“I must remove the arrow now.”
He nodded.
“This will hurt, but you cannot move. Do you understand?”
He looked at her and nodded once more.
She sat up. “Lord Rozemberk, what kind of arrowhead was it?”
“Broadhead. Barbed.”
She sighed as they looked at each other, both of them knowing what that meant. More pain. More blood loss. More danger.
She grabbed the shaft of the arrow, tensed, but then shook her head. “My hands are too slippery. Will you—”
Lord Rozemberk slid his hands over hers and snapped the shaft. Ottakar arched his back.
“Turn him to his side. That way. Careful and slow, so as not to move the arrow.”
The men did as she ordered.
Ottakar cried out as she slid her fingers into the wound. She sang to soothe him. “‘Oh Lord, give us thy love,’” she sang, placing her other hand at his back where the tip of the broadhead lay just beneath the skin. She put her forehead on his shoulder. “‘Give us salvation and hear us.’”
She breathed as Ottakar breathed. She closed her eyes so she could visualize Galen’s drawings of organs as she pushed against the shaft and threaded the arrow through the King’s body, twisting it slowly so it could slide between his ribs until she felt it pierce the skin at his back. The blade sliced her fingers as she grasped it, pulling it slowly toward her. It slipped free of the skin with a wet pop.
Tossing the arrowhead to the floor, she pulled at the entrance wound, blood from her cut fingers mixing with Ottakar’s as she tried to see what organs might have been damaged by the broadhead. Two ribs were broken and blood oozed from a small cut on the spleen.
She pulled an iron rod from Mother Kazi’s satchel.
“Heat it in the fire,” she said as she handed it to Brother Jan and then bent her face to Ottakar’s again; he was moaning. “Shhh, shhh. Almost done now.”
“Sing,” he whispered hoarsely.
“‘Oh, Lord give us thy love,’” she began again. She took the hot iron, not even wincing as her fingers burned, and looked back to Lord Rozemberk, who closed his eyes and held the King’s arms once more.
With quick precision, she pressed the cautery against the arrow wound, searing the torn spleen and stopping the flow of blood. She bit into her lip as Ottakar screamed; he sounded like the horses that had burned at the market festival years ago. She was only seven, and Father Lucas had had to grab her arms, pinning her to the ground to keep her from running into the smithy’s stables to save the horses. It was too late, he’d said. Too dangerous. There was nothing she could do. Father Lucas was always shielding her, holding her back, telling her what she couldn’t do. But she knew otherwise. She could have saved those horses. She would save this man.
“‘Kyrie Eleison,’” she sang as she packed the wounds with strips of linen she covered in a paste of the ground coriander and clove mixed with a bit of wine. “‘Kyrie Eleison,’” she sang as she washed his chest with more wine and wrapped it with more linen. She bent to speak to him again. When she stopped singing, she realized that the song went on, deeper, quieter.
She turned and saw the infirmary even more crowded now with Brothers who had come to watch and wait and pray. They—knights and Brothers alike—were all kneeling and singing to their king.
Ottakar laid his hand on hers. “What have you done?” he asked in a whisper.
“Saved you.”
“God has saved you, my Lord,” Brother Jan said, stepping close to the pallet, demanding notice. “It is a miracle. An answer to all our prayers.”
“You,” Ottakar said to the girl. “A miracle. Like Cosmas and Damien with the angels.”
“No. It was just me,” she said. “Just a girl. I saw no angels.”
“And who are you?” he asked.
“I am Mouse.”
TWO
A right name for such a little thing,” Damek said, and Lord Rozemberk chuckled. Mouse’s cheeks burned.
“Get me something to drink,” Ottakar said, but as she started to stand, he squeezed his hand around hers. “Not you. Vok.” He looked up at Lord Rozemberk. “And send the men out. I do not need an audience for my sickbed.” He tried to shift on the pallet and groaned.
“Go to the kitchener and tell him to brew some yarrow and comfrey tea,” Mouse instructed Lord Rozemberk.
“No. I want ale. Strong.” Ottakar drew in a quick breath and dropped her hand to push against the pain in his side.
“Ale will make you sluggish, slow your breathing. I need to see that the lung is working as it should. The comfrey will ease your pain and the yarrow will help stop the bleeding.”
Vok did not wait for more discussion. “Out,” he ordered as he spread his hands wide, corralling the king’s guard toward the door. The din of mail and weapons echoed in the chamber as the men pushed themselves to their feet.
Brother Jan slipped into the space Lord Rozemberk had left beside the King, kneeling and muttering, “Let us give thanks to the beneficent and merciful God, the Father of our Lord, God and Savior, Jesus Christ, for He has covered us, helped us, guarded us, accepted us unto Him, spared us, supported us, and brought us to this hour—”
“Go pray somewhere else, Brother,” Ottakar said.
“Yes, my Lord.”
Hiding her grin, Mouse wouldn’t look at the prior as he left.
“What is your real name?” Ottakar asked once they were alone.
“I have no other. Just Mouse.”
“You were at the river. I saw you—” He closed his eyes. “You are an odd thing,” he mumbled as he drifted off.
Mouse had been called that, too, when she was little enough that the things she could do were merely odd and not frightening.
At first, she’d thought she was like all the other girls who had been brought to the abbey because their parents didn’t want them. Surnames were abandoned at the threshold, and the girls began a bleak journey to becoming brides of Christ. But even from the start, Mouse was different. She did not sleep in the dormitory with the other oblates; she slept in a private room with Adele, the nurse who had brought her to the abbey. Mouse was not allowed to go to Mass or to take the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ. She was not offered the salvation that came from such a union.
And Mouse never had any kind of name—first or last.
She grabbed at the bloody straw at the edge of Ottakar’s pallet, pushing it along the pool that spread across the floor, but the straw was too wet to soak up more blood. She ran her finger through the streaks of red, which glistened in the dying light. Anna, she wrote. Ludmila. Marie. All names, but none of them hers.
It was an empty game she had played as a little girl, starting that day when Father Lucas taught her the sounds and shapes of the letters. He broke with custom—educating a girl not even meant for the Church—but he said that following God’s path sometimes required breaking with Rome’s rules.
Mouse had learned to read that day after morning Mass and, by Vespers that night, had taught herself to write. She was not yet five. Hiding in the empty guesthouse at the abbey, stretched out before the vacant hearth, she had traced the letters in the ash, raking her hand across them when they didn’t look right and trying again until she could make them just as they were in the book. It didn’t take long—such things came easily to Mouse—and soon she put the letters with their sounds together to make words.
She had started with the most important: Adele. Lucas. Kazi. God. Names of the people she loved, of the people who loved her—four in all the world. It was then she started her game, trying to make herself a name: Anna, Ludmila, Marie. But none of those names belonged to her; none of them fit.
So, with a sigh, she had written MOUSE—a nickname given to her by her wet nurse, Adele, when she was just a baby. Quiet like a mouse. Small like a mouse. Helpless like a mouse, she had thought, looking down on the word written in ash. It had made her feel sorry for herself, and she’d sucked in a breath and blew
until MOUSE disappeared as the ash scattered across the hearth. She had cried again, for Adele, who had died, and for herself because no one had wanted her enough to even give her a name.
But that was ten years ago now, and she wasn’t a child anymore. She snatched the handful of straw across the floor, slashing through the names in the blood. She was a young woman, fifteen come Hallowmas, and ready to make a place for herself in the world. But who would want a girl with no family, no dowry, no name? She had skills; she had just saved a king’s life with her knowledge and steady hand. But they weren’t the kind of skills that made a wife.
She had thought her skills would secure her a place at the abbey, but Mother Kazi had always been clear that the Church was not for Mouse. No one ever explained why the doors of the Church were closed to her, and Mouse never asked. She had seen what was either fear or awe in the faces of the Sisters. Even Father Lucas and Mother Kazi seemed afraid of her at times.
Because Mouse had more than just learned skills. She also had “gifts.” That’s what Father Lucas called them. All she knew was that she could do things she shouldn’t be able to do. Things that scared even her.
She pulled the bloody straw to her chest and stood as she heard Lord Rozemberk sit the cup of tea on the floor next to Ottakar—and another of ale beside it. “Shall I wake him so he may drink?”
She kept her face down but shook her head. “Let him rest as he can.”
“Can you leave him now?”
Mouse looked at him, confused.
“Another of my men is wounded.”
Mouse followed him to the archway that led to the Mary Garden at the side of the infirmary. She could smell the man before she saw him, and she knew there was nothing she could do for him. They had laid him beside the dog-rose that climbed the stone arch; the last of its blooms, withered and brown, lay on the ground around the man’s head. A low branch heavy with red hips hung near his face. The bush looked like it was shedding tears of blood. It was October, and the days were already growing cold. Mouse knelt beside the man and lifted the blanket someone had tossed on him. His intestines spilled from two large gashes.
“Who did this?” she asked.
“I did.” If Lord Rozemberk was sorry, he didn’t show it. “He shot the King.”
“I thought you said it was an accident.”
“He shot the King.”
“I can do nothing for this man,” she said.
Lord Rozemberk shrugged and went back into the infirmary.
Mouse ran her hand along the dying man’s forehead, leaving behind smears of Ottakar’s blood and her own. The man took a slow, ragged breath and then opened his eyes.
“Please.” His voice was thick with pain. “The King?”
“He will live. Be at peace.” Mouse knew what comforts to offer the faithful at the time of death. She had watched Mother Kazi.
But the man shook his head and grabbed Mouse’s arm with surprising strength.
She tried again to give him comfort. “They know it was an accident. You are cleared.”
He moved his mouth frantically until he had the air to speak. “No. A priest.”
“I can get someone.” She started to rise, but he wouldn’t let go of her arm.
“No time. You, Sister.”
When she was ten, Mouse had slipped into the sacristy and taken a wafer and a cup of altar wine and gone to the woods alone while the others went to Mass. She settled under a linden tree and uncorked a jar of holy water she had taken from the infirmary.
“‘I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,’” she’d said as she touched her forehead and chest and shoulders with one hand and poured the holy water over her head with the other, just like she’d seen Mother Kazi do to dying babies. “Amen.” The baptismal water ran into her mouth as she spoke; it tasted like any other water.
Mouse had stolen her baptism. She was not among the saved, so she gave the dying man a lie. “I can take your confession.”
“I took . . . money.” Blood poured through his lips as he spoke. “To kill the Younger King.”
Mouse shivered and tried to pull away.
“Absolve me. Quickly.” His bloody spit splattered her face.
“Who paid you to do such a thing?”
“Absolve me!”
“I . . .” Mouse saw the dullness start to spread across his eyes, and she wanted to give him his peace, but the weight of his crime seemed too heavy to erase with another lie. “I cannot.”
He was dead before she spoke.
She turned back toward the abbey to see if anyone else had heard, if anyone was watching, but she was alone.
“Eternal rest grant him, O Lord, and let . . . let perpetual light—” The words stuck in her throat. “From the gates of Hell, deliver his soul, oh, please God.” But she shook her head because she knew. Mouse might not be part of the Norbertine life at the abbey, but she knew their rules and tried to live by them. She knew what her lie had cost this man.
She gathered two black stones from the path in the Mary Garden and, after closing his eyes, laid them on his lids and covered him with the blanket. There was no more to be done for him, and she had another man’s life to consider. If there was a plot to kill Ottakar, who else among his men might be traitors?
Mouse took only the time to wash the blood off her hands and the evidence of crying from her face; she would wrestle with her conscience once Ottakar was safe. He was moaning and twisting on the pallet when she came to him. Lord Rozemberk was sitting on the floor nearby, firelight dancing across his face. “Do something for him.”
“It is the ribs that hurt him. Only time will heal them. The pain should ease in a few days.” She stood.
“Where are you going?”
“The blood has drained from his chest. It is time to stitch the wounds. I need light to see.” She walked past him to shelves in the dark corner by the window.
“He is dead,” she said as she gathered a handful of candles.
“What?”
“That man who shot—”
“Gernandus. That was his name.”
“He said . . .” As confident as Mouse was that she could heal Ottakar’s wounds, she did not see how she alone could keep him safe if there was another attempt on his life. Clearly the King trusted Lord Rozemberk, but Mouse didn’t like him. Did that mean she shouldn’t trust him either?
“What did he say?” Lord Rozemberk asked.
Mouse walked to the fire, her back toward him as she knelt to light the wicks, and she closed her eyes, shutting out the coughs and groans of the sick Brothers, the smells of burning wood, the feel of the heat on her face. She let her senses turn inward for a moment and then sent them outward toward Lord Rozemberk. She could see a silhouette of him glowing against the grainy blackness of her mind.
This was another of her gifts, the one that scared Mouse the most, this ability to see inside someone, to see their soul; it was the gift she had discovered first, the one that changed everything.
It had happened when she was only six and had gone into the woods with Mother Kazi. Small enough to move through the brush and saplings with ease, Mouse had followed a squirrel, wanting to share in the adventure and never thinking about needing to get back. But then the dense woods had grown shrouded with fog; the papery white trunks of the birches had looked like bones growing up from the ground, the rib cage of some massive, half-buried dead thing. The wet leaves and bracken stuck to her bare feet as she walked aimlessly through the undergrowth. Mouse was lost.
“Mother Kazi?” she’d called. The fog made everything look different, and it made the sounds of the forest ominous. She fought her panic as the rain grew hard enough to break through the canopy in sheets. She was drenched and cold within moments.
“Mother Kazi, where are you?” The tremor in her voice scared her—she didn’t want to cry. Her breathing grew shallow and her heart raced. She sank onto the wet forest floor. Head in her hands, she rocked back an
d forth as the rain made a waterfall of the hair hanging in front of her face.
And then, something strange happened.
As she closed her eyes to wipe away the water, she realized she knew where Mother Kazi was. She could see her in her mind—not her exactly, not her body or face, but she could see an outline of Mother Kazi; it was glowing.
Mouse knew about souls; even though she was not allowed to go to Mass, Mother Kazi and Father Lucas had seemed intensely concentrated on Mouse’s spiritual education. So little Mouse had reasoned that the glow coming from Mother Kazi must be her soul and that the unnatural vision, sent at this hour of need, must have come from God.
She had embraced the concept with the surety of a child, hopped to her feet and run in the direction that seemed so very clear now. She stepped into the clearing with a wide smile on her face just as Mother Kazi turned.
“Where have you been?” Mother Kazi’s voice had been sharp with relief and leftover fear.
“I got lost, Mother.” Mouse had cuddled into the stout woman’s arms. “I was following a squirrel, and it went too far. And then the fog and the rain came, and I did not know where I was, but God sent me a vision, and I knew just where to find you.” She had rattled the story out with the confidence of a loved child, never fearing rebuke, so she was shocked when Mother Kazi grabbed her by the arms and pushed her sharply away.
“What do you mean God sent you a vision?” Her face was stern, and the cold fear in her voice frightened little Mouse.
“I closed my eyes and, when I thought of you, I could see your soul, and I knew how to get to you,” Mouse whispered. “Did I do something wrong, Mother?”
Forcing calm into her voice, Mother Kazi had asked, “How did you know you were seeing my soul?”
“I could not see your face or you, exactly, but there was something . . . glowing, and I knew it was you because it felt right, and it was what I wanted. That glowing thing was your soul, right? I read about—”
“Mouse, how do you know the vision came from God?”
“Who else would have sent it, Mother?”
Mother Kazi had pressed her lips together and said nothing else as she led the way back to Teplá Abbey. Mouse had to run to keep up with her. As they entered the door, she closed her eyes to help them adjust to the deeper darkness of the interior room.
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