Isaac said, “I would not have asked it of him, Margravine, but it is a boon I will not reject.”
“Of course, he is welcome to the nourishment of any relic in my collection,” Friar Gilles offered. “I have many fine saints who would bless his endeavors, even if they must be in the service of the Jews.”
Isaac’s voice growled across the table. “Even the Pope does not condone such violence as has been done against the Jews, Brother.”
“No, certainly not. And the Lord who knows when a sparrow falls does not prioritize miracles, at least not in any fashion that you and I can fathom. Perhaps the doctor himself, ah, but here he is.” Friar Gilles pushed himself to his feet, arms wide in welcome, his smile seeming even wider as Elisha entered the room. His rope belt slung a bit lower around his stomach than it had before, testifying to Isaac’s grumble about the friar and his food. His skin glowed with health and humor, thick hair edging his tonsure.
Isaac, too, stood up, chin held high, but one hand clutching the cross he always wore, his thumb worrying over the granulated gold. “Forgive me if I spoke too freely last night, Elisha. Certainly I do not expect you to turn aside from your tasks to worry over my family. I have a horse; I’ll simply ride—”
“Alone through the mountains in the snow?” Elisha put up his hands as he approached. “I wouldn’t let you.” He darted a glance at Katherine, but she focused on her plate, slicing a wedge of cheese into tiny bits.
“So you’ll simply leave us?” she said to her plate. “We need you here.”
“I fully intend to return, and to bring them all with me.”
“Yes, an excellent notion.” Gilles clapped his hands, his grin fixed. “Here, the goldsmith’s family will be welcomed in comfort. I myself can tutor his children, if such should be required.”
“You’ll do what he wants of you at the risk of so many others?” She let the knife clatter onto her plate. “You know as well as I do that it’s harder to travel to an unknown place. Even your power must have limits.”
Gilles moved toward Elisha, his tonsure glistening with sweat. “Ah, my lady, he also has recourse to the bounty of the Lord. With prayer and with the right saints—”
Elisha met Katherine’s hard gaze. “I’ll do what he needs, Katherine, because it sets my own soul to rights. If that is unbearably selfish, so be it.”
She shoved back from the table, her chair clattering against the wall. “You really are a—” But she swallowed the word, her glare shifting from him to Isaac and back. “It is selfish,” she said in a softer voice. “Of the both of you. Harald and I have risked our lives daily to find the enemy, to spy them out and dispatch them. The goldsmith has no idea what his little boon requires. That same journey might be spent in slaying a necromancer or in saving a dozen more people.”
“I can care for my own family, my lady. You are in the right.” Isaac turned away, gathering his things into his hands from the side table—quills, book, a roll of parchment, a bottle of ink. The bottle slipped from his grasp and shattered on the floor in a spreading pool of darkness.
Isaac stared down at it, his shoulders so tight that Elisha could feel it. Almost, he reached out to touch the other man, to reassure Isaac he did not need to be alone, as he had been left as a child to face the men who had murdered his family. But Elisha held back, his hands remaining at his sides. A “bugger,” that’s what Katherine nearly called him. How much of her argument came from need, how much from envy? She did not know whom he loved, merely that it was another man who held his heart. Now she seemed to think it might be Isaac.
“None of you knows what it is for me to step outside the world. Even you, Katherine, who have done it yourself.” He looked at each of them in turn, Friar Gilles’s wide-eyed wonder, Katherine’s bleak withdrawal, Isaac’s bowed head and rigid spine. “You would have me stay and make your miracles. I wish I could. I wish I could be there for everyone who needs me.” Katherine’s face softened, her lips parted as if to speak. “You and Harald have done so well—you need my knowledge, but you don’t need me. With Isaac’s help, I can share it with you, and with all of those who would serve at your side.”
At that, Isaac did turn, pivoting on his heel, frowning. “What can I do to be of use?”
“Your sketches gave me an idea. I need some pictures. After we bring your family here”—he shot a warning glance at Katherine—“will you help me draw them?”
“Of course.” Isaac looked wary rather than victorious.
“Let the monks know that your family is on their way, and we shall go out to meet them after breakfast, does that suit you?”
Isaac gave a nod and walked out, smoothing his velvet clothes, head held high.
“And me? What can I do? The fingernails of Saint Lucia came in handy for you, didn’t they?” Friar Gilles steepled his own fingers together. “I have added a few items to the collection which may be of interest to you.”
“Later, I am sure your relics will be of use,” Elisha told him, and the monk beamed, his fingers tapping on each other.
Katherine stood by the wall to one side of him, Elisha at the archway. After a long moment, Gilles said, “Well, then, perhaps I’ll go join the brethren at prayer, shall I?” He pinched up a bit of his habit and shuffled away down the corridor toward the cloister.
The day grew brighter, for the shutters cast slits of shadow across the wall above Katherine’s head. Her silvering hair had been carefully braided, her face washed, the darkness beneath her eyes faded with a night of rest. She stood in a pool of deathly power, the talisman of her husband’s hand still bound in the bodice against her breast.
The line of her jaw looked hard in the pale light. Her gaze remained on the floor. “Your friend should have cleaned up his ink. They will never be rid of that stain.”
“I’m sure it will be taken care of.”
She flicked her hands along her skirts, as if she could smooth the wrinkles away. “Am I meant to apologize for looking out for you, or for the fact that we need you here in order to continue our work, the work that you set out for us?”
“You might apologize for your suspicions of my relationship to Isaac. Though I am glad for all our sakes you stopped short of accusation.” He stepped up to the table and took the last seat rather than ally himself with Gilles’s or Isaac’s empty chairs. A platter of bread, cheese and dried grapes filled the center of the table, along with a carafe of wine. Elisha helped himself and sat down to eat, the weight of her silence almost as oppressive as the growing shadow of the plague. “What do you suppose is a more certain way to get him killed, to spread the word about his past, or to spread a rumor of buggery?”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Elisha, I did not mean to hurt anyone, least of all the goldsmith.” She dropped into her chair across from him and scraped it closer to the table.
“Me, then?” He smeared butter on a slab of bread and bit into it, fresh and white and crisp, a very long distance from anything they had eaten in the vale these last days. To be true, with the smell of sickness all around them, they barely thought of eating at all.
Katherine reached across the table, spreading her hand. “Never you.”
It was a lie, actually. She once wore poison on her nails for the purpose of killing him. Reformed or not, Katherine had been a mancer. He took another bite of the bread. It reminded him of England, eating the king’s bread, made from the finest flour. What was Thomas doing now? Elisha washed down the bread with a swallow of the deep red wine, and missed the cider of home. Thomas’s golden ring winked on Elisha’s little finger, a dangerous temptation to flee to his home.
He set down his cup. “Much greater things are at risk here than you and me, our friends or our feelings.” He reached out at last and touched her hand. “The mancers are spreading this disease over all the nations. I stopped them from claiming Rome when I ruined their relics, but they had already set it in
motion. The rabbi said a long while ago that they might topple the kingdoms, but that they would be hard-pressed to break the Church itself. They are trying, and we cannot let them win.”
With her thumb, she shifted the ring on his finger. “Forgive me. I must try not to let my feelings intrude. I should be more like you.”
“It means so much to know you are fighting with me, even if I’m miles away.”
“Harald does most of the work.” But still, her touch echoed with her remorse and gratitude.
“Where is he? Can you bring him? Or should we go there?”
She shook her head. “He’s only one, and very experienced at this sort of travel. I’ll bring him here. Would to God he were a magus himself. He’s at the court of Emperor Charles, to spy out the mancers there.”
The worried hum of Isaac’s presence approached, and Elisha broke his grip, chewing the last of his bread and swallowing his wine. Katherine made ready for her own journey while Elisha and Isaac spoke about his home. From the heart of his attunement, Elisha reached for the Valley, opening himself again to the tides of death.
In moments, they stood together outside a tidy house on a broad street in a distant town, as Isaac broke his embrace with his wife and struggled with the words to explain what must happen next. When they had packed a few things—clothes, tools and supplies for Isaac’s work—each took a child by the hand. Elisha rallied his strength to shield them from the worst of the passage, showing them the glow and sharing the song of the peaceful dead while the wails of the shadows swelled around him. At last, they stepped through the Valley back to Heidelberg, to the deserted Church of the Holy Ghost, rather than be seen to appear from nowhere. As Katherine had said, the journey to Isaac’s unfamiliar home, even guided by the bits of blood that every craftsman must spill the course of his labors, left Elisha breathless, while the journey back to Heidelberg felt like just a few steps. The two girls stared around them, gazing at their father like a hero, watching Elisha with terrified awe as he escorted them back up the hill to the abbey that would be their home.
He had not gotten one foot past the gate when a woman assailed him, catching his hands in a grip of magic and howling her fury into his flesh.
Chapter 6
“Where is my daughter? What have you done with her?”
The assault dropped him to his knees, her demands beating at his ears while her magic shot into his skin, streaking through him, searching for answers. Her power thrust into him, piercing as knives in the desperation of her need. Gretchen’s mother, a prosperous innkeeper, bore little resemblance to the woman he had met a few months ago when he first came to Heidelberg. Her round face looked puffy with grief, her cap askew and apron smeared with the mud of the street, but her teeth set like the mask of a demon.
Isaac leapt between the furious witch and his family, hurrying them through the abbey gate before he turned to Elisha. He unslung his satchel of tools and swung it at the woman’s back, but she blew out a breath, turning it to a roaring wind that knocked the goldsmith from his feet and scattered his things all around him. He struck the stone with a grunt of pain.
Snatching for the power of the Valley, Elisha shielded himself with death, rejecting her sorcerous probe with an icy pressure. She fought back with the fire of her fury, a mother’s fear he could not simply turn aside. The slithering stroke of her power nauseated him, twisting beneath his skin. Elisha cried out.
“Let him go, for God’s sake!” Isaac scrambled to his hands and knees, wobbling, blood tangling in his curls.
As she wrapped her hands all the tighter around Elisha’s, forging her flesh into steel, Elisha dropped beneath her. He dragged her off balance so she tumbled over his head with a shout, forced to release him or break her own wrists as she fell. Whirling, Elisha drew up the power of death and put out his hands as if inviting her to make contact. He gathered the cold so that his breath frosted into the air. The effort made him shaky, but he forced himself to be still and project strength. “Do not touch me again, woman.” His hands spread low, patently empty yet full of menace.
“You bastard, what have you done with her? Have you skinned her alive?”
“That’s not my way and never was. Last I saw Gretchen she had taken charge of another magus, a witch who would see all desolati burned if it means the witches can thrive. When you see Gretchen, ask her what she did in England, and what happened to the people she met there.”
“My Gretchen’s never been to England.” The tendrils of her presence reached toward him, tingling.
“She went there searching for me and led a dozen of her husband’s friends to steal a sleeping witch and kill her keepers.” The loss of Mordecai blossomed into the hollow at his heart, and Elisha shed his weakness. He still believed Gretchen herself to be deceived by the mancers—what more could a mother do, but to seek her child and to defend her? It did not change the fact that Mordecai was dead because of Gretchen’s aid to the enemy.
The woman’s glance flickered over him. “I cannot feel the lie in this—you must be a very accomplished liar.”
“Not half as good as your son-in-law. Or it may just be that I’m telling the truth.”
Her nostrils flared, then she blew out another blast of wind that seared his face and hands and tossed his hair about him.
Elisha stood firm. “Last I knew, she was in Italy. The shadows there”—he lifted his left hand, indicating the south—“you feel them too, don’t you? Something terrible is coming, and Gretchen is a part of it. If you find her, get her home and get her away from the necromancers.”
“She is no part of that. You act as if I don’t know my own daughter.”
“She stole my talismans, and burned most of them. I still have one only because it fell from her grasp.” He clenched his fist around Thomas’s ring, but his most important talisman, a vial of the earth where his brother bled out his life, remained in mancer hands.
That caused a breach in the woman’s fury, an affront at the idea of a magus stealing another’s talismans, much less destroying them. “Because you threatened her, you threaten all of us—we can all see what you are.”
“She stole my way home, woman. You may all be stuck with me for a very long time.”
“Heaven forbid we stand between you and the gates of Hell.”
“You know nothing of Hell, but you will learn. Gretchen’s friends will deliver it.”
Behind her, on the long slope into the city, Katherine strode upward. A slight, quick figure came with her, breaking off and slipping to the side, a shimmering blade already coming to hand. Harald. The innkeeper glanced around, then her presence withdrew, the pressure of her attention against him vanishing. Two steps back, then she dodged down an alley between the other buildings and hurried away.
Elisha turned to the door, to Isaac, on his knees, breathing heavily, a trickle of blood marking his forehead. “You’re hurt,” Elisha said. “Let me see to it.” But he swayed on his feet, and Isaac waved him off.
“Just a cut, nothing serious.” He reached out and snagged his satchel, starting to gather his fallen tools back into it.
“Elisha!” Katherine ran the last few yards, her skirts bunched up in her fists. “You look awful. And what was that about stolen talismans?”
Harald slid into the alleyway where the woman had gone, silent and swift.
“Gretchen doesn’t trust me. She stripped me of my talismans. I found this one.” The gold ring winked on his finger. “Only in the moment of birth or death would it be enough to transport me. Harald’s not going to kill her, is he?”
“I don’t think so,” Katherine replied. “She’s not on our list—not yet in any case.”
“What sort of place have you brought me to, Isaac?” A voice demanded from the gateway. Isaac’s wife emerged from the shadowed arch, her arms at first tightly crossed, clinging to her fear, then spreading as she came beside her h
usband, gathering his tools. “You claimed we would be safe here, safer because of him.” She tipped her head toward Elisha.
“You’ll be safer when I’m gone, Frau Burghussen, but first, I do need his help with something.”
Isaac rose. “Anything.”
“Isaac, really,” his wife began, but the goldsmith faced her, cupping her cheek with one hand.
“There are darker days coming. I pray we shall survive them, and the best way to do so is to keep ourselves to the light, even when it hurts.”
She kissed him gently and took the satchel from his hands. “Then we best get inside and do what can be done.” She slipped her arm through his and brought him along, drawing him in with close comfort.
Elisha and Katherine watched them go.
“When you’re gone?” she echoed. “Where are you going, and when?”
“Back to your manor, I assume.”
Her presence burst from the chill of deflection like the sun from behind the clouds. “Come inside then—surely a bit of food and a fire will do you good.”
Elisha still felt the shivers beneath his skin of Gretchen’s mother’s invasion. She had been prepared for him, not to kill, but to question, forcing a close contact to judge the truth of what he said. Had his answers satisfied her, in spite of her defiance? He let Katherine bring him in, to join the others in the common room where the fire roared and Isaac’s wife stroked away his blood with a clean cloth while their two daughters ran along the corridor opening one door after another and giggling.
The novice at the gate frowned at this behavior, but not seriously, coming after Elisha. “Forgive me, Herr doctor, it was my task to visit the market this morning, and the vendors asked why so much food, had we got visitors, and I said, yes we had, and one from very far away indeed. The innkeeper was shopping there as well, and I did not think to guard my words, but I wouldn’t have thought it of her to assault a man at our very door.” He lowered his eyes. “I’ll bring some mulled wine, then, and a bit of sausage.” He shuffled away toward the monk’s quarters and the kitchen between.
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