The Frenchman grinned and said proudly, “That one is from my own vineyard. A pinot noir, which Alsace Region is noted for, in addition to champagne, of course.”
“Of course,” Nick replied, having no idea what came from Alsace Region or anywhere else, but having tasted champagne during his stay in Paris, he would have agreed that it was indeed delicious. But then, so was Léandre’s pinot noir. “Though I can’t say I’ve tasted a finer wine than this since I arrived in France.”
“You’re too kind, Nicholas. Here, eat something, you’ll feel better, and then you can tell me what you found.”
It was more ham and bread. There was also cheese and tiny pickles on the plate. Nico ate at first to be polite, but soon realized that his new friend was right. Despite his sizable breakfast, he was hungry, and when Léandre cleared away the empty plate and replaced it with delicate cookies and more coffee, he ate those, too.
“It seems all I do is eat your food and drink your wine.”
“It is a pleasure, my friend. The house has been empty with my wife gone, and my daughter living so far away in Calais, near her husband’s family. They have a very profitable shipping business, which my son-in- law is expected to take over when his father retires. I miss her, but am ever hopeful for a pack of grandchildren who will spend summers on their grandfather’s vineyard, learning how wine is made, and perhaps one day, will want to take over my business instead.”
“It sounds a far more pleasant life than packing ships.”
Léandre laughed. “It does indeed. Now, tell me what you found that wounded your soul so dreadfully.”
Thinking the winemaker understood people as well as he did grapes, Nico related a made-up, but believable story of his cousin’s descent into lawlessness, and the terrible decision Nico now had to make as to whether to go home and tell his great-grandmother that he’d failed to find Sotiris, despite months of searching—though she knew him well, and would surely know he lied. Or should he give his search one more chance, one more attempt to find his cousin. Then he could drag him back to his family, who would take him in hand and stop him from cheating others out of their hard-earned money.
Léandre listened carefully, not interrupting to comment, until Nico had finished. “Do you know where he’s gone?”
“He left a great number of papers and scrawled notes. It might be worth a bit more of my time to read through them, and see if I can find anything that would tell me where to look, at least. And if I discover nothing useful, then I’ll be able to go home with a clear conscience, knowing I’ve done all I could.” He sighed. “I miss my brothers, Léandre. I need to—” He almost said, “find them,” but caught himself and finished by saying, “See them, and the rest of my family, including my great-grandmother.”
“You are a good man, a good grandson to have done so much already. You shouldn’t have to pay for your cousin’s bad deeds or lack of concern for his family.”
Nico sipped his wine. “Still, I wonder if I could use the cottage for just one night, in order to be certain there’s nothing to find in Sotiris’s notes.”
“Of course, but, oh! My friend, I’m having dinner with my brother’s family tonight. His wife argues that my own spouse is negligent in leaving me to cook for myself, and insists I come over for a decent meal. And as she is an excellent cook . . .”
Nico grinned. “Go. I will be completely occupied with Sotiris’s records, and no fit company in any event. In all likelihood, I will leave before dawn, regardless of what I find. Whether it’s to continue my search, or turn for home, I will be eager to get started as soon as possible.”
“I could cancel—”
“Absolutely not. I won’t hear of it. You’ve been far more gracious and kind to a stranger at your door. I have never felt more welcome, and you may tell your wife I said so.”
“If you’re certain.”
“I am. Please, go and enjoy an evening with your brother’s family. And perhaps say a prayer that I will soon be doing the same with my own brothers.”
“I will pray for you every Sunday. And I will leave the door unlocked here.” He gestured at the back door. “Feel free to take whatever you wish for supper, or if you require anything else.”
“You are too kind.”
“And your cousin is a fool.”
It required a few more invitations from Léandre, and insistences from Nico he would be well enough alone, but eventually he was able to retreat to the cottage with a bottle of pinot noir to “give him strength” for the night’s work.
Once Léandre had departed in the horse-drawn carriage, Nico conjured a witch light and began reading. Unlike what he’d told Léandre, however, his reading material wasn’t anything that Sotiris had written. He’d already been through what little had been left and determined it was nothing useful.
No, what he read as he sipped wine and ate more of the excellent ham and bread, was his own journal. He read and re-read every word he’d written about the transition spell, both before and after he left his home for Paris. But no matter how many times he read it, he arrived at the same conclusion.
If Sotiris was set on leaving a trail of clues for Nico to chase, no matter how cruel or useless some of them might be, or how many worlds or centuries the trail took him through, the only way he would ever find Antonia, and free his warriors, was to follow his enemy. It might be years, or it might be centuries, but he would someday be reunited with everyone he loved.
LÉANDRE WAS disappointed, but not surprised, when he knocked on the cottage door the next morning only to discover his friend Nicholas was gone. He was surprised, however, to find Nicholas’s very fine gelding stabled in his own barn. He stared at the horse for a moment, then being a sorcerer who believed in the impossible, he took it in stride and went about his day.
1824, Outside London, United Kingdom
NICO WOKE TO find himself lying in the dirt next to a large building, with a sore head, and no idea of where he was. He’d cast the same transition spell that Sotiris had used to flee France, and assumed it had worked, but the only way he could know for sure was to explore his surroundings. He leaned back and studied what looked like a house. He was lying next to one of its walls, and its brick construction was probably responsible for his aching head.
He gathered himself to stand, and was relieved to see that his backpack had survived the transition, still hanging from a single strap on his shoulder. Worried, he did a quick inventory of its contents, which now included the four, carefully wrapped statues of his warriors. He’d briefly considered setting aside his reservations and leaving those, along with his horse, at Léandre’s vineyard, but couldn’t know for certain that he’d ever return to that place and time. And the more he’d thought about it, the more reluctant he’d been to part with them. Some might call it instinct, others superstition, or plain foolishness, but he was convinced that parting with those statues, even to safeguard them from harm, would lead to bad things for him and his warriors both.
Once more on his feet, he looked beyond the house, and saw nothing but a thick forest that seemed to go on forever. Closer to the building was a broad lawn of very green grass flanking the walkway leading to a wide, gray door. As for the house itself, it was even bigger than he’d first thought, nearly as wide as the forecourt of his father’s castle, with three stories rising overhead. There were no outbuildings that he could see, which seemed odd. The house appeared to be isolated in these deep woods, so where was the barn, or stables for the horses, that should have been necessary for transport to somewhere, anywhere, else?
Resigned to play out Sotiris’s game, he strode to the front door and knocked. The door opened beneath his fist, and he froze, drawing protection over himself, and summoning an attack spell. He’d dueled with Sotiris for too many years to assume that anything about this place was safe.
Nico shoved the door ha
rd enough that it smacked against the wall, before bouncing back to hang completely open, giving him an unobstructed view inside. He saw no one, heard nothing. The house had an abandoned feel to it, as if it had been empty for a very long time, despite the well-cared interior with its elegant couches and pleasing complement of chairs, the wooden tables gleaming with not a speck of dust in sight.
It was the absence of dust that made Nico pause on the threshold. Every sense he possessed told him it had been years since a family had sheltered under its broad roof. And yet, it was as neat and clean as if held immune to the passage of time. A strong enough sorcerer could work such a spell. Nico could have done it. And he was following a trail cast by Sotiris.
He’d already walked the yard and stone path to the door. If there’d been anything there, he’d have sensed it long before. But now, reaching out as he should have done from the first, Nico cast his magic into the house itself and saw the spell revealed as it unraveled under the touch of his own. It was as if a coating of wax, like that on the paper around the box, was melting away. Inside the house, there was a golden shimmer, like sunlight through a window, that glowed brightly for an instant, and then disappeared with a soundless explosion of light.
He didn’t enter right away, but took the time to cast his magic forth once more to be certain, since he now knew that Sotiris had been here. The spell had his stink all over it, but though it confirmed his enemy’s presence at some time in the past, it didn’t tell him when or for how long. A spell like that, cast by a powerful sorcerer, could last for a century or more. Time was measured differently by those with magic in their veins. Living in the human world like this, it would have made sense to protect the house for that length of time, so that it would be there when they returned with a new identity to suit their human neighbors. Although this house had few neighbors close enough to matter, but there was still the marketplace and whatever town was nearby.
With that in mind, and knowing that Sotiris might well have directed him to this place regardless of whether Antonia had ever been here, Nico took three steps into the house . . . and froze. He’d been wrong, or maybe he’d been right all along, because Antonia had been here, recently enough to leave her unique scent in this room. Worried he was wrong, that he was only sensing what he’d so fervently hoped to find, he began a frantic search of every room in the big house. He started with the ground floor, where her scent was so strong in the large sitting room with big windows that looked out on the endless forest, and went from one room to the next, taking time to cleanse his senses upon entering each room to be certain of what he was finding.
Disappointed when he found no trace of her anywhere else on that floor, he climbed the broad stairs to the second floor, determined to find out if his senses were telling him true, or if he was overcome with wishful thinking. Choosing a direction at random, he turned left, walked to the very end of the hallway, and began opening one door after another, intent on checking every room and closet, big or small.
He reached the top of the stairs once again, without finding a trace of Antonia. Once more convinced he’d imagined her scent downstairs, but determined to finish his sweep of the house, he started on the hallway to the right, checking room after room and finding nothing, until he opened the door to a small, sunny bedroom with an unmade bed . . . and was suddenly drowning, not only in her scent, but in the lingering taste of her magic. It was barely recognizable, overlaid with Sotiris’s unmistakable taint, but it was Antonia. She’d been in this room. He saw a discarded piece of clothing, a lightweight linen shift, the kind a woman might wear to bed on a warm night. Striding forward, he grabbed the gown from where it lay on the floor and staggered so hard that he had to sit on the bed, before he fell.
The front of the gown was covered with smears of blood. And by all the gods in heaven and hell, it was her blood. Antonia had been in this house, had slept in this bed, and had been wounded so badly that she’d bled.
He knew now what Sotiris had been in such a hurry to do, why he’d tried to delay his taunting message from reaching Nico. He’d needed enough time to reach this remote house and take Antonia away to the gods knew where, before Nico caught up to him. It was the reason he’d left his gift of the statues in distant Reims, rather than having it delivered it to Charron’s townhouse. He’d probably hoped that the statues and what they represented would break Nico emotionally, throwing him off the hunt, or at least slowing him down.
Taking the gown with him as a reminder if nothing else, he returned to the ground floor, where he sank to the bottom few stairs and, clutching the gown to his chest, leaned against the wall. He was so fucking tired. He couldn’t remember his last full night of sleep untroubled by terrifying possibilities, or past nightmares. Was this to be his life now? Racing from one place to the next, only to find himself a day too late? An hour? And all the while he was chasing Sotiris, his warriors were suffering gods knew what horrors.
Fuck. He didn’t know what to do next, how to interrupt Sotiris’s diabolic plan to torture those who’d dare cross him. Somehow, he had to get a step ahead of Sotiris instead of two steps behind, so he could kill the bastard once and for all and give his people their lives back.
Nearly falling asleep where he sat, despite the next riser digging into his back, Nico walked over to the nearest sofa, and stretching out on its too soft cushions, pulled a woolen throw off the padded back, and surrounded by the scent of Antonia, he slept.
He woke the next morning to the sound of a horse blowing restlessly somewhere outside. Abruptly wide awake, he rolled to the floor and, half-crouching, made his way to one of the big windows that looked out over the front. A carriage stood there, with a pair of chestnut brown horses dancing restlessly at the front. A man in work clothes was removing the harness from one horse at a time, then walked them to a nearby pair of iron posts, with hitching rings on top. As Nico watched, he slid feed bags over the nose of each horse, then leaving the carriage where it stood, walked out of sight, around the house to do whatever he’d come for.
Nico hated to steal another man’s horse, but if he left it at a stable in the next town or city, with enough financial incentive and information for the stable’s manager, there was a possibility at least that the man could reclaim the animal. And it wasn’t as if he’d be stranding the owner at this remote location, since the other horse would still be available to him.
Wanting to be sure before he tried to steal a horse and sneak away, Nico slipped quietly through to the back of the house and peered through the windows there. The man was chopping fat lengths of tree logs into firewood. Nico had seen multiple fireplaces not only on the ground floor, but in the larger rooms upstairs. And since he was currently spying through the kitchen window, he could tell that the pile of wood next to the big kitchen hearth was woefully inadequate.
If the workman was chopping firewood, it might mean that someone was about to visit. Not Sotiris, however. He wouldn’t come back, knowing that Nico was likely to have found the place. But the imminent arrival of others might have been another incentive for him to move Antonia someplace else.
And damn but Nico would have loved to know how Sotiris had left this place. Had he cast his next transition spell from right there in the front yard? Or had this man possibly driven him to a nearby city, where he’d been better prepared to undertake travel to another place and time?
Nico could ask the man. A simple truth spell would tell him what he needed to know, and he could make the man forget without harming him in any way. The tricky part would be approaching the workman without frightening him into doing something unwise, like tossing that big fucking ax at Nico.
Deciding he had to find out what he could if he was to have any hope of following Sotiris, he went back to the front of the house and walked around, as if coming from the road. “Good morning!” He realized he was still speaking French, and had no idea if he was still in that country, or had “
traveled” somewhere new.
The man stopped working and stared, obviously not expecting casual visitors. “Stop right there,” he called. “What do you want?”
Nico walked a few steps closer before he stopped, since distance was a factor when attempting to take over a person’s mind without consent. And also, because he didn’t understand what the workman had shouted, since it wasn’t in French. But neither was it enough for him to make use of the only fortunate aspect of Sotiris’s spell, and understand the new language.
“I need answers,” he called back, once more in French, but his magic didn’t care what language he used, as long as his intent was clear when he followed the words with a whispered spell, which would both ease the man’s fears and ensure he would speak truthfully.
The workman went perfectly still for a moment, then shook himself all over, and stared at Nico. “Do I know you?” he asked calmly.
“No, I’ve just arrived and need you to answer some questions for me.”
He nodded slowly. “All right.”
Nico walked over, and sitting on a fat log, said, “Let’s sit and be comfortable. You can leave your ax there.”
“All right.” The man lowered the ax to the ground, then came over to sit on the log, a short distance from Nico.
“What’s your name?”
“Marlin Padmore.”
“What country is this, Marlin?” Nico asked.
He frowned. “The English part of the United Kingdom.”
Nico had heard of the country during his stay in Paris, but knew little of it. “What’s the nearest city?”
“London.”
“Is it a large city?”
“One of the largest in the world, I’d say.”
“Thank you,” Nico said politely, although it made no difference to Marlin. “Was there a man here recently? He had a young woman with him.”
The Stone Warriors: Nicodemus Page 29