’t believe she regretted her recklessness; she surely hadn’t guessed what was about to happen. To my torment, for that moment and all of eternity, I foresaw the event with sudden and brutal clarity.

  I stood sodden in the cold tide, buffeted by it, blinded eyes stinging from the salt, and I was full of horror. My very breath was battered from me, and when I finally caught sight of Brenna again, she was far beyond my reach. The horse reeled and pitched, and Brenna went hurtling from the beast’s back, her slight figure disappearing beneath the relentless waves.

  I scrambled toward her, only to be swept back toward the shore by the sheer elemental force of the water. I struggled through the tide once more and was nearly trampled by the terror-stricken mare as it battled its way back to solid ground. I had a glimpse of Brenna’s red-gold hair in the surf, and somehow, by strength of will, I reached her and gathered her into my arms.

  I wept as I carried her ashore, for I knew, even before I laid her out on the sand, well away from the grasping, murderous water, that she was gone. I knelt beside her, the stony ground biting into the flesh of my knees, and emitted a great, wailing sob that shaped itself into her name. Then I fell forward, my forehead resting against her bosom, and gave full rein to my grief. My cries were wrenching and hoarse and seemingly without end.

  Night came; I did not venture far from Brenna’s side, even to search for the horses, which had both bolted long before. Instead I gathered what twigs and bits of driftwood I could find and managed to make a small fire—I still believed, in my bewilderment and sorrow, that I might offer my beloved some degree of comfort and protection.

  I felt the too-rapid beat of my heart and the raw rasp of my breathing, but I cared nothing for those things. My tunic and breeches clung to my flesh, soaked and icy, and that did not matter, either. Physically I was numb.

  I kept my vigil throughout the frigid night, holding her small, still hand in mine, and with the dawn came the devastating realization that this was no nightmare, but the crudest reality. My Brenna was well and truly dead, and needed burying.

  I lifted her into my arms once again and started off toward the place where I had glimpsed smoke rising between the gentle green hills the day before. I did not think beyond the hope that I would find a village, with a churchyard to receive Brenna’s fragile remains and a priest to say the holy words that might secure her place in heaven.

  I don’t know how long I staggered over that barren, windswept terrain, holding my perished angel close against my breast, and I have no memory of reaching the small cluster of huts where I came groping and flailing to my senses some days later.

  By that time, according to the aged and crowlike woman who had, by her account, dragged me back from the threshold of death, Brenna had already been laid to rest. Lucky she’d been, too, my nurse proclaimed, not to die of the plague like those other poor souls. They’d been flung onto a blazing pyre as soon as they’d breathed their last.

  As I lay on my pallet, drenched in the sweat of a recently broken fever and smelling of all manner of base things, I wished with all my being that I, too, might be taken by the pestilence. I realized even then, however, that I was condemned to live, and to my great and secret shame, I also knew I hadn’t the courage to put an end to my own misery. I believed too little of my father’s grim theology to follow its dictates, and too much to risk the fires and pitchforks of hell.

  I turned my face to the dank, daub-and-wattle wall and mourned in silence.

  After a while a holy man came to see about me. I would not look at him.

  “I am Brother Timothy,” he said.

  I did not reply.

  “You must be grateful and repentant,” he persisted. “God has chosen, in His infinite mercy, to spare your life.”

  I spat, though my mouth was dry.

  The man of God sighed and left me to my private damnation.

  I might have lain in that wretched hovel forever, despising everything that was holy, waiting to perish of despair, if the crone hadn’t finally grown impatient one foggy day and put a foot hard to my ribs.

  “Get up, you,” she commanded, having apparently passed the outermost bounds of Christian charity. “I can’t abide the smell of you, and I’m that weary of spooning gruel and goat’s milk into your mouth as if you was a sickly babe. Go on, take yourself out of here.”

  I groped to my feet with her none-too-gentle help and swayed dangerously before finally catching my balance. I staggered out of the hut with its thatched roof and hard dirt floor into the cold glare of sunlight. For a moment or two I was blinded by the dazzle and raised one arm to shield my eyes.

  Mortals are damnably resilient, even when they don’t choose to be. Within a moment or so I could see clearly, and my weakened frame supported itself with a shaky determination that came from some unexplored part of my mind. I looked about and saw other huts—pigs and dogs and chickens wandering in their midst—and a few gaunt humans in poor clothes. Not far from the edge of the village was a great firepit, encircled with stones, black and acrid at its center. I was drawn to the place by a horrible fascination that shamed even as it compelled me to take the next step toward it, and the next.

  Blackened bones and skulls lay scattered, haphazard, through the ashes, and I recognized a single charred arm, muscles clearly defined, sooty fingers curled. I wretched convulsively and reeled away from that grim sight and the other helter-skelter leavings of death. I could be grateful, at least, that Brenna’s mortal remains had not been cast into the pit. That none of those hideous pieces and parts were hers.

  I nearly collided with the small, rotund monk who stood behind me.

  “What is your name, lad?” he asked, and I was struck, even in my welter of confusion and agony, by the serenity in his expression. I knew this was Brother Timothy, the holy man who had visited me in the witch’s hut.

  He wore robes of undyed wool, a narrow, frayed rope girding his middle, and his tonsured head was fringed with brown hair. The flesh of his face was tight, but the eyes were old, and I could not begin to guess his age; he might have been seventeen or seventy.

  “Valerian,” I answered hoarsely. I did not speak of my dead father, nor did I offer the name of my village. I had no home now, after all, and no kinsmen. For me, there was only one question, one concern, in all creation. “Where did they bury milady?”

  Brother Timothy gestured toward a copse of naked birches on top of a small knoll nearby. The branches of those trees looked like white cracks in the smooth, chilly blue surface of the sky. “There,” he said. “On the hill.” I moved past him, awkward in my weakness, near collapse, but desperate to look upon Brenna’s grave.

  “We did not know her name,” the monk hastened to inform me. “But there is a cross to mark h
er resting place. Was she your sister. Your wife, perhaps?”

  At his words, the loss of Brenna cut through me anew, fresh and sharp, seeming to sever not just muscle and marrow, but other, less tangible parts of me as well. I locked my knees to keep them from buckling and forced myself to keep moving. “I have no sister,” I said. “And the word wife is too feeble to contain all that Brenna was to me. If I could have died in her place, I would have done it.”

  “Such decisions are not ours to make,” Brother Timothy replied. “Perhaps that is a blessing in itself. Nor is such a desire unselfish, for its root is merely the cowardly wish to escape your own pain.”

  A surge of contempt swelled within me and, somewhere deeper, where I was wont to look, shame. “Pray, do not speak to me of blessings,” I said without meeting his eyes. “There is no mercy in your God, and I seek no favors of Him.”

  How glibly I uttered sacrilege in those days of innocence and sorrow, and how very little I knew of damnation and devils, gods and angels! I was yet a lad, after all, with a child’s blithe certainty of a multitude of things.

  Brother Timothy laid a hand on my shoulder, and though he was smaller in stature, his grasp was forceful enough to stop my progress. “Your grief makes you bitter and angry,” he said with a tenderness that made me yearn to sink, weeping, to my knees. “Those feelings will pass one day. The wounds will heal. In the meantime, though, you must turn your heart toward heaven, where comfort and absolution lie.”

  I shrugged free of his grasp and went on, propelled by stubbornness, not strength. I ached with frailty and fatigue. “No more talk of heaven,” I growled, blinking back the stinging moisture in my eyes. “No more.”

  I knew which plot was Brenna’s, even before Brother Timothy pointed it out.

  My beloved rested beneath a gentle mound of newly turned earth, with a crude wooden cross to mark her passing. It was a peaceful place, though the sea churned in the near distance, like some tempestuous gift seeking to ungive itself. Light would dance among the shimmering leaves of the birch trees, come summer, and in other seasons the wind and the rain and the sea would sing their varied choruses.

  I pressed my palms into the raw dirt and dug my fingers in deep, as if to find her, drag her upward, resurrect her somehow. “Brenna,” I whispered. What I wouldn’t have given, facing the finality of her death yet again in the moments that followed, to be as she was, unaware, empty of emotion, immune to suffering. Hidden from the gazes of man and God.

  I trembled, light-headed from my exertions, and might have pitched forward to lie sprawled across the grave if Brother Timothy hadn’t grasped my shoulders and raised me to my feet.

  “Come away,” he said quietly. “You can do no good here.”

  I had risen from my sickbed not even an hour before, and I had no power to resist. I allowed that tenacious and good man to support me as we moved away from the village, descending the opposite side of the hill.

  Below lay an ancient structure, surely a monastery, with low stone walls and a single crumbling tower. From that height I saw garden plots, a well, a narrow courtyard without fountain or bench. I stumbled, and Brother Timothy tightened his grasp, and once again kept me from falling.

  The interlude that followed lies strewn through my memory like dried bones, disjointed and strange. I was taken to a cell, furnished only with a cot and a crucifix, and able hands stripped away my ruined garments. I was bathed in warm water, garbed in a clean, if coarsely woven, robe, given stout wine and broth by spoonfuls.

  I slept, wandering in the dark mists of my dreams, searching tirelessly and in vain for Brenna.

  When at last I returned to full awareness, body and mind rallying to a semblance of their former vitality, I discovered myself to be a dry, hollow husk of a man. My grief had vanished, but so had my conscience, my better graces, and, indeed, my soul.

  I was empty.

  “Stay with us, your brothers,” Timothy pleaded when, after days of gradual, painstaking recovery, I was well enough to rise from my cot and move about the monastery and the grounds. We were in the courtyard that afternoon and the weather was bright and crisply cold. “Surely it was a sign, our finding you—”

  “I am grateful for all you’ve done,” I said, though in fact I felt nothing—not gratitude, not hatred, not grief or joy. What followed, however, was purest truth. “I am not suited to this life, Timothy. I was born a sinner and I shall remain one for all time.”

  Would that I could have known how prophetic those rashly spoken words really were. But then, I do not believe anything short of Brenna’s return from the dead would have changed my course.

  Timothy looked pained; tears filled his kindly eyes, and he spread his hands in a gesture of pleading. “Valerian—”

  I was unmoved by the monk’s sorrow and held up a hand to silence him. In the next moment I looked ruefully down at my borrowed robe. “Have you no breeches in this dreary place? No tunics or belts or boots?”

  He drew an audible breath. “We keep a store of such garments, yes,” he admitted slowly. “Each of us arrived here as an ordinary man, after all. Our possessions are part of our sacrifice, and as a rule they are either sold for the benefit of the order or given to the poor.”

  “No one,” I said, laying my hands on my chest and looking at Timothy with gentle impudence, “is poorer than I am.”

  Timothy nodded sadly and left my cell, returning minutes later with a stack of colorless, somewhat ragged garments, neatly laundered and folded. He said nothing as he held them out to me, and I confess that I snatched them from his hands.

  I was eager to be gone from that place and those people.

  I left the following day, wearing the ill-fitting tatters Timothy had brought to my cell. I also had two coins, of very modest value, that he had provided.

  Thus began seventeen years of searching, not for Brenna now, but for that vanished part of myself that had enabled me to love, to laugh, to weep, to mourn.

  All hope of that soon perished, and I sought only to meet a merciful death. I was, like the Prodigal, a libertine, a liar, a heretic, and a thief. I wandered, and I committed every sin I could think of without compunction, and a few that were suggested to me. I consumed what wine I could beg or steal, and awakened in pigsties and gaols and the beds of strangers. I cared for nothing and for no one, least of all myself.

  Then one momentous gloomy night, when I was five and thirty, and the most devout of derelicts, my old tutor, Challes, quite literally stumbled across me where I lay sprawled, stuporous with drink, upon the filthy floor of a stable.

  It was soon after that the dark miracle occurred, and I was forever changed.

  Daisy

  Las Vegas, 1995

  Daisy was not the whimsical type, but it seemed to her that a faint echo of magic lingered in the silence of that empty auditorium. When Jerry Grover flipped on some of the interior lights, the multicolored tinsel curtain threw off a blinding dazzle, and Daisy winced.

  Grover smiled, obviously pleased by her discomfort. “You won’t find Valerian here,” he said with a combination of indulgence and condescension in his tone. “As I told you, he never appears during the daylight hours.” He paused to smirk, then added, “Perhaps he’s a vampire.”

  Daisy thought of Jillie Fairfield and her bloodless body and felt a quiver of fear. She quickly squelched it. “No doubt,” she answered dryly, widening her eyes, “he’s tucked up in a coffin somewhere, fast asleep.”

  Grover sighed. “Where Valerian is concerned,” he said, “nothing would surprise me.” He paused to consult his watch, a sporty Rolex, and Daisy didn’t miss the point of the gesture.

  She folded her arms. “I won’t keep you—I can find the dressing rooms on my own,” she told him. “In the meantime, I suggest you take another look at your computer files. For a start, I’d like to know where you send this guy’s paychecks.”

  Color seeped up Grover’s tanned neck, and he spoke with exaggerated slowness, as though addressing an
idiot. “That’s easy, Officer Chandler. Like most performers, Valerian has an agent. There are contracts.”

  “That’s Detective Chandler,” Daisy said, undaunted. “What’s this agent’s name?”

  A pulse pounded in Grover’s temple. “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  “Then I’d suggest you find out,” she answered, turning to start down the nearest aisle. “I’ll stop by your office for the information before I leave.”

  Grover spared her a slight nod, whirled on the heel of one Italian loafer, and strode away.

  Daisy lingered for a moment, recalling the events of the night before. She’d never seen a trick that even remotely rivaled the carriage bit, and the mystery of it both intrigued and frustrated her. And there was something else, she admitted to herself, walking toward the door at the right of the stage.

  Valerian had touched her, not with his hands, but with his mind. She’d been downright mesmerized by him, and the realization was profoundly irritating. If for no other reason, she wanted to face the magician again and prove to herself, as well as to him, that he had no power over her.

  Very little light reached backstage, and the ornate carriage Valerian used in his act loomed in the shadows, ghostly and somehow ominous.

  “Hello?” Daisy called out. “Anybody here?”

  No answer.

  She left the wings and proceeded into the area behind the stage. She immediately encountered a ponytailed young man in jeans and a T-shirt, pushing a rack of costumes along the hallway.

  “Hi,” she said, pulling her badge from her purse and offering a glimpse before stowing it again.

  “Hi,” he replied, looking uncertain and slightly flustered. “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so,” Daisy replied, smiling in an effort to put him at ease. “What’s your name?”

  He flushed, perhaps with relief. “Joe Fitch. Is—is something wrong?”

  Joe hadn’t heard about Jillie Fairfield’s murder, then. Daisy wished she didn’t have to be the one to break the news.