by Ingrid Hahn
And how she trembled, rage rampaging through her veins, stinging like her blood had been replaced by a potent brew of virulent nettles.
Sidonie had played through this moment in her mind a hundred times in a hundred different places. Sometimes the inquisitor’s man caught her. Sometimes she went to him willingly.
Never in all her imaginings had she considered the violence of her physical reaction to the moment. In her daydreams, she’d always been calm, surrendered, shrouded in a glow of perfect peace.
The reality was anything but.
If she did this, she’d pay with her life.
The scene brought her a deeper understanding of what it must have been that night in the garden long ago in a faraway land when another person begged for his life not to be taken from him.
“Sidonie, can you hear me?” Roland radiated strength and power, but a distant note in his voice suggested he struggled to subdue his turmoil.
It was a comfort, detecting that turmoil in him. It meant he wasn’t fool enough to believe fear didn’t exist. So long as he didn’t try to pretend he possessed no fear, he could manage himself. She could trust in that, at least. And Roland was no fool.
“Yes, I understand.”
“Understand what? Me?”
“My soul is too dear and there won’t be a second chance, not for me.”
“Absurd. It’s not like that and that’s not what I was referring to. I’ve seen the gateway, I’ve seen—”
“No, Roland.” She clutched a fist against her chest. The children had reached the top of the steps and stopped before their father. “It’s like I told you. This isn’t about him. This is about me.”
The inquisitor’s man’s gaze rose. The pocket of time enveloping the city grew heavy around them. Everything slowed. The click of horse hooves on the stone. The slosh of carriage wheels through brown water. The shocked outrage of the man shouting after the urchin fleeing with his purse.
And the inquisitor’s man’s eyes. One flick upward. Closer to her. Another. And another.
They stared at each other. Everything faded into distant recesses. The light, so golden only a moment ago, was beginning to weaken. Night was coming. With the night, the moon. And with the moon, the ability to elude Death for a few short hours—ample time to see her task complete.
So she hoped. If she failed, so much would be lost. Was she powerful enough?
It didn’t feel as though she was.
But she’d run out of time.
His lips didn’t move. But she heard—clear as if they stood alone in an empty field, salted and dead in the wake of invading warriors with nothing, not even a slight breeze, to carry the words away from her, each resounding with perfect enunciation.
You belong to me.
~ ~ ~
“Roland, go. Now. Run.” She shoved against him, but he might as well have been a wall erected by the ancient Romans.
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Do you think you are a strong enough man to help me die?”
He almost choked. “I would never—”
“Then you must go. This isn’t your fight.”
Across the road, the children and their governess had been shuffled into the house. The inquisitor’s man approached, his steps as languid as they were deadly. Without taking his gaze from them for a second, he moved into the street. Horses whinnied. A cart came to a precarious halt before him, as if the force of his power were so great as to twist the world to his will.
Were it a river between them, no doubt the waters would have parted, the droplets of the waves on either side sizzling to steam if they came too close to the man’s skin.
“Like hell.” Roland stood his ground. “He wants you, he comes through me first.”
Sidonie clenched her teeth. “You must go. Now. Go and don’t look back. Not once. If he gets you, he gets Jacques.”
“He most certainly does not.”
Sidonie snatched Roland’s dagger from his belt, digging the blade against the artery in his neck just hard enough for the flesh on either side of the steel to whiten. “I’ll slit your throat and soak myself in your blood as you lay dying at my feet before I let him touch you.”
Roland held up his hands and took a step backward. “Sidonie . . . don’t do this. You need me. You saw the medallion. You know what I am.”
“What you are is why you need to live.”
He looked at the inquisitor’s man. He looked at her. “No.”
“Please. For me.” Her voice shook. “My God, how I love you.”
Roland’s face hardened. He turned, his cloak sweeping through the air in a rustle of thick fabric as he fled.
A dark form entered the corner of her vision. She didn’t need to look, not even when a cold hand closed around her wrist.
She bowed her head. No. Please, no. She’d thought she had the strength for this . . . but she was a prideful, horrible thing. She did not have the strength. She was not strong enough. She could not face this. Her heart was weak, her will nothing but a handful of gray ash.
Please. Please, no. Take this burden away from her.
The hand squeezed. Bones crushed bones. Hot pain shot up her arm in a splitting burst of white light. The blade fell. The rattle of metal on stone was the last thing she heard.
~ ~ ~
Roland wasn’t getting enough air. He’d been running for hours. The dampness in his boots said that he would find his feet good and bloodied later. What did he care?
What was he trying to escape? That she said she loved him?
He fell to his knees he knew not where. He put his hand to where she’d pressed his own dagger to his throat and brushed away dark crumbles of dried blood. Only a hair’s width deeper and she would have driven the blade right into his artery.
He clutched the medallion, pressing his fist against his battering heart.
Night had swallowed the world. Oh, yes, some windows glowed, some torches burned. But it wasn’t enough. How he’d been running for so long in perfect darkness without catching his foot in a pit and breaking his leg or flying straight into the wall of a building . . . he couldn’t remember anything about the last few hours. Again and again in his mind he relived the worst moment of his life: turning his back on Sidonie.
He stretched his hands out before him. Strange, these. He’d seen them every day of his life. Why did they appear so distant? They didn’t look like his. They looked like a stranger’s. His hands couldn’t have allowed him to turn his back on her. They would have killed him first. How had he come to possess a stranger’s hands? Where had his gone and how the devil was he supposed to get them back?
“Please. Let me die.” He flung himself to all fours and pounded fists against the hard earth. How could he have believed it didn’t matter whether or not he loved her? Loving Sidonie was the only thing that mattered—the only thing that could give meaning to his empty life.
Not far off came a yell. “Get your ass off this street, disgusting drunkard.”
A second chimed in that he was sending for the night watchmen. The voices could have been right above him as easily as they could have been on the other side of the river.
Roland threw his head back to glare into the sky and shouted louder. “Let me die, I said! Let me die!”
Nothing. Only more darkness.
No. Not nothing. He blinked. Roland was staring straight into a perfect crescent moon. A waxing crescent represented the maiden in her transition from virgin to mother.
Roland spit at the accursed silvery orb. Waning moons were supposed to represent the transition into death. Sidonie wasn’t supposed to die.
Wasn’t supposed to die . . . the thought echoed in pace with the blood beating in his veins. Wasn’t supposed to die . . . Wasn’t supposed
to die . . . Wasn’t supposed to die . . .
He stared back up into the crescent. Two points . . . horns . . . bull. Male.
Could it be? Could it be him?
Two halves. She’d said as much, hadn’t she, what she’d seen in her last vision? Something to complete her?
Was this hubris? Was this the desperate wish of a man whose grief had driven him to madness?
Sidonie had told him he was uncertain.
Not any longer he wasn’t.
It was him.
He might not have been his father’s son. But he was his mother’s.
Chapter 22
Sidonie’s eyelids cracked open. Her unbound hair obscured her vision. She made out the orange glow of torchlight in a cavernous room and the dark form who spoke from the far end. In addition to the crackle of flames was a dripping noise, like fat water droplets falling at an intermittent pace.
These were the depths of Paris, under the city in the secret dungeons where these so-called courts operated. Perhaps not all those who were brought here were innocent, but evil men controlled what happened within these walls.
Though this was not the Arsenal near the Bastille where Madame Voisin, the notorious poisoner in the king’s court, had been taken, it was very much the same place. This was a Chambre Ardente—a Burning Court.
This was where heretics were judged.
Sidonie’s face was pressed against cool tile. She lay in a tangled heap with her hands behind her back. A little tug of her arms and her wrists strained against the rough ropes of her binding.
No sooner had her nose registered the stomach-turning undertone of scorched human flesh than hands fell upon her and yanked her to standing.
“Careful, Philippe.”
The voice crawled over her skin.
Instantly, her handler’s grip lightened.
“Our Sidonie here is special. We mustn’t mistreat our gift. She gave herself over so willingly, practically placing herself right into our hands.”
The moon had risen while Sidonie had been unconscious. As she was being dragged, she tamped down the rush of strength ebbing through her. It was the night of the waxing crescent—her night. It mattered little that the room had no windows. What could not be seen still existed. Like a soul.
She was pushed against a cold wall. A drop fell on her head. Then two more on her shoulder and nose.
Through the strands of her hair she made out the face of her handler—the inquisitor’s man’s servant, no doubt. He was young, no more than sixteen or seventeen. His face was a study of smooth, classical lines. With just a fraction less blunt strength to his features, he would have been effeminate. His curly wheat-colored hair was long, but his irises were a pale ice blue . . . bereft of life.
He pulled the knot free and methodically coiled the ropes. She pushed her hair back.
Setting a pen between the pages of the book in which he’d been writing, the inquisitor’s man placed the ends of his thumb and first finger upon the surface of the desk, stood, and came around to the other side. The desk rested upon a dais, making the man appear all the larger. He took a sip from a shining silver cup. “I’m pleased you chanced to see my daughters. It is for them that I work to extinguish your kind from the earth. It is for them that I will succeed.”
Sidonie could have spat. “We aren’t a clan, nor are we a city or country. We aren’t even a family. You could kill every one of us living and still more would be born.”
The servant took one of her hands and clamped it in a shackle above her head. Moisture began drawing up into the fabric of her garments.
“Oh, bravo, madame. Such brave talk. We commend you.”
“Believe what you want.” She kept her eye on him while tallying everything in the room. No windows, clear enough, as they were somewhere below ground. A few empty benches. Church symbology hanging on the wall behind the desk to encourage the illusion that the inquisitor’s work was ordained from heaven.
This was the room in which she would die.
Funny how mere hours ago she’d seen the room where she’d been born. A full circle.
Upon the end of the inquisitor’s man’s desk rested narrow wooden boards. Though they might have seemed incongruous to many, they were no ordinary objects. No, indeed, but instead a carefully placed promise of agony. Not a threat. A promise. Brodequins, the device was called. The boards would be strapped around a leg and tightened until bones shattered.
“You still believe you possess the upper hand, don’t you?” The inquisitor’s man stroked his fingers in a loving caress over the boards of the brodequins, starting at the far end and creeping along until he’d swept over every inch.
“I’ll never submit to you.”
“That doesn’t matter, my dear.” He smiled. “We are sending you to Hell where you belong. However much pride you care to take with you on your journey, well, that is entirely up to you.”
She bared her teeth at him.
The younger man clicked the second shackle into place, his body too close to hers. “You’ll make a lovely corpse.” His breath was hot on her neck. The anticipation ripe in his hushed tone painted an ugly picture of what he’d be doing to her body once she’d left it.
Sidonie shivered, but refused to react. He wanted to see her horror, her revulsion? He’d have to do better than threaten to rape her dead body.
The inquisitor’s man remained motionless. It was unclear whether he’d heard Philippe’s utterance, as easy to believe not as it was to believe he had and could feign ignorance. Or didn’t care. “A year ago we’d have married you and let you bear our son before we turned you over to be dealt with. Now, however, we know better.”
He pinched out one of the flames glowing atop a narrow taper on the branched candlestick on the desk, flinging Sidonie back in time to the place it had all began—that night she’d stolen into Bramville.
It seemed she’d lived a whole separate life between that night and this moment. What a fool she was for not telling Roland what he’d given her in her final hours.
Too late for that. She reviewed her situation. Torches on the walls in a room shut away from daylight. Benches. The desk on the dais. And an empty stool in the middle of the room, a sellette for the accused to sit during a trial.
She settled herself long enough to sense the presence of others. One presence in particular . . . stronger and more defined . . . Jeanne?
Sidonie’s heart leapt. Yes. Jeanne, most certainly. Where the old witch was, so must be the others. They were alive. Sidonie wasn’t too late.
Her joy was cut short by another sense. Death. In the perfect situation, Death came with a sense of peace.
Not here.
It wasn’t Sidonie’s own end she sensed. It was one of the other witches. It was the feeling of a weary spirit who’d struggled too long . . . and was about to relent.
In the inquisitor’s hands was the ribbon Roland had given her for her hair. He held up the dangling strand as if to admire the rumpled length. “Silk is so lovely, don’t you think? This particular shade of blue, how utterly becoming it would be in the gold of our little Marguerite’s hair.” He dangled the end over a candle flame. “But how could we call ourself a father if we were to allow something that had touched an abomination like you to soil my dear one’s pure soul?”
The ribbon curled and twisted as the fire crept upward. Just before the flames reached his fingers, he dropped the silk on the floor and crushed out the flame under his shoe.
The far door opened. A man stood at the threshold, but did not enter. He had a paunchy face and a crimped mass of indifferently colored brown hair. It was none other than Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, Lieutenant General of the Paris police in the flesh. He was also a rapporteur of the Burning Court.
The inquisitor’s man ac
knowledged him with a gracious bow and the man followed suit.
Reynie could easily know her as the daughter of Cordumont. If so, it was not hard to imagine her sire could be here inside of an hour to strap her into the brodequins himself.
No recognition registered in the lieutenant general’s eyes. “I want the bodies burnt before dawn.”
The inquisitor’s man nodded and Reynie left.
Philippe gave Sidonie a look that said hers might be spared the pyre for a short interlude, no matter what Reynie’s orders were. Was it better to feign ignorance of what the servant intended to do to her dead body or to stare him down to make certain he understood she didn’t care?
The inquisitor’s man addressed his servant. “She’s going to become uncomfortable in those damp garments.”
Immediately, Philippe withdrew a knife and began cutting away her clothing, first the ties keeping the pieces together. With a quick slice, her skirts fell away. He cut into one drooping sleeve of the final covering her. Then he started the other, blade stinging into her skin with each stroke.
The inquisitor’s man picked up the sack containing her things. “Such interesting objects you travel with.”
When he withdrew the looking glass and gazed at his reflection, Sidonie winced. It was almost as bad as violating her body. Her mother had looked in that mirror.
“Another beautiful item. A family treasure, no doubt.”
With a swing, he brought the face of the mirror down upon the corner of the desk. In the moment his arm was arcing, the skeletal calm of the man’s features twisted in a minute flash, revealing the shrieking grotesque locked away just below the surface. Shards flashed as they spun wildly to the ground, catching the light of the fire as they flew.
Every nerve in Sidonie’s body lit in a soundless scream. There was no way now. No way at all. Not without a reflection. Jeanne had told her to run . . . warned her she couldn’t possibly win, not against him, no matter what she tried. Sidonie had thought she had known better than the old witch.