The destruction was already beginning. It was not unusual for a house on the bridge to lose a door or a window. Occasionally a whole building would crumble into the river, taking with it a fortune in gold and silver. But more often—as was the case on the day of Jean-Loup’s accident—there was nothing but a slight tremor that caused the old house with its ground-floor shop to sway.
The movement was small, even negligible, except that Jean-Loup was carrying an iron vessel filled to the brim with molten gold.
The first drops on his hand caused him to jerk his arms upward, pouring the rest of the gold onto his arms, chest, and neck. The pain was so excruciating that he could not even scream, but only gasp as he saw the skin on his arm sizzle.
Fortunately, his assistant Thibault had watched the whole scene and started running toward Jean-Loup as soon as those first fiery liquid drops were spilled. With one motion, the sturdy young man lifted his employer into his arms and headed out the door.
For Jean-Loup, the pain was almost more than he could bear. He felt his mind shutting down even as he watched with eerie dispassion as the flesh fell off his arms like rotten meat, leaving the white bones beneath exposed.
• • •
He was given something to drink that sent him into a deep sleep for a time. But when he awoke, the agony of his burns returned. “Where am I?” he croaked, blinking as he looked around at the stone walls with their flickering candles. Each small flame seemed to melt into the others as the horrible pain blossomed into life again.
“Shh,” a woman said gently. “You’re in my house.”
Her voice sounded familiar. He sought her face, although it proved to be too difficult for him to focus. After a time, however, she bent over him and he could smell the scent of lavender on her clothes. Then he eased his eyes open and looked into her perfect face.
“It’s you,” he said.
She covered his eyes with her long, slender hands. “Do not trouble yourself by talking,” she said. “Just rest, Monsieur de Villeneuve.”
“I’m dying.”
“Not at all. You’ve been drugged, that’s all. Poppies, to dull the pain.” She gave him another drink.
“Poppies . . .” So that was why he felt so disconnected, almost as if he were caught between the land of the living and the realm of the dead.
His eyes filled with tears. He knew he was about to cross over into death, but that was not why he wept. He was not afraid of death. But he felt such desire for the woman who sat beside him that he almost could not bear her closeness to him. He longed to hold her, to kiss her violet eyes and full lips, to touch her sweet skin, to breathe in her scent like perfume. But that was not to be, he knew. Instead, her face would be the last vision he would see in this life.
“What is it?” Veronique asked, so gently that he could hardly hear her. “Are you in pain?”
“I love you,” he whispered.
He felt her stiffen, but he would not apologize for speaking the words that filled his heart. “I love you,” he repeated, and tried to squeeze her hand before losing consciousness again.
• • •
Jean-Loup did not know how much time had passed before he awoke again, but he did feel better. Much better. With a sigh of relief, he realized he was not about to die.
Warm hands clasped his. Warm, with long fingers scented with lavender. “Thank you,” he said, and the hands folded around his own. The poppy juice he’d been given was strong and he wanted to sleep again, but first he had to remain awake long enough to see Veronique once more.
“Please . . . ,” he rasped, his throat parched. “I must—” His eyes opened, sticky and crusted. “Your hair,” he said, unable to disguise his shock.
Veronique’s beautiful dark hair had turned snow white.
She smiled sweetly. “Do not be troubled,” she said. Then she slid silently onto the floor, unconscious.
Jean-Loup leaped out of bed. “Help!” he shouted, only tangentially aware that his right arm, once little more than bare bone, had filled out with flesh and the skin was nearly healed. “Someone, please come at once!”
A woman wearing a thick gauze veil around her head rushed in as Jean-Loup was scooping Veronique into his arms.
“Put her down!” the woman, who Jean-Loup reasoned must have been a nun, shouted. Three other women followed behind her and one other, he would have sworn, simply materialized in their midst. Together they carried Veronique out of the room. Jean-Loup tried to follow, but the nun who had first answered his call forced him away from the doorway. “Now, sir,” she said crisply, “you just stay in here. You still need your rest.”
“But—”
“I am Sister Béatrice,” she said authoritatively, “and I will see to it that the abbess is taken care of. So allow me to do my work, will you?”
Reluctantly, Jean-Loup agreed. Sister Béatrice helped him back into bed and left the room.
After a time, he examined his arm, marveling at its radically improved condition. How long have I been in this place? he wondered.
Long enough for Veronique’s hair to turn white.
He looked at his hands. They were still a young man’s hands. Except for one deep scar on his wrist, they looked just as they had before the accident, down to a smear of ink on the side of his thumb. And he was not stiff, as he should have been if he’d been bedridden for months. Not so long, then. But how could . . . her hair. . . . There were so many questions.
Quickly, he made his way to the door and walked into a busy corridor. A number of women were moving purposefully toward a room at the far end of the hall, where a bell was ringing. The women were dressed plainly, in woolen robes with long, wide sleeves and gauze headdresses like Sister Béatrice’s. There was a sense of urgency about them, as if they were being summoned.
For prayer? Jean-Loup wondered. Was that what Sister Béatrice meant by her “work”? Staying close to the wall, he followed the women into the room, then hid behind a hanging drapery. To his surprise, the room was not a church sanctuary, but more like the living area in a noble’s home, with rush mats on the floor and beautiful tapestries hanging over the stone walls. There were benches and stools set in groupings, and candles everywhere that lent a warm glow to the large, comfortable space.
The most remarkable thing about the room, however, was not its furnishings, but the women who occupied it. A pair of tabby cats lying contentedly beneath a bench moved into the open, stretched, and then—amazingly—transformed into young women who joined the others, gathering into a circle around Veronique. The woman who had seemingly materialized out of nowhere in Jean-Loup’s room suddenly vanished a few feet away from him. Then, in another moment she reappeared, saying that the doors were secure. As the circle tightened, another woman (Are these nuns? Jean-Loup asked himself) raised her arms, and from across the room a thick wand flew into her waiting fingers. Someone else languidly waved her hand in a circle over her head, and all the candles dimmed almost to guttering.
Then Sister Béatrice spoke in a voice that was not exactly a voice, but more like an echo in Jean-Loup’s mind: “Let us begin.”
The women began to circle clockwise. As they moved, they sang:
We are the wave of the space between,
We are the flood that rushes to shore.
We sweep past all barriers set in our path,
Through corridors of time we pour.
Our Magick lends eternal proof
We give in return Healing and Truth.
Then they reversed the direction of their movement, singing the second half of what Jean-Loup knew must be a spell.
We circle and bind the hands of time;
Years swim in our embrace.
Our power spins in widdershins
To undo the riptide’s pace.
Our Magick lends eternal proof
We receive in return Healing and Truth.
As they sang their strange song, Sister Béatrice’s “voice”—which was more like a hum in the middl
e of Jean-Loup’s forehead—sang its own low counterpoint: Heal. Heal, Veronique. Take our magic, and with it, take back your years.
Then, before Jean-Loup’s eyes, Veronique’s limp body twitched back to life. When she finally sat up, still in Sister Béatrice’s arms, her hair had become dark again, except for one streak of pure white that ran down the side of her waist-length tresses like a silver ribbon.
“We cannot take back all the time you’ve lost,” Sister Béatrice told her. “Having given so much of your life away, you must be more careful in the future, Lady Abbess. The next time, we may not be able to save your gift at all.”
Veronique nodded solemnly, her eyes darkened to indigo with fatigue.
“What gift?” Jean-Loup asked, stepping out from behind the curtains where he had been hiding.
The women turned away from him. One of them fainted. The woman who had slipped in and out of sight disappeared again, although this time it took her ten full seconds to vanish.
Sister Béatrice fixed the young man with her sharp eyes. “What will he do to us with his knowledge?” she asked in her eerie non-voice, her lips never moving.
Veronique stared at him, her face anguished.
“I will say nothing,” Jean-Loup stammered. “For in truth, I am more like you than you know.”
• • •
Three months later, Jean-Loup and Veronique were married.
“I don’t want you to heal anyone again,” he said as he held his bride in his arms. They lay in the big bed he had built as a wedding gift for her. “Even me.”
She examined his arms in the sunlight streaming through the window of his rooms above the shop. Not a single scar remained. “I’d say I did pretty well,” she said, kissing his wrist.
The touch of her was almost overwhelming. He had loved her from the first moment he saw her, and now that she was his, he loved her even more than he had ever believed possible. It didn’t matter a whit to him that Veronique had aged twenty years in one day.
She was the first person he had known since his time at the university that he didn’t have to hide from. She regarded his talent for making gold as a gift, not a freakish curse. For that alone, Jean-Loup would have been grateful all the days of his life.
But there was more.
Veronique understood Jean-Loup so well because she, too, had been born with an inexplicable gift that, in its way, was as rare and remarkable as his own.
Veronique was immortal, or nearly so.
She had been born with the promise of living forever, but even as an infant she had felt compelled to use her unusual gift to help others. Her mother had enjoyed suckling her because of the feeling of well-being the child imparted simply by being near. From her earliest childhood—perhaps even before she became aware of what she was doing—she had been able to heal birds and small animals merely by touching them or blowing on their faces. And each time, she grew a little older. Once, when her younger brother had fallen out of a tree and the servants could not wake him, her ministrations had brought him back. The next day her mother remarked that Veronique had appeared to grow five inches overnight.
“How time flies!” she had exclaimed, laughing as her beautiful daughter was fitted for a longer gown.
But each time she saved a creature from death, she lost a small part of her immortality. With each breath given to heal another, she sacrificed a bit more of her life force.
“If you’re not careful, you’ll give away too much of your life,” Jean-Loup chided.
“Better than having it taken from me,” she said. Then Veronique smiled and kissed him once more, and reassured Jean-Loup that she had no intention of dying anytime in the near future. Still, she would have no regrets, whatever happened. She had already lived longer than most dynasties. And her life, by any standard, had already proven to be extraordinary.
• • •
The French script that had been so hard for me to read at first was becoming a lot easier to understand, even though the lighting in Azrael’s cave was creating a serious strain on my eyes. I looked up, then down, rolling my eyes and squeezing them shut until I stopped seeing phantom Gallic squiggles wherever I looked. Instead, to my surprise, I saw the big painting hanging on the cave wall, and recognized her from Azrael’s book. She was Veronique! She had to be, with her beautiful violet eyes and the dramatic white streak in her long hair. I wondered if she or Jean-Loup had been Azrael’s distant ancestors, or if he had simply painted her from imagination after reading about her.
Had Azrael himself written the fantasy of the alchemist and the immortal woman? There were so many things I wanted to ask him, but of course I couldn’t say anything, at least not until I’d replaced the book I’d nearly destroyed.
“Who’s here?” Azrael’s quavering voice echoed from the passageway outside the cave.
Quickly I stashed the pages in the waistband of my jeans and pulled my shirt over them. I stood up, holding my chef’s jacket in front of me so he wouldn’t see the bulge. “It’s me,” I called out. “Katy.”
He walked in looking disheveled and tired and carrying two two-liter jugs of water, which he set down with a thump.
“There is water here in the carrières, but one must walk quite a distance to get it,” he said. Then he stared at me, obviously uncomfortable with my presence.
“I brought you some dinner,” I blurted, pointing to the scallops. “Coquilles St. Jacques.”
“Very nice,” he said patiently. “Thank you.” He took a newspaper from the pocket of the sweater he wore. “But since I was not expecting you . . .”
“I know. I’m going.” I edged toward the exit. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right. I mean—”
“Yes, yes. I understand. Again, many thanks.” He plopped down on the same comfortable chair I’d been sitting in, and fanned himself briefly with the newspaper.
“I’ll bring water next time,” I said as I left.
He didn’t answer. I think he was tired.
CHAPTER
•
TWENTY-ONE
I stripped off my chef’s jacket and headed for my room, but on the way I nearly collided with Sophie de la Soubise.
“Goodness, you nearly crushed me,” she said, giggling.
“I didn’t touch you,” I corrected as expressionlessly as possible.
“I suppose it’s the way you Americans walk,” she said. Then she performed a passable imitation of a gorilla before laughing delicately.
“Excuse me,” I said, trying to squeeze past her.
“Oh, by the way, your friend Peter left.”
My heart sank. I’d hoped I’d be back before he had to leave, but I supposed I’d spent too much time waiting for Azrael.
“Well, he’s busy,” I said, trying to sound indifferent. “With Jeremiah.”
“But he wasn’t with Jeremiah,” Sophie said. “Now, who was he with? Let’s see.” She tapped her perfectly manicured fingernail to her cheek, pretending that she was trying to remember something. “Ah, yes, of course. He left with Fabienne.”
I tried to ignore the note of triumph in her voice. “She must have needed a ride somewhere,” I said.
“Mon Dieu, but you’re so trusting.”
“Peter’s a trustworthy person,” I said, pushing the woman aside with my clunky American arms. “So is Fabienne.”
I only wished I could have used my clunky American foot on her refined French derrière.
Sophie was transparent as ice—and almost as warm—but she’d still managed to shoot a little dart into my already fragile self-confidence. Peter and Fabienne? Together?
• • •
So Peter was gone. Again. With an impossibly beautiful girl. And this time, it was my fault. Now I knew how easy it was to stand someone up without meaning to. From now on, I’d cut Peter some slack when he had to cancel on me because of work.
I tried to wash away my disappointment and petty jealousy in the shower, but all I managed to accomplish was to turn
myself red. Oh, well, I thought, trying to look on the bright side, at least I can use the time to finish putting the pages of Azrael’s story in order.
It seemed I’d arrived at a new chapter. If only the pages had been numbered, I wouldn’t have to read it at all, but as it was, I had no choice but to pay close attention to every word.
A.D. 813
Charlemagne’s Wife
Veronique de Theuderic Avremarus was born in A.D. 794, 378 years before Jean-Loup turned the counterfeit coin into gold and began the process by which they would eventually meet. Her father was a Frankish chieftain whose liege lord was Charlemagne, the great leader who had accomplished within one lifetime the seemingly impossible challenge of uniting all the tribes of post-Roman Gaul into a single unified nation.
Charlemagne had been a remarkable man: clear-eyed, intelligent, powerful in both body and spirit, yet humorous and compassionate. He was seventy years old and the most important man in Europe when he took Veronique for his eleventh wife. That year was A.D. 811. She was seventeen.
Charlemagne gave Veronique many fine gifts during the remaining two years of his life, among them the gold and diamond necklace that announced to the world that nothing was too magnificent for the wife of the king of the Franks. There were also brooches, pins, cape-clasps, hair ornaments, earfobs, bracelets, torques, and rings.
Since the aged king had already sired eighteen children, Veronique was not pressured into bearing a child, as his earlier wives had been. His heir, the slovenly Prince Pippin, had already been named. So instead of being treated as a royal brood mare, Veronique was treasured as the king’s companion in his old age. While his progeny went about the business of making war and converting the Lombards and Saxons to Christianity, the old king contentedly taught his young bride the stories of his youth, stories of his battles both on the field and within his widespread, discordant family.
“When I die, my beauty,” he advised her near the end of his life, “do not allow my sons and grandsons and their wives to make use of you for their own benefit.”
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