Thomas collapsed onto his side, his limbs still held close, dangling loose as if he were already dead. He coughed hard. The fall had knocked aside the shield of his hair, exposing his neck and the length of rope tied around it—not tightly, but it need not be, its only purpose was to ward off Elisha himself: It was braided with his hair. At least he saw now what he was up against.
“No,” he said carefully, denying Wills’ request, and searched for a reason. “Your skin is too fresh.”
Wills lifted an edge of the sash he wore which still seeped blood from its raw side. “Damn.”
The stout woman grabbed Thomas’s ankles, and she and Broken-nose heaved him into position over the shallow outline in the stone.
Swinging away from the table, Elisha swept the tall woman into his arms and kissed her lightly. “How about you, love?”
“Me?” She beamed. “Don’t worry, I’ll share.” For an instant, she melted against him, then pushed him away, her eagerness slapping against the stone he made of himself.
“No,” said Bardolph. “Not now, like this.”
“What has come over you?” she asked, tossing her hair and pulling out her fleshing knife, its curved edge catching the morning sun.
“Ask the arch-barber what’s come over him,” he snapped back with a jut of his chin toward Elisha. “Those across the water—”
“Don’t be an ass.” She brushed past him to the stone where Thomas now lay, his lean body arranged for the kill, wrists and ankles chained through holes in the table’s surface.
“He feels too strongly of the barber,” Bardolph said. “She knows him, better than anyone. I can bring her —”
“What, are you a desolati, so insensitive you can’t see but with your eyes?” said the tall woman. “She may know the barber, but I know him.” She pointed at Elisha.
“Enough!” he shouted. “I’ve not come all this way to hear you moan, and I shall be missed if I am gone too long.”
“Right you are, darling.” The tall woman hiked up her skirts and held out her hand to Wills who helped her onto the stone. She towered over the king.
“Start with the throat,” Elisha blurted. “Let him think you’ll answer his prayers.” He tilted up his chin and traced the line that Morag’s blade once etched, from the point of his chin down to the V at the base of his throat.
“Oooh!” the tall woman smiled. “Yes, I like that.” She set down her knife by Thomas’s head and started to strip off her gown.
For a terrible instant, Elisha feared she had some plan of her own: one more humiliation would be too much for either of them.
Instead, she cast aside the heavy gown, revealing her lighter shift with its slim-fitting sleeves. She knelt straddling Thomas’s chest, the child’s skin she wore settling down over his thighs. She took up her blade once more, crooning over it gently, and the others moved nearer, leaning in, their breath caught behind their teeth. Wolves and vultures looked more kind.
With soft movements, she stroked the hair back from Thomas’s forehead. Every time they touched Thomas, Elisha imagined he felt it, razor-sharp like the blade that slew his brother.
With one finger, she tipped up her prisoner’s chin and smiled, her nose nearly brushing his. If she kissed him, Elisha would tear her face off.
She slipped the knife between them, placing one tip just above the rope. Thomas moaned as she drew the blade ever so slowly upward. He began to shake his head, and she lifted her other hand, pressing it up under his chin, holding him still. She cut so gently, Elisha thought of Mordecai the surgeon. In the wake of her knife, blood seeped through the parted skin, just a little as if she had barely scratched him. It oozed free and trickled down as she continued.
The blood caught against the rope. Elisha’s scalp tingled as blood seeped into the strands of the rope woven through with his hair. With a searing bolt of panic, the lock of Thomas’s hair surged to life as Thomas’s blood cut the circle of warding that kept Elisha away. Elisha gasped, and Bardolph shouted, sweeping out his knife.
He leapt too late, for Elisha was already gone. He snatched himself through death, back to the table, ignoring the howls of despair that frosted his flesh and rimed his eyes. He caught hold of Thomas’s presence and flung himself to the side of his king, staggering as he landed on the stone over the kneeling mancer.
The woman jerked back, gaping up at him.
He punched her jaw, the archbishop’s ring breaking teeth, tumbling her to the side. With a quick gesture, he snapped away the skin of her last victim and sent it soaring on the frigid wind.
“What the hell are you doing!” she cried, dragging herself up, clutching her knife. Then she caught sight of the dagger he swept into his hand. “You’re not Jonathan at all, you are the barber!”
She dodged the blade, but Elisha caught her leg with his foot and sent her the force of his fury. Death tore into her, his pack of hounds eager for the kill, and her scream broke into nothing as her throat withered with the blast, her knife clattering to his feet.
“I told you!” Bardolph thundered, leaping up to the stone. He jammed his foot down on Thomas’s trapped hand, forcing contact and no longer caring if the king should bleed.
Elisha could send the waves of death through Thomas’s body and into that contact, but he could not be sure of the king’s safety, not with the manic pounding inside his own skull. He spun, setting his feet on either side of Thomas and threw the golden dagger. It sped toward his target.
Bardolph ducked to one side and put up his hand.
The dagger shot off at the brush of his finger down the hilt—the hilt still damp with Elisha’s own blood.
Bardolph’s eyes flew wide and he snapped his wrist to flick away the blood, then he was screaming as the contact flared to life, or rather to death. He clawed at his arm as his skin withered.
“Stop it!” someone shouted. “Let him go or the king dies!”
Elisha snapped back the power and turned on his heel, dropping to a crouch.
The stout woman held her fleshing knife against Thomas’s heaving throat. The half-moon blade had only a shallow edge but it would serve.
Somewhere behind him, Bardolph gagged. The air rippled with cold and cracked with the awful power, then Bardolph was gone through that passageway of horrors to some lair of his own.
Elisha crept his hand downward, his fingers finding the handle of the stout woman’s blade. Thomas’s blood cried out his fear, but Elisha could not afford to hear it. He wrapped the handle, envisioned the leap of affinity—this blade to that one, both edged in the king’s blood. He twisted the images, letting the bounding power of death consume the blade, its handle rotting, its blade dissolved in a cloud of rust.
“Bastard,” the woman muttered as her own knife crumpled in her hand.
Iron to rust. Easy. Elisha lay his palm on Thomas’s trembling chest and sent the gentlest power he could control streaming along the stretched limbs.
“Catch the king!” she shouted, flinging herself down across one arm even as the fetters puffed red mist and clattered away.
Wills rose up beside her, a long spear clutched in both hands.
“Thomas, do something!” Elisha shouted, springing back to his feet.
Thomas snapped onto his side as Broken-nose reached to snare his leg. Instead, the king curled into himself with a spasm as if he’d been struck by the bombards’ blast. One arm lay outstretched buried beneath the woman’s bulk—she who had been fed and rested these long weeks. She dug her fingers into his shoulder and clung.
Hands at the ready, Elisha faced the spearman.
Wills hesitated, knowing the strike would make contact, and feinted right.
Instinctively, Elisha dodged, but his heel jammed against Thomas’s ribs. Elisha cried out as if he, too, felt the pain, and his own side burned with the blow.
A wail broke the air.
Then Thomas kicked Elisha’s knee, and he staggered forward, toppling onto his startled enemy. Wills gathered the horror of the skin at his waist, but it was only a single murder, a single small death, and the novice mancer made poor use of it. He sent the dread of the victim’s last moments toward Elisha, but the wave passed through him, and he stood immovable.
Wills lifted his hand, blade in his grasp, and Elisha caught his wrist in a grip as cold and unshakeable as death itself. The mancer struggled as flesh peeled back from his fingers, flayed like an illustration from a medical master. His screaming battered Elisha’s ears, and Elisha let all sound fall away into nothing. The hand he gripped broke apart layer by layer until the bones rattled to the ground.
Death cackled and danced in his soul. He was a man of flesh no longer, but a creature at one with eternity and nothing could move him now.
Even so, even as he knew it to be true, the tiny knot of humanity pinched at the pit of his stomach and a voice whispered through the ferns of ice embedded within.
“Ah,” said Brigit, “it seems I’ve gotten here just in time.”
Chapter 22
What gave her that power? How dare she reach inside him and turn him from his need?
Elisha cast aside the ruined arm and turned, roaring. A pale face stared back, blue eyes flashing. Elisha pictured the layers of the skin, the naked skull beneath. The face receded as the man scrambled away, toward the mancers he must have fought hard to flee. Thomas!
Recognition flooded Elisha’s senses. He vaulted back onto the table, the armor he had forged within him melting into rust as he stumbled on a hollow shaped to hold a leg. “Thomas!” he cried, his hope finding voice at last.
“Your Majesty!” Brigit called. “Thank God you’re all right.” She slid down from her horse and ran toward them.
“Whose side are you on?” Broken-nose shouted. The mancer lunged forward, catching hold of Thomas’s arm and dragging him back. The king’s wild eyes never left Elisha’s face.
Thomas flailed against his captor, then his hand came up with a fleshing knife and slashed across the mancer’s chest and arms.
“Goddamn it!” The mancer grappled with him, tossing him down and seizing the blade.
“No!” Elisha’s and Brigit’s voices joined in a harmony they had never before achieved, and he darted a look toward her.
She ran from the gate, her red-gold hair gleaming, something in her hand flashing in the light—a crucifix. “Back, you devils!” she howled. A crucifix meant nothing to a mancer, but she spoke as if it did. The mancers frowned and darted her glances, and the stout woman rolled her eyes: It was a signal in a script they no longer knew how to follow.
Thomas held back his attacker’s arm, but it inched closer by the breath and the stout woman loomed up beside them.
“Give up, Elisha, either way, I win,” she said, her words curling in his belly like a snake eating him from the inside out.
His power was scattered: he couldn’t beat them all, and she knew it, but she must know, too, that he would try. He started moving again, putting out his hand, steeling his nerve as if he still held back death by his merest wish. The two mancers exchanged a tiny glance, then they pounced, lifting Thomas from the stone, and the woman swept out a long knife.
Thomas’s despair swirled outward from the lock of hair that linked them, and Elisha fell to his knees, his sensitivity returning full-force as the last of his power dissipated, the black tide of Thomas’s emotions and his own fear overwhelming him. The memories trapped in the stone below began to creep up through his knees, the pleading of the victims, their horrid cries as they finally died. Elisha tried to shake the cold that stole over him. Think! They’d done this to him before, using their evil talismans to bewilder him with other people’s pain. This time, the victim lived, writhing in their grasp, and it was Elisha’s own heart that stopped at the thought of his dying.
Broken-nose panted, trying to work his lips into a sneer. As he twitched, blood and sweat dripped from his arms to splash against the table, splashes of life against the Death captured in the stone.
Contact. But how to use it without hurting Thomas? Too strong a casting could kill both the mancer and the king. Elisha steadied himself and met the mancer’s gaze. “Release him, and I may yet be merciful.”
The mancer giggled, a little too long, gulping his breaths. “You won’t try—you’d hurt him same as me—I’ve got contact.”
“So do I,” Elisha murmured, through stone and Death and blood. The young fool thought his single murder would defend him. He knew nothing.
From the strands of horror woven through him, Elisha captured only the cold. He gathered the endless frigid night, the howling ice and the blast of wind.
The mancer’s teeth chattered and his arm jerked with the chill as gooseflesh rose across his body. His blood froze into little crimson icicles dangling from their wounds and falling away as he shook, shattering on the stone. Dropping Thomas, the mancer staggered back, hitting the wall, falling away.
Thomas lay curled on the table a few feet from Elisha, the stout woman standing behind him, narrowing her eyes. Her glance shifted from him to Brigit and back. Elisha lifted his hands, palms open to the sky. “Go,” he said softly, letting the last of the cold mist his breath. “Go now.” The frozen droplets of moisture chimed against the stone as they fell.
She gave a single sharp nod, stepped back, and vanished with a sound like children dying.
Elisha shuddered, his bones threatening to give way within him. He’d been too weak for more than tricks—thank God that had been enough. On his hands and knees, he clambered across the table, over the human form carved into it, and caught Thomas, holding him to his chest.
The king tensed, then thrashed against him, shoving at him with weakened arms.
Elisha stroked his tattered hair. “Thomas,” he sighed. “It’s all right. You’re safe now.”
“Safe?” his voice cracked, and Elisha flinched to hear it. “Safe, with you?”
“Thomas, there’s so much to explain.” Elisha gathered his raw senses and sent his compassion, letting his hands warm against the chilled flesh.
“Will you tell him everything?” Brigit demanded. “You’ve only had lies for me. Don’t worry, Your Majesty, I’m here for you—he threatened,” she let a gasp interrupt her, not bothering to look distressed for Thomas’s eyes were yet hidden. “He threatened the life of my child, your brother’s child, or I should have helped you sooner.”
Thomas stiffened in his arms.
“While you were gone, he usurped your throne. I’m sorry it took so long to find you. I wish,” again, she broke off, and when she started, her voice rang with sorrow and quivered with reluctance. “It was Queen Rosalynn’s death that led me here, Your Majesty. When I found out what had happened—”
“Brigit made a bargain with them, Your Majesty. She’s part of their plan.”
Thomas shifted against his chest, one thin arm snaking out around Elisha’s waist.
The touch hurt, throbbing with the weakness and fear they both must master, and with Elisha’s thrill of relief. Somehow, Thomas would be all right. He could make it so.
Something flared through Thomas, a quickening that Elisha, in his exhaustion, could not understand.
Thomas edged away to sit on his own, then slowly lifted his head. Elisha reached out to touch the king’s face as once an angel had touched him, and sent the prayer for his recovery. A brief panic flickered across Thomas’s face. “Elisha,” Thomas breathed.
It hurt just to look at him, but Elisha refused to turn away. “I’m here.”
Thomas’s fist slammed into his face, knocking him against the stone with astonishing strength. Elisha’s head rapped into the pit carved there for that very purpose.
The archbishop’s dagger dove toward him in Thomas’s hand, stopping short, tipping back his chin with
the edge, carving a groove but no deeper. “You Goddamned son of a bitch,” Thomas spat, flecking Elisha’s face with droplets of blood that carried his rage. “She never hurt you! She never hurt anyone, Elisha, why?”
Elisha swallowed, the blade sinking a little deeper. His arms lay outstretched, his fingers trembling with the weakness of casting. Another day, it might have seemed laughable, the one man barely able to hold his knife, the other too weak to put him off. “I didn’t kill her.”
“Rosie was becoming a witch. She knew your touch. Anyone could lie to me, and I wouldn’t know it, but how could they fool her?”
Elisha wet his lips, finding a way to breathe again, his awareness reaching through the hands that would kill him to look for trust. “With my hair, Thomas, and a little blood, and someone I trusted to tell them all about me.”
Thomas’s fingers tightened, his teeth gritting together. “No, Elisha, not when you murdered her, not when you raped her. She was screaming your name!”
Elisha stared into the face of his king, twisted by hatred and hurt, the blue eyes so clear now lost to the darkness that shadowed them. Gently, he searched for a way to heal, some means by which Thomas might be whole again. His hands trembled. He had defeated the mancers. He had carried Martin into the fire that killed him and quenched the fire that would have killed them all. His eyes stung with sudden tears.
Thomas’s touch seethed with fury, but his lips trembled. “What the Hell do you have to cry about?”
Elisha shut his eyes, helpless to stop the tears, his heart thumping against the stone that drank death. “I can find no way to heal your pain,” he whispered. “Not even with my death.”
The fingers twitched against Elisha’s throat, then something clattered away, and Thomas flung himself up, stumbling a few steps only to collapse again.
“Thomas.” Elisha’s throat caught against the bruises and the cut he had no strength to heal. He struggled and lifted himself enough to roll over, blinking at the bent architecture of bone that Thomas’s back presented, the ribs heaving with sobs.
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