Roman

by Heather Grothaus

  “You were a soldier, my lord?” Isra said, shocked at this information. “How then did you escape the siege?”

  He met her eyes. “No. I was a craftsman. A stonemason. I built Chastellet.”

  The admiration she already felt for him grew in her chest. This was no pampered lord; no soldier charged with saving his comrades and superiors. Before her was simply a man who had been intent on rescuing his friends. And his reward had been that his freedom and his livelihood were taken away.

  But the admission seemed to have made him uncomfortable, and so Isra did not press him. Indeed, his face now bore deep lines of pain and fatigue, and Isra knew she was the cause of both this day.

  “Thank you, my lord,” she said. “For saving me. For listening to me.”

  “Go to sleep,” he said. “We will talk more on the morrow.”

  “Will you stay with me all the night?” she couldn’t help but whisper, and even she heard the fear in her voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “I, too, might sleep. If the man comes who first questioned you, you must wake me. He—” Roman closed his mouth in a grim line. “Wake me if he comes.”

  “As you wish, my lord,” she said.

  “I’m no lord.”

  “As you wish.” Isra closed her eyes and took as deep a breath as her searing lungs would allow. By the time she exhaled, she was asleep.

  She had never felt so safe in all her life.

  Chapter 3

  Maisie Lindsey relieved Roman the next morning, although Adrian must not have been completely comfortable with his wife being in the cell with Isra by the conversation Roman heard just beyond the door. But eventually, Maisie did enter the chamber, bearing a tray of food and drink as well as a fresh pile of cloths and a basin of water, along with a small pot of dried plant matter.

  “How is she this morn?” Maisie asked as Roman rose from his chair.

  “Still sleeping,” he said, sidestepping around the perimeter of the chamber to give Adrian’s wife room to put the tray down. “She had a bad night.”

  Roman did not elaborate upon Isra’s weeping and moaning episode in the deepest dark, or how he had been unable to withstand the sound of her misery and had escaped the cell to stand on the far side of the fountain for many long moments, keeping close watch on the doorway. When he’d returned, she was asleep once more.

  “I’m nae surprised by that,” Maisie said, coming to lean over Isra. “She’s taken quite a thrashing. Much more and she wouldna have survived.”

  Roman had no response to that. His own arm was searing, throbbing heat at the moment, his back ached, his head pounded, and he needed to make water.

  “I’ll return in but a moment,” he said to Maisie as he made his way toward the low door.

  “Rest a while in your chamber,” Maisie instructed, pouring from a pitcher into a cup. “Victor shall come before the noon meal.”

  Roman paused. “Is that wise?”

  Maisie glanced up at him as her hands readied her supplies on the tray. “Of course it’s wise. Of all the people at this abbey, think of those with whom Constantine would nae readily come to blows for disobeying him. I count three, myself.”

  Roman had to grin as he considered there could be no other woman on the planet more suited to bringing Adrian Hailsworth to heel. He inclined his head toward her in acknowledgment and turned to leave, intending on seeing to Lou right away.

  “Oh,” Maisie called after him into the gallery. In a moment she was standing in the doorway, cloths in her hands. “Valentine asked me to tell you that he has taken to the mews this morning.”

  Roman nodded and made his way toward the stairs to behold the pale Brother Wynn descending, his personal stench preceding him like a rolling fog. The man gave Roman a distracted smile and bow, which Roman returned, and then held out a short, waxy-looking stick. After Roman took it, Brother Wynn first pointed to his own biceps and then Roman’s before giving a wave and disappearing into the blackness below with an eye-watering breeze.

  As Roman climbed the stairs, he wondered how he had come to have such people around him, such friends as these.

  Was Isra Tak’Ahn’s presence a threat to all of them?

  The ointment disappeared into Roman’s sleeves, along with his hands. As much as he wished to indeed seek his bed and put to good use the medicine gifted by Wynn, he needed to talk to Constantine first.

  Roman found the general once more in the abbey’s manicured bailey, where the majority of the brethren were readying the plantings and beds for the coming winter. Stan was working with his back to Roman, using a wide, stiff rake to smooth a section of needle mulch. The bailey was peaceful, quiet, only the sounds of tool and branch and leaf stirring on the crisp breeze. Roman stepped into Constantine’s peripheral vision and gave a bow.

  Stan glanced up, pretended a return bow over his rake, and then turned his attention back to the curved red slivers beneath his sandals.

  Roman waited for Constantine to stop, but it soon became apparent that the man had no intention of giving him any attention at all. So Roman did the only thing that came to his mind. He strode to the nearest arch and retrieved a rake and then joined Constantine in the garden bed.

  The motion of pulling the rake was so terrible that Roman was soon forced to use only his left hand, tossing the head of the tool out onto the mulch and then grasping the middle of the handle and lifting, dragging it back. The activity caused sweat to break out on his forehead instantly in the sunny bailey, and his increased heartbeat caused his arm to throb like a rotten tooth.

  After several moments of Constantine glancing back at Roman with ever darkening glares, the general stalked to the archway and tossed his rake against a wall before disappearing inside the doorway that led to the gatehouse. Roman followed with a silent prayer of thanksgiving as the cool darkness flashed over his fevered brow. After a quick glance around, he stepped up behind the statue of Michael and ducked into the twisting corridor.

  Stan had left the silent stone door standing ajar, and Roman pushed it to carefully, noting that the general had taken up a place before the secret library’s only window, a stone-edged arrow slit where Adrian Hailsworth had spent countless days lost in his own misery.

  When his vision cleared from the pounding of blood behind his eyes, Roman at once repeated the information Isra Tak’Ahn had relayed to him the night before. He embellished nothing, belittled nothing, reciting everything as closely as he could as to how he had been told.

  Once Roman had finished, he waited in the silence for several moments for a response from Constantine.

  “Why do you believe her?” he said at last.

  “I don’t know why she would lie.”

  Stan turned his head to look over his shoulder at Roman. “Perhaps the four large bounties offered for our capture?”

  “She risked her life to come here. She nearly died as it was. And she saved you and Adrian and Valentine in Damascus. She saved me as well. I never would have been able to find you on my own, and if I had been caught . . .” Roman let the thought trail away. Constantine wasn’t stupid, after all. He knew perhaps better than anyone what would have happened to Roman had he been captured inside the city walls. “She never demanded payment for leading me to you that night.”

  “She is demanding her payment now.”

  Roman took a step into the room. “By giving us an opportunity to stop Glayer Felsteppe from orchestrating the murder of a man who was at one time one of your closest friends and possibly clear our names? Is that a payment or another debt we could never come close to repaying?”

  Constantine spun around. “You tell me, Roman. She purports not to know who the English contact in Jerusalem is. Have you any idea how many states you would have to search? How impossible it would be for you to access the caste of nobility where you might ferret out the traitor? Or were you planning to simply march into Baldwin’s salon and announce as fact rumors relayed to you by a common whore wanted for murder?”

&nbs
p; Roman felt his head draw back as if Constantine had struck him. He had to wait several moments for his heartbeat to slow before speaking. “It is true that I know little about Isra Tak’Ahn beyond what she has told me. And I have no idea how we would locate Baldwin in time to give him the information he needs. But that’s why I have come to you, Constantine.”

  Stan turned back toward the window and muttered, “I’m not the general any longer.”

  “You were never my general,” Roman said. “I’ve come to you as my friend. As my brother.” He stepped to the table now and sat down in his chair. “If we are to act, it must be in one accord. Aren’t we accused together?”

  “I don’t trust her,” Constantine said. “She cannot be allowed to leave the abbey.”

  “I will go with her. I have no wife, no child.” He regretted the words as soon as he’d said them.

  A long, cold silence filled the library. “She has already killed at least one man. You may underestimate her cunning.”

  “If you trust me not either, then come and be my keeper. Face Baldwin yourself.” Sweat broke on Roman’s brow and he rose again, suddenly filled with an agitation that made him unable to sit and caused nausea to cover him in gooseflesh. “It is the last chance I can see to clear our names, and what better way to do it than by saving the king’s life?”

  “You’re wrong, Roman,” Constantine said. “I do trust you. I simply don’t care if Baldwin dies.”

  “You’d better bloody well care,” Roman growled as the vision of Stan blurred and doubled for just an instant. “It is his word that damns or clears us. If he dies before we are vindicated, we will never have our lives back.”

  “I don’t have a life to return to,” Constantine spat.

  “I’m certain Adrian would like to see his brother and his father before he dies,” Roman said. “Think you Valentine and Mary wish to raise their child in a cloister of monks?”

  Constantine spun around, but the dark glare on his face changed in an instant. “You don’t look well, Roman.”

  Roman opened his mouth to reply that he didn’t feel well either, but the vision of his friend went foggy, blurring at the edges, and gave him such a start that his lips felt gummed together. He reached out his good arm to brace himself against the table, but his hand seemed to swipe through nothing.

  The fog grew brighter and brighter until Roman felt it swallow him up completely.

  * * *

  The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was Constantine’s face, his friend’s brow creased in concern.

  “Did I break the table?” Roman muttered.

  Stan’s frown deepened. “What?”

  “When I fell. Did I break the table?” He raised up his head to see if he had reduced the Brotherhood’s meeting place to a pile of splinters.

  But when he looked around, instead of shelves of manuscripts ringing the room there was nothing but gray chiseled stone. A figure moved over Stan’s shoulder and Isra Tak’Ahn came into view. The bruises on her face seemed to be healing quickly.

  “We brought you to the woman’s cell.”

  He found Stan’s eyes again. “How long have I been out?”

  “Two days.”

  Isra moved around Stan, and Roman could see that she carried a cup in her hands. She ignored the general’s dark look as she leaned close to the pallet, sliding her fingers behind Roman’s head and lifting.

  He had never seen a smile so serene. “I can be of use to you now.”

  Roman swallowed the wine in the cup, trying to look anywhere but at those deep brown eyes that regarded him with a kindness he did not understand. But he could not look away for long, the almond shape fringed with thick black lashes so appealing to him.

  He swallowed and leaned back. “Thank you.”

  “As you wish.” Isra backed away from the pallet and moved to stand beyond the scowling Constantine again. Roman wished she would come sit at his side.

  “How do you feel?” Constantine demanded.

  “I feel fine,” Roman said, wincing a bit at the pain his words caused in his head. He tried lifting his arm, hissed when the bending of his elbow caused a burning pain below his shoulder. “My arm hurts.”

  “We had to lance your wound. It had festered. But Brother Wynn has doctored you well.”

  “What did you tell Wynn that he would not grow suspect of such traffic in his demesne?”

  “He told me nothing,” a voice said from closer to the door, and in a moment, the albino monk reached Roman’s side, a tray in his hands. The cell was instantly filled with his odor. “And I have no wish to know.” He set down the tray and then placed his fists on his hips, looking Roman over from head to toe while he continued to speak. “You should have gone immediately to your cell with the balm I gave you. We would have had none of this.”

  The albino sighed. “You’re looking fit enough, though. So up with you now. Up, up!” He grasped Roman’s left arm in two places, squatted, and pulled in such a manner that Roman felt his body being lifted.

  No single man had been able to move Roman before, especially not one whose head came only to the middle of his chest. He found himself quite disconcerted with the situation: Constantine and Isra in a cell together, Brother Wynn playing physician, himself being unconscious for the better part of two days.

  The pale monk poked and prodded, squeezed and wiped, muttering and humming to himself all the while. Isra stood in the shadows along the wall, and Roman could not make out her features. At last Wynn straightened and looked to Constantine.

  “The fever has gone from his arm. He will be well soon.”

  Constantine nodded. “My thanks, Wynn.”

  “If there’s nothing else, I’m off to bed.” He turned to Roman and patted him on his left shoulder. “Rest well, big fellow.” The albino shuffled from the cell without another glance over his shoulder.

  Once the door had closed, Roman looked to Constantine. “Stan? What are you doing here?”

  The general kept his eyes trained on the floor somewhere in the area of his feet. Constantine hardly ever looked up anymore. It was as if his burden of sorrow had become so great that it had physically impaired him.

  “I owe you an apology, Roman.” He glanced up, meeting Roman’s eyes for only an instant and then dropping his gaze again, nodding almost imperceptibly, as if he were hearing a conversation in his own head. At last he muttered, “I suppose it could be Raynald of Chatillon.”

  Roman winced. “Who could what?”

  Isra stepped just inside the glow of the torch. “The traitor who has schemed with the Englishman to see Baldwin dead?”

  Constantine shook his head. “No. Raynald wouldn’t have schemed directly with Felsteppe. That would be too easily turned on him. I think Felsteppe has used his connections in Saladin’s camp to encourage a pact with the traitor. Perhaps a senior adviser in Raynald’s company. Felsteppe knows the leaders of the states well: their means, their frustrations. No doubt he has been kept well-informed as Baldwin’s hero.” Stan all but spat the last word.

  Roman was still hesitant to draw any conclusions. “You wish to return to Syria and warn Baldwin?”

  Again, Constantine’s tangle of hair shook. He looked up. “I’ll stand with you, whatever you and the others wish to see done. But I will not go. You need to understand the danger you will be in.”

  “We can’t simply let him die, Stan,” Roman said. “He was once your friend. And his word could be the very thing that clears us all.”

  Constantine only looked at Roman with deep sadness in his eyes, and Roman knew in that moment that Stan didn’t really care if his name was ever cleared.

  Roman nodded and held out his left arm.

  Constantine took it, and the two men sat connected for a moment before Stan rose from his seat. He once more averted his gaze. “You have been excused from your regular duties. Wynn has requested your assistance with the lairs.”

  Roman nodded. “I’ll come to you when I have made my decis
ion.”

  “Good night.” Stan turned and left the cell without a glance for the woman still skirting the pool of torchlight.

  “At least he did not speak of killing me,” she mused, and then she turned her gentle smile upon Roman. “Perhaps he is beginning to like me.”

  Chapter 4

  Roman left her cell soon after, promising Isra that he would return after the brethren of Melk had broken the fast together the next morn, and he was true to his word. The screeching of the wooden door across the stony floor startled her from her pacing, and she held her breath as she turned to see who had entered.

  The blond man had changed into a cowled robe, and his hair was dark gold, the damp ends curling around his temple and square jaw. His right sleeve hung limp, the obvious misshapenness across Roman’s midsection indicating that he was wearing his arm in a sling close to his body. Isra’s stomach clenched as it flashed through her mind that his injuries were entirely her fault. He could have been killed.

  Lou perched on Roman’s shoulder, but Isra could not see the falcon’s sharp black eyes for the hood that it wore. Roman turned and pushed the door of Isra’s cell closed before reaching up and removing Lou’s hood.

  “It’s best to keep him blind down here. No telling what he might get after otherwise. But I thought you’d like to say hello.”

  “Good morn, my lord.” She approached both man and bird and reached up a crooked finger to stroke the falcon’s wing. “Good morn, Lou.” The bird swiveled its head to investigate who was touching him. “I am happy to see you again.”

  Lou considered her, and Isra smiled at the majestic-looking creature while addressing his owner. “This is a strange place for a religious house.”

  “Wynn is a strange man,” Roman hedged.

  “He is a wise man,” Isra argued, reaching up once more to stroke the bird. She hesitated when he shied away, but then turned his head as if granting her permission. “His knowledge of healing is great. Why would such a man be kept hidden away in the bowels of the abbey?”