The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Not even stones remained to mark where the cluster of humble huts and shops had been, but it didn’t matter. I found the location of the bootmaker’s shop, with our pitiful rooms at the back, where I’d been born as a human child, where I’d nursed at my mother’s breast and endured my father’s resentment as I grew. I knew the places where Krispin and I had played as boys, the spots where peddlers had sold their wares and tinkers had made their bright, noisy camps. I looked out upon the dark sea, watching the moonlight dance in ever-changing patterns of gold and silver, and wondered why Tobias had sent me here.

  I had found memories, yes. But what of the answers I sought? What had I gained by returning, beyond another increase in my capacity to endure pain?

  I might have left then, in frustration and disappointment, were it not for a stray thought of my poor mother. I knew that she, like my father and Krispin, like most everyone in the village, had died in the pestilence. Brenna and I had looked on from the hillside while corpses, blackened by that foul plague even before they burned, were flung onto the blazing pyre.

  Someone must have buried the bones afterward, I reasoned, for the majority of our neighbors had been Christians, and they will go, I have found, to great lengths to dig proper graves and say holy words over them.

  While I did not mourn my father, I had loved my mother and brother quite devotedly in my way. I wanted to find their last resting place and stand beside those long-forgotten plots for a brief interval, remembering, hoping they had fared well in the next world.

  They deserved that much, I reflected, after all their suffering.

  When I had made considerable explorations, striding this way and that, dredging my memory and all my senses, I divined the presence of a large, common grave, well away from the place where the village had been, and hurried toward it, gliding silently through the grass like a specter.

  Standing beside that unseen tomb, with its great, dry jumble of bones, I closed my eyes and fixed my concentration on days so long past that only immortals remember their like. After a time I began to see images of the bodies in that grave as they had been before the plague struck.

  I saw Old Tom, the tanner, and Ben Willy, who milled the com into meal. I saw their wives and their children, and so many others as well—fishermen, crofters, the baron himself. They were ghosts, some joyous, others full of sorrow, and they cast dancing shadows into my mind.

  I saw my mother, the uncommonly beautiful Seraphina, and knew her remains lay disjointed and brown within the pit. My father’s bones were there, too, far from hers and reaching out to her even in death, but I felt no impression of Krispin, no echo of his laughter or his quick fury.

  I frowned. If he did not he here with the others, then where? Had he escaped to the sea, onboard one of the ships he was forever sighting on the horizon? Had he gone to London, or taken up the Christian cross, as the good brothers had bade me do so long ago?

  I heard Tobias’s voice in my head.

  Return to Dunnett’s Head. The answer is there—and not there.

  I frowned, and another chill struck me, coming not from the cold and treacherous sea but rising from within my own being.

  Could it be? Was this my enemy, then—my own brother, Krispin?

  No, I insisted to myself. He loved me, and I loved him.

  Krispin would have been unable to keep his existence from me for so long. Besides, we had been brothers, friends. He had followed me everywhere, looked up to me, laughed with me…

  And wanted to do everything I did.

  Everything.

  I shuddered and tipped my head back to search the starry sky with eyes that burned. “No,” I whispered. “Not Krispin.”

  But I knew even then that my brother had not returned to dust, like our father and mother. He was aboard, and he was my avowed foe. Some vampire, most likely Challes, had transformed Krispin into a blood-drinker.

  My despair was absolute, all-encompassing. It drove me to my knees, there beside that mass grave, where I wept with fresh grief.

  “Krispin,” I whispered. “Why?”

  There was, of course, no answer, for my brother, as it happened, was very busy elsewhere.

  Elisabeth

  London, 1457

  The house was fine indeed, with a cozy fire burning in every room and paintings on the walls. Elisabeth had a chamber of her own—that was what the master called it, a “chamber,” and she liked the way the word sounded—and even a servant whose task it was to look after her. The maiden, named Kate Crown, plainly disapproved of Elisabeth and her country manners, but she was a canny soul and showed her misgivings only when Valerian wasn’t about.

  Elisabeth saw neither hide nor hair of the master during the day, and even at night he often had business abroad. She didn’t mind dealing with Kate and the other servants of the household, for she could hold her own against that lot right enough, but she’d become somewhat attached to Valerian and was always anxious for his return.

  He joined her at the table most nights, and an abundance of roast meat and boiled vegetables was always served, along with fruits and potatoes, but Elisabeth never saw him take so much as a bite to eat. She asked him once why he didn’t touch his food, and he said he’d had all he needed somewhere else. She didn’t raise the subject again, but she’d often gone hungry in her brief and difficult life, and she still thought it was a queer thing never to take up a spoon or a knife in your own house.

  There were other odd things about the household and its master.

  For one, Valerian was never addressed as Mister This or Mister That—the servants called him sir or master, and kept their eyes down. His friends, of whom there were a great many, and who always visited at night, were every bit as strange as he was, and greeted him in odd ways. They scolded him indulgently, as if he were a child, and yet they seemed to revere and even fear him.

  Elisabeth was frankly jealous and wished they wouldn’t be so familiar. She especially hated the women, in their grand gowns and jewel-trimmed capes, for to them he was “darling” and “beautiful one,” and they kissed him and smoothed his hair.

  Sometimes, when he was home of an evening, he read to Elisabeth from manuscripts and bound volumes by the fire in the drawing room. He took her to see a puppet show once, and every night, when she was ready to go to bed, she found a handful of shimmering gold coins waiting on her pillow.

  She hoarded them against a future that might be less bountiful, hiding them under a loose board in a corner of her room. She had learned long since that good fortune was no more trustworthy than spring weather or a tinker’s promise, but there could be no denying that she was in luck.

  Not that Elisabeth was entirely happy, for she wasn’t. She had come to want Valerian, as a woman wants a man, but despite his generosity, he still had not come to her bed. In fact, he hadn’t even entered her room since the second night, when he’d appeared as if by conjuring and asked her to stay with him.

  One evening, after a month of high living in London Town, Elisabeth was alone by the drawing room fire. She kicked away her slippers to warm her toes and wished it was so easy to take the chill off her heart. She was a woman, not a child, as the master seemed to think, and she longed to be touched and held and spoken to in soft words.

  Elisabeth had enjoyed her work at the Horse and Horn, both upstairs and down. It was worth enduring the occasional bad night for all the times when she’d taken comfort from the warm presence of another person.

  She wanted that again.

  The guest came in the early evening, when the master was out, and asked expressly for Elisabeth. He was fair and handsome in a prissy sort of way, and he would not give his name. He’d brought a packet for her, he said, a splendid gift.

  The package was small, a sheet of parchment tied with a thin blue ribbon. Pleased, Elisabeth opened the bundle and found a golden ring inside, set with a great, glittering red stone.

  Elisabeth closed her fingers around the jewel, wanting it for her own and yet str
angely afraid, too. “What do you want in return?” she asked, for she knew the ways of the world well enough.

  The stranger slipped the exquisite ring onto her finger, and the square stone winked, red as an ox’s blood, in the firelight. “Only for you to wear it,” he said.

  Elisabeth was speechless.

  He touched her forehead with light, cool fingers, and then he was gone. Within five minutes Elisabeth had no memory of the encounter, and could not explain, to herself or anyone else, how she’d come to have such a ring.

  When Valerian returned home, it was late, for the moon had fitted itself into a high corner of the window, and it was so pale Elisabeth could almost see through it, like an onion skin. There were two young men with him, their eyes bright, their beautiful skin white as new milk, their clothes rich and elegantly cut. To another person, they might have seemed drunk, but Elisabeth was an expert on that, and she knew they were sober as Saint Peter, the pair of them.

  The master stopped on the threshold when he saw Elisabeth curled up in his favorite chair, and she realized with a start that he was surprised to see her. That was an odd thing in itself, since he usually knew not only where she was, but what she was thinking.

  The two knaves squeezed into the doorway behind Valerian, peering over his shoulders at Elisabeth.

  “The rumors are true,” one of them said. “What a vision she is!”

  “However do you resist her?” asked the other.

  Valerian’s gaze was fixed on the fiery jewel gracing Elisabeth’s finger, and a small frown creased his brow.

  There ended the theory that the costly bauble had come from him.

  She hoped she hadn’t taken to stealing in her sleep.

  Elisabeth rose, with a dignity she’d learned by watching the master’s female guests, and put her hands on her hips. “I’ll thank the both of you not to talk about me as if I had neither ears nor wits!”

  Valerian’s mouth twitched at one side, but Elisabeth didn’t know whether he’d suppressed a smile or a scowl. And she wouldn’t have cared, whichever one it was.

  “Go to bed, Elisabeth. It is late,” he said evenly. She noticed that he didn’t move out of the doorway, but effectively blocked his friends from entering the room.

  “I ain’t a little girl and I won’t be ordered about,” Elisabeth replied with a lift of her chin.

  The master raised one eyebrow. “Ah, but this is my household,” he countered in the same smooth tones as before. “Here things are done as I command.”

  “Are they now?” Elisabeth pressed. She had doubts about the wisdom of what she was saying, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She folded her arms and raised her chin. “For all I care, you can take your bloody commands and bugger yourself with them, one right after the other.”

  The lads laughed uproariously at this, but Valerian did not look pleased.

  “Leave us,” he said, without sparing his guests so much as a glance, but they knew he was speaking to them. Elisabeth recognized that right enough, because they almost collided with each other in their rush to back away.

  “Wait!” Elisabeth called to them, not in fear, but in defiance. “I’ll go with you, lads. It’s that dull around this place—”

  She started to pass Valerian, as if to follow them, and he caught her arm in a firm but gentle hold and stopped her. It was hard not to smile; silly of him, not to realize that she’d never leave without her store of gold coins and at least one woolen cloak.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he said. “And we’ll discuss that little trinket you’re wearing later.”

  Elisabeth hid her triumph, and the flash of fear that streaked through her like lightning, as she had hid her amusement. He’d read her mind often enough in the past, the master had, but he seemed to have lost the knack.

  Still holding her arm, Valerian glanced at his guests and repeated his earlier request in blunter terms.

  “Get out.”

  They obeyed without further ado, and the door slammed hard behind them.

  “What is this about?” the master demanded of Elisabeth when they were alone.

  Her chin quivered, and she thought she might cry. Damned if she would, she vowed in the very next instant, she who hadn’t shed a single tear since the day her father died of a fever, when she was but fourteen.

  “I want to go back to the Horse and Horn,” she said, hugging herself tightly with both arms.

  He did not release her until he’d marched her back over to the chair and pushed her into it. “You want to do what?” he rasped, pacing the length of the stone hearth several times and then stopping suddenly to stand there glaring at her. “In the name of all that’s holy, why? Haven’t I treated you well—given you food and coin and garments fit for a princess to wear?”

  “You’ve treated me,” Elisabeth said bravely, though in truth her courage was starting to crumble, “like I was your sister!”

  The master stared down at her, clearly astounded. “My behavior has been impeccable!”

  “Whatever that means!” Elisabeth flung out her arms in exclamation. “Talk like a plain man for once, damn you, and not some walking book with skin and hair and eyeballs!”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “What would you have me say?”

  Elisabeth swallowed. “I wouldn’t have you say nothing,” she replied boldly. “You don’t only talk too fancy, sir—you talk too much as well!”

  He watched her in pointed silence, his arms folded.

  A terrible thought occurred to Elisabeth, a reason why he had never touched her in any intimate fashion.

  “No,” Valerian said before she could voice the possibility, “I do not prefer boys to women.”

  It was almost a relief that he was reading her mind again; at least he was paying attention.

  Elisabeth blushed, holding his gaze, fierce and intimidating though it was. “I need somebody to lie down with me,” she said. “I need to be held real tight in somebody’s arms.” And then she began to cry. Noisily, with a great deal of snuffling and heaving of shoulders.

  Valerian hesitated, then stepped forward and, without a word, pulled her into his embrace. She wailed into his fancy tunic, the fabric bunched in her fists.

  Presently, when she’d expended most of her great sorrow, he lifted her gently off her feet and carried her up the stairway and along the passage to the door of her chamber. She was certain she wouldn’t be able to stand it if he left her alone, feeling the way she did, but he stayed.

  He undressed her slowly and with reverence, admiring and caressing her breasts as he bared them, lightly touching her soft white belly and the tangle of skin beneath, where her legs met.

  Elisabeth lifted her hands to his face and drew his head down. When their lips touched, he moaned, somewhere deep inside himself, and for Elisabeth it was as if there were stout ale mingling with her blood, racing through her veins.

  After a while he pulled back from her, just far enough to look into her eyes. His hands, though cool, seemed to set her flesh ablaze with sensation.

  “Is this what you want?” he asked. “The choice must be yours, beloved, not just mine.”

  She nodded, frantic and feverish, and pressed herself close to him. Beloved. The word found its way into her very soul and tolled there, like a bell. “Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, yes.”

  He laid her gently on the bed and took off his clothes without hurrying. Moonlight streamed in through the windows, making his splendid body glow like polished marble, and as she watched him, it occurred to Elisabeth that he was too beautiful, too perfect, to be human.

  Valerian was indeed, as he himself had once told her, more than a man.

  “Touch me,” she said, and he lay down beside her on the soft mattress, taking her into his arms. There was a single flaw, she saw, as he poised himself above her, a long, thin scar, pink against the alabaster whiteness of his skin, spanning the width of his torso.

  “I have wanted you for so long,” he told her, and sh
e believed him.

  Elisabeth had never known such piercing desire, never dreamed of feeling the way she did that night. She could not lie still and, putting her arms around Valerian’s neck, she moved her hips in a circular motion beneath him.

  He groaned, and somewhere far off a hound bayed in primitive harmony.

  Their joining, too long delayed, was neither gentle nor ordinary. One moment they were separate, the next they were a single being, with a shared heartbeat, breathing the same air, thinking with one mind, one soul entwined with the other.

  There was a sense of the inevitable, of a destiny that could not have been avoided. They moved together, their pace rapid, urgent, fierce.

  Elisabeth pitched beneath Valerian, her hands moving wildly over the smooth flesh of his back and the flexing muscles of his buttocks, as if to take the whole of him inside her, as she had taken his manhood. She had pretended with other men, but with Valerian there was no need; her rising cries were born of the purest pleasure.

  Valerian did not try to quiet her; instead he thrust harder and deeper. Although he made no sound at all, Elisabeth saw ecstasy in the planes of his face and felt it in the way he trembled upon her.

  She reached satisfaction first, sobbing and breathless, soaring into a new place, far above the reach of her own mind and soul.

  When Valerian followed her into the flames, only moments later, he gave a long, low cry, and started to spill himself into her. Then his body jerked convulsively, as if to leap to some new and unexpected height of pleasure. He closed his eyes, his head thrust back, and gave a raspy, triumphant shout.

  The name he called was not her own. It was Brenna’s.

  Elisabeth didn’t care, for he’d given her what she wanted, and she had never aspired to earn his love, never so much as hoped for such a thing. She cradled him in her arms and soothed him with light fingers and whispered words while he shuddered in the aftermath of a climax that had been emotional as well as physical.

  Presently he slid downward upon her warm and welcoming body, still trembling, to rest his head between her breasts, and she stroked his hair. He turned and took her nipple, tentatively at first, and then with greed. Elisabeth felt something reawaken inside her and coil itself tighter and tighter.