Blue Flame

by K. M. Grant

  “I’ll take my chances, Sir Parsifal,” said Raimon softly.

  “Just Parsifal, please.”

  The hours passed. Darkness crept in. Parsifal ate, Raimon did not. When he reckoned it was time, he got up. He made little noise as he prepared to leave.

  “Don’t go,” Parsifal said, quite loudly although he didn’t move, and he kept on repeating himself long after he knew, from the silence, that Raimon had already left. He was never sure what made him change his mind and follow Raimon to the graveyard. He thought it was because the cave was a cheerless place without the Flame, just a hole in the ground in which a man with no friends and no greater purpose might hide out. Whatever the impulse was, Parsifal did not wait long. Less sure-footed than Raimon, and much less certain of the way, it took him a while to reach the cemeteries, hampered all the way by the rain. But he was there by the time the soldiers revealed themselves. He heard Yolanda’s shouted warnings and saw the burial party flee. He also saw Raimon struggling, not with the White Wolf, but with two soldiers over the dog. The Flame was nowhere to be seen. He heard Yolanda scream as she was pulled down, an anguished answer from Raimon, unable to get to her, and it was without hesitation that he launched in himself.

  After that there was only a vortex of mud and blood. He had no idea how he pulled Raimon out, nor the dog. He only knew that he had the strength of ten as he shoved them toward the river, tumbling in near the millstones, and himself in after them. All he could hope was that when the soldiers realized their quarry had vanished, the rain would dampen their enthusiasm for much of a search and they would soon be gone. He was right, but even so, it was some time before the place was clear and Parsifal could pull everyone back onto the bank. Raimon, who had suffered only minor injuries, helped haul Brees out. The dog was badly wounded and still bleeding heavily, particularly from the neck. His thick collar was missing but it had saved his life.

  “The Flame,” Parsifal panted when they were all lying facedown in the streaming grass, Brees motionless beside them. “Did you lose it?” It was hard for Raimon to hear, but he didn’t need to ask Parsifal to repeat himself.

  “I stuck it behind the wall. I saw them with Brees. I heard Yolanda, and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t—” He was completely stricken.

  They found it, the box sodden but the Flame still lit, and this time Raimon made no complaint when Parsifal tucked it under his coat. Parsifal had saved them all: Yolanda, Brees, and himself. The Flame seemed to have chosen rather more wisely in its guardian than Raimon had imagined. He helped Parsifal lash together a stretcher from branches and creepers and between them they carried Brees back to the cave. Though blood loss from many dagger wounds had weakened him and one leg dragged badly, the dog’s heart was strong. By the next morning, he was doleful but not dying and Raimon was determined to return Brees to Yolanda himself. He had not thought to quarrel with Parsifal again, but quarrel they did, for Parsifal thought this a very bad idea. The town would be in tumult after the night’s events. Anyone could be accused of being at the Cathar cemetery. They should leave Brees as close to Castleneuf as they dared and hope that somebody else would return him to Yolanda, or that he would hobble home himself. Raimon, for all his gratitude to Parsifal, obstinately refused to countenance this. Parsifal didn’t understand, he said. He must return Brees personally, whatever the risk. And though Parsifal tried, he could not find the right words to dissuade him.

  10

  The Trial

  Girald’s excitement, when he had learned from surreptitious whispers that a Cathar funeral was to take place, had turned to fury when the soldiers he had posted crept, empty-handed, back through the chateau gate at dawn. His fury was also personal. He should have ignored the ache in his bones and the sickness in his stomach and gone down to the graveyard himself. He should have seized the whisperers and demanded a name. Apart from the Blue Flame, there was nothing he wanted more than a suspect to parade in front of the people of Castelneuf so they would know he was no paper tiger, but an inquisitor with teeth and claws. So when the first mass of the day was over and after he had given the last miserable soldier a tongue-lashing he would not forget, he wrapped himself in one of his brother’s cloaks. An inch-by-inch trawl of the cemetery, up to his knees in mud, revealed nothing except a dog’s collar, which he picked up on the end of a stick. He recognized it. Not quite a wasted journey then.

  A fresh batch of scouts searching for the Flame was setting off as he returned. The sergeant tried not to meet his eye. Meeting an inquisitor’s eye seldom did you much good. “Godspeed,” Girald said. The sergeant answered at once. Not answering an inquisitor never did you much good either.

  Once he had secreted the dog’s collar in his pouch and changed out of his muddy clothes, Girald sat in his courtroom twirling a quill and scratching at blots on his parchments with his nails. He had learned from other inquisitors that patience, which he did not possess naturally, was often the most powerful weapon of all during a general questioning. He wondered how you practiced keeping your temper. Perhaps, he thought, it would help that he knew exactly what he wanted from Castelneuf. He wanted the Flame, for with its help he could become chief of the General Council of Inquisitors; he wanted at least a dozen successful convictions; and he wanted to be the generator of a large Cathar pyre. He did not feel that the list was in any way beyond him.

  High above him, as the effects of the posset she had drunk wore off, Yolanda awoke. She was deadly stiff, for she had slept crunched up and she felt the loss of her dog as an amputee feels a missing leg. In her dreams she heard him whining at the door and sniffing under her bed. She saw him lumped under his blanket with a rabbit’s skull, his maggoty mutton chop, and one of her shoes. She was sure his wet nose was pushing under her arm. And then there were her other terrors. What had happened to the Belots? Easier to worry about them than hear those lecherous voices and smell that primeval smell. Where the saving hand had come from, she had no idea. It was not Raimon’s, though. She knew that because she wished it had been.

  She stepped over to her window and looked out. The rain had stopped and a watery sun was making an attempt to dry the earth, its dapples giving the untidy courtyard a romantic air it hardly deserved. Had it been an ordinary day, Yolanda would have crowed. Sun after rain was festival time. The whole of Castelneuf would have been singing. There was silence today and there seemed to be fewer servants than usual. Perhaps, after last night, they had finally all run away. She pulled on the first dress at hand and kicked the wet one she had stripped off the night before into a corner, then she made her way downstairs. For the first time in her life, she had no idea what she would find.

  Dread can exert a magnetic force, and she was drawn against her will to the small hall. The doors were open and she could see her uncle sitting in the judge’s chair with her father sitting unhappily in a smaller chair beside him. Simon Crampcross, his hands across his belly, stood behind Count Berengar, trying to look as if he mattered. Aimery and Hugh were lounging on benches. Lining the walls was the answer to her question about the missing servants. They were all here, dozens of them, Gui and Guerau included. Even some of the dogboys had been dragged in from the kennels and were scuffling about, many on all fours.

  Uncle Girald, giving in to failing eyesight and reading his list through a wedge of glass, was taking a roll call. Nobody moved, except to acknowledge their name, until Guerau turned his head, saw Yolanda, and raised his hand.

  At once Girald was alert. “You. Step forward.”

  “Me?” Guerau tried to make his voice jaunty.

  “Yes. You.”

  Guerau licked dry lips and though his eyes were insolent, there was a tremor in them too. Yolanda crept in and sat down.

  “Guerau, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” It seemed safe enough to admit that.

  “Where are your shoes?”

  “Under my bed, like the shoes of all good Christians.”

  “Good Catholics or good Cathars?”

 
; “I said, ‘good Christians’ and that’s what I meant.”

  “Don’t be sharp with me, man.” Girald’s upper lip was bobbled with sweat. His feet and hands were cold, the rest of him feverish. He gave an order and Guerau’s shoes were duly found, inspected, and pronounced dry. They had clearly not been in the Cathar cemetery the night before.

  Girald ground his ring around and around. “Did you sleep in your own blanket in the hall last night?”

  “Does any woman claim otherwise?”

  One of the dogboys giggled, unable to help it. Girald bit his cheek. “Did you see anybody leave?”

  “I tend to sleep with my eyes shut.”

  There was more giggling. The dogboys did not fear Girald, for they barely knew who he was. They feared only the huntsman.

  Girald ignored them. “You!” he barked at Gui. “Gui, isn’t it? What about you?”

  “I sleep with my eyes shut too. Perhaps it’s a musician thing.”

  Girald bit his other cheek. The room held its collective breath.

  But there was no explosion. Patience, patience. Girald allowed Guerau to sit down and asked several others to show their shoes. Some had to show their legs also. Others brought their cloaks and three brought the piles of outdoor clothes and wooden pattens for general use that sat in a chest at the back of the main hall. Not a drop could be wrung out of any of the cloaks, and the mud on the pattens was old and dry. Yolanda knew she should have hidden her soaked dress. As for her boots, they were not only wet, they were ruined and she had no idea where they were.

  But Girald seemed not to notice her. He moved on from clothes to prayers. Could the chateau’s spit-turner recite the Lord’s Prayer? Could the bird-plucker say the credo? Both spit-turner and bird-plucker could, with one or two mistakes. But these mistakes also seemed to pass Girald by. People began to relax. Perhaps, though the man looked like the kind of hawk they called the bone-breaker, he was really just a jay: lots of noise but no threat.

  Yolanda began to slide out and Girald waited until she had nearly made it before his voice cracked like a whip. “Ah, Yolanda.” She was tempted to flee but flew to her father instead.

  Girald pushed back the folds of his habit and his skin was blueish, for though it was chilly, no fire was lit. His voice was not raised but stood out anyway like the caw of a rook above the chatter.

  “Last night, Cathar heretics were burying their dead. Soldiers witnessed this, but they escaped because somebody shouted a warning. I’m going to discover who it was.” He scrutinized her much as a vulture might scrutinize a promising carcass.

  Berengar waved his arms. “Oh, goodness. Is this really necessary?”

  “Do you wish to obstruct God’s work?”

  “Of course not, Brother, but really—”

  “I’ll do my job, you do yours.”

  Berengar relapsed into silence. Girald whispered to Simon Crampcross, whose jowls shivered as he passed the order on.

  Berengar held onto Yolanda tightly but Girald had not finished with him yet. “You know, Berengar, you could save us a great deal of trouble by telling me yourself whose funeral it was.”

  “Me? Oh, people die. I haven’t heard of anybody in particular.”

  Girald’s eyes narrowed.

  Aimery cleared his throat and Yolanda’s heart began to quake. Surely he couldn’t betray the Belots. He wouldn’t. Especially not to Uncle Girald. It was unthinkable. Yet she could see that he was going to say something.

  “There is an old man called Guillaume,” Aimery began. “His wife died the day I returned. Perhaps it was her burial. You could arrest him.”

  Yolanda gulped, half relieved, half appalled. Guillaume was an ox-driver, an old busybody, certainly. He had once scolded Yolanda for spending fifty sous on a pair of fancy shoes she had never worn, but he was well meaning enough and sixty if he was a day. She was outraged that he could mention such defenseless people to Girald.

  “Leave Guillaume alone,” she said. “He’s done nothing.”

  Girald turned slowly to her. “Ah, Yolanda,” he said softly. “Yolanda, Yolanda, Yolanda. I have something of yours, something rather precious, I think.” He showed yellow teeth, held up his hand, and then stepped back to watch the effect. He was not disappointed. A cry burst out. “Give it to me.”

  “Tell me who was in the graveyard.” Girald made the dog collar swing.

  “I won’t,” she said, though her eyes went back and forth. It was like seeing Brees swing.

  “If you don’t, you’ll never see your dog again.” There was no giggling now, and certainly not from the dogboys. Everybody shrank. To be small didn’t guarantee safety, but it gave Girald less on which to focus.

  Yolanda found Girald’s threat to be wicked but empty. Brees was dead. The soldiers who had threatened such violence on her would hardly have spared him. And if he was not, he would have returned to her. She would not betray the Belots for a corpse.

  Girald swung the collar around. “I’ll just keep this then,” he said.

  “Make him give it to me, Father,” she begged. “It’s all I have left.”

  The count remonstrated. “She’s just a girl, Girald, not yet fourteen. What good is the collar to you?”

  “You should keep a better eye on your daughter, Berengar.” Girald looked at Simon Crampcross, who nodded. A man came forward and gave Girald a sack, which he opened with distaste and turned upside down. Yolanda’s dress and one wrecked boot slapped against the floor.

  “Now, Brother, did you know your daughter was out in the Cathar graveyard last night?”

  “I’m sure she wasn’t,” Berengar said, not looking at the dress. “You weren’t, were you, Yolanda?”

  “Father, I—”

  A voice spoke up from the back. “She was out with me, sir, and I don’t tend to take young ladies to graveyards.” Hugh’s words were cool and confident.

  “What, out courting in that weather?” Girald was openly disbelieving.

  “The people of the Occitan are not put off by a little rain, sir.”

  “Indeed. Well, Sir Hugh, all I can say is that if Yolanda really was out with you, that verges on the disgraceful.”

  “Disgraceful, perhaps, but not heretical,” Hugh said evenly.

  “But if you and Yolanda were staring at the stars in the rain”—Girald still pushed on although his tone was less aggressive, Sir Hugh des Arcis would have powerful friends—“then why was that dog in the Cathar graveyard?”

  “Dogs go where they wish,” Hugh replied. He seemed almost amused by the whole proceeding.

  This gave the count a little confidence. “Especially that one,” he chimed. “He often gets into the flocks and causes trouble.”

  “He was a good dog,” Yolanda said. She kept feeling that if she blinked hard enough, she would wake from this nightmare. Any minute now, any minute now. But all she saw was the collar swinging and she couldn’t help herself; she jumped at it. Girald flicked it higher. She jumped again. He flicked it over his shoulder and she jumped like a doll on a string.

  “Give it to me! Please give it to me.” The dogboys began to howl. They couldn’t help it. Brought up with the hounds, they had been taught no human manners and just followed their instincts.

  Girald’s head throbbed but he was not stopping now. “Tell me who was in the graveyard.”

  “Just give it to me!”

  The hideous game was only stopped by a grunting, which cowed the dogboys into silence. Everyone turned and there, dragging his leg and with his head too heavy to lift more than a foot from the floor, was Brees himself.

  Girald turned from gray to white and Yolanda from white to pink as she threw herself down the hall and collapsed with Brees in an untidy heap. The dog seemed to be alone. She scolded him and petted him all at once, asking where he had been and why he hadn’t come home. Then she turned on her uncle, but he was neither listening to her nor looking at her and Yolanda’s tirade faltered as she followed his gaze. Raimon was standing at the
door and on one side of him stood Sanchez and on the other, Pierre. He was bound by both hands and feet, so that instead of his free, swinging walk, he had to shuffle. That shuffle was the most shocking sight Yolanda had ever seen.

  She got up slowly, although she never let go of Brees. Even though the evidence was clearly before her, she couldn’t believe it. Pierre and Sanchez couldn’t give up Raimon to Uncle Girald. Had they forgotten how Felippa had sat with Sanchez when he was covered all over in spots and his own mother had been too afraid? Or how Pierre and his father had helped Sicart and Raimon build the new floor onto the Belot house? She clutched these memories as they began to fragment and darken.

  “We found this one at the gates with the dog,” Sanchez said to Girald, looking uncomfortably around at the dozens of pairs of eyes fastened on him. “He tried to get the dog through the bridge gate by stealth. If he was so innocent, and had come across the dog by accident, why didn’t he just ask us to bring it back here?”

  Yolanda didn’t need to hear the answer to that question. She knew exactly why Raimon had needed to bring Brees himself. He was making his own kind of apology for the way they had parted, for his sending her home from the hill with his cutting dismissal still echoing. She couldn’t smile at him, or thank him, or say anything, for fear that Girald would somehow use her against him. Instead, she put her hand up to her hair. She had not combed it again. The curious, hesitant exultancy he had about him, despite his shackles, she took for understanding and acceptance.

  There was a movement behind Girald and she saw Raimon’s shoulders hunch a fraction. Hugh was standing under the window. He had taken off an emerald ring and was inspecting it for flaws.

  The inquisitor didn’t notice Hugh at all as he circled around Raimon. This was what he had been waiting for. One person on whom to focus. Now he could really begin. “What is your name?”

  Silence.

  “His name’s Raimon Belot,” said Pierre.

  The inquisitor inclined his head. He remembered Belots from when he was a boy at Castelneuf. Weavers. Easily broken, he thought.