Mystic Rider

by Patricia Rice

  She didn’t doubt the worthiness of her father’s cause. She loved him and aided him as best she could, fully believing the nobility had no right to deny others a chance to better their lives. Unfortunately, the only area of her life she’d ever controlled was her music. Were she to allow her emotions free rein, she’d no doubt shoot the toes off anyone standing in her way. Better that she pacify her unruly sentiments by staying behind the scenes, writing music for the Revolution.

  Pauline’s arrest destroyed her fragile serenity.

  Helplessly, she tapped her nails against the silver bell a student had given her in lieu of payment for his music lessons. She had taken to carrying the bell with her in her errand basket, in hopes of finding someone to replace the missing clapper. But all the decent silversmiths had deserted Paris for more peaceful, profitable markets. Mostly, she carried the bell because the charming chime of her nails against the silver helped her believe that all would be well. The bell had become her comfort when nothing else succeeded.

  As always, the melodic notes cleared her emotional stress sufficiently to light a rational path. Bribery might rescue her sister-in-law and her two adorable children from the horror of prison. Paris ran on bribery — mainly because coins were scarce and the Assembly’s paper notes were almost worthless. She didn’t think she could find enough coin to free a priest charged with treason, but innocent women and children…

  While Chantal tried to imagine where she might acquire enough coins to bribe a guard, she smoothed her palm over the polished curve of the peculiar bell, and her ring caught on one of the gemstones embedded in the ornate handle. She would have thought the stones would reduce the bell’s harmony, but they somehow enhanced it. A very skilled musician must have crafted it.

  She set her basket on the counter and lifted out the bell by its broad handle. Frowning, she looked under it, trying to determine why it no longer possessed a clapper, or how one had been affixed to the interior, but she was no silversmith.

  Her eyes widened at a wild thought. Would the guards take a broken silver bell as a bribe? The gems alone must be worth a fortune, and silver was always valuable. The possibility that someone might melt down the harmonious object horrified her, but…

  She cringed. She hated to destroy such a treasure, or give it up at all, but she had to be practical. The silver and gems gave the bell a monetary value far higher than even her piano, and the bell was easier to carry. Since it was broken, its musical value was small.

  For Pauline, the sister she’d never had, she would sell her soul.

  Verifying with the printer that the pamphlet would be ready when her father came for it, Chantal wrapped the bell in the wool she used to disguise its gleam. Then, lifting the skirt of the sturdy twill gown she wore when she worked, she hurried into the bustling streets of Paris. Once upon a time she would have had a grand carriage to take her the mile to her family’s home, but in these days of the glorious Revolution, her father’s position in the Assembly required that they suppress any conspicuous show of wealth. They kept the carriage and horses out of town, where her father could use them to travel long distances.

  Chantal did not mind the walk home or the necessity of wearing old dresses. As long as she had her music, she was content.

  But Pauline’s incarceration had thrown her off her safe path onto an unknown side road. She wished she had someone wise to talk to, but she couldn’t bear to think of Pauline and the children locked behind bars while she scoured the streets for sage advice. Even if her father arrived this evening as planned, it would take time to negotiate a release. Travel in France was erratic, based on politics as much as weather and the condition of the roads. Anything could happen to Pauline before Papa returned. Chantal shuddered in horror and walked faster.

  The massive wrought-iron gates enclosing the carriage drive to her father’s home did not swing wide at her approach. Instead, a small door in the block wall opened to let her in. Chantal nodded a worried greeting to the guard, then hurried up the marble stairs. The town house was not so grand as their country home near Le Havre, but she preferred the coziness of the smaller rooms, and the acoustics of the music chamber were ideal.

  A maid met her at the door, and Chantal handed her the bell. “Shine it until it gleams, if you please. Then ask Girard to join me in the music room as soon as he arrives. Madame Pauline and her children have been imprisoned for helping her brother.”

  The maid gasped, curtsied, and hurried away.

  Pauline had her own small townhome, but she and the children ran in and out of Chantal’s suite as often as they did their own.

  Chantal lifted her skirts with both hands and raced up the stairway to the family wing where she kept her rooms these days. After Jean had died — almost two years ago today — she’d sold their flat and moved home to share her grief with her recently widowed father. So many deaths in so short a time…

  The mansion had been built for a large family, but the Orateurs were not fortunate in that way. She was an only child, and Jean had never given her an infant of her own.

  She did not regret that she had no child to worry about now. Her work with her father on France’s revolutionary course and her music lessons kept her well occupied. All in all, her new life would be almost perfect — if not for the hotheadedness of these new radicals who condemned all aristocracy and believed the poor and uneducated should rule the kingdom.

  If it hadn’t been for the protests of members of the middle class like her father, the Assembly would never have been created, so she couldn’t argue with the need for change. She simply wished the radicals weren’t so… extreme in their demands. Compromise was essential. The alternative was civil war. She hummed to shut out that unpleasant idea and turned her thoughts to her immediate concerns.

  To imprison a young mother because she loved her brother… It was barbaric, even if Pierre had refused to take the oath of loyalty. He was a priest. He owed his loyalty to the church. One could not ask a priest to forswear God.

  Hastily washing, Chantal discarded her drab twill and replaced it with a flowered muslin dress wrapped with a bold satin sash. Her father’s chargé d’affaires, Girard, was elderly. As a concession to his preference for the stiff elegance of an earlier time, she chose the delicate gown instead of the practical twill in hopes of persuading him to do her will.

  Bribery, however, was illegal, and considering such an action disturbed Chantal on many levels. Her father, Alain Orateur, was a lawyer sworn to uphold the law, as had been Chantal’s husband and her maternal grandfather. But the latter were gone now, Jean to consumption, her grandparents not long after, in the same typhoid epidemic that had weakened her mother and led to her death not long after. Their losses, one right after another, had deadened her soul.

  Papa and Pauline’s family were all she had left. She would fight to the death for them.

  Girard appeared in the music room as requested. He still wore an old-fashioned gray wig over his balding head, and the gold braided frogs and silk coat of the previous era. But his stature and the sword at his side protected him in a way that Chantal couldn’t command. Her petite size was a hindrance in a city tense with violence.

  “They caught Pierre in Pauline’s attic,” she said without preamble. “She’s been harboring him despite the Assembly’s edict.”

  Girard’s stoic features revealed no opinion. “Where was he taken?”

  “I don’t know.” Chantal paced the parquet floor, working up her courage. “He should have left Paris for Italy when he had the chance. He knew we would not let Pauline and the children come to harm. It was reckless foolishness on both their parts.”

  It had been foolishness to refuse to take the oath, also, but Pierre had become a priest because he held noble ideas. Chantal was more pragmatic. Noble ideas seldom fed the poor and often led to death. Dead was dead, no matter how one got there.

  “You know your father will not approve of whatever you are thinking,” Girard warned, well versed in Chant
al’s ability to wheedle her way into getting whatever she wanted.

  “He would not approve of Pauline rotting in prison through no fault of her own either.” She pivoted on the marble tiles, her skirt dragging on the floor behind her.

  “Supporting a traitor is an act of treason,” Girard intoned without inflection, giving no indication of his opinion one way or another.

  “He’s her brother!” Chantal clasped her hands nervously, not certain she dared ask Girard to break the law. But she could not very well go to the prison on her own. She’d survived so far not because she was strong, but because she wasn’t stupid.

  The maid hurried in with the silver bell wrapped in clean felt. How fortunate that the clapper was missing, or Chantal felt certain it would be ringing in warning of her rash behavior.

  “This is a gift to the guards who keep Pauline.” The declaration appeared on her tongue without conscious thought. She was not usually quick with a lie, but once she considered the words, she found they truly were not a lie. “Find out where she is being held; then present it to them and ask if I might secure the bond of the prisoners and have them released in my name.”

  How amazing that she should suddenly utter phrases she’d heard since childhood, as if she were the lawyer in the family.

  “Oh, madame, you cannot bring a defrocked priest here,” the maid whispered in horrified tones. “It is a sacrilege!”

  “That depends on whether you’re speaking of Rome or Paris,” Girard corrected. “There, he is a hero. Here, he is a traitor to our cause.”

  Chantal waved aside the rhetoric. “He is my brother-in-law, and his sister and her children are suffering for his beliefs. He is the same man who blessed this house a year ago, not the evil Inquisitor the radicals would make of him and others like him.”

  “It is not our place to change the laws,” Girard insisted. Once his mind was made up, it became an immovable object.

  She might be merely an idle lady with musical talents, but Chantal had devoted her life to the well-being of her small family. She hummed beneath her breath to suppress her frustration as she’d learned to do. Hysteria would never aid her cause. There were times when she wished herself a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier so she could pitch obstacles out of her way.

  She took the bell from the maid and unfolded the cloth to admire the gems twinkling back at her. She tapped her fingernails against the silver. Warmth and assurance instantly wrapped around her like a cloak.

  She did not want to let the bell go, but she must. Lifting it from the cloth, she hugged it, then shoved it at Girard, who grabbed it instinctively.

  “Go,” she said, modulating her voice into persuasive tones she had learned at a very early age. Her toddler tantrums had caused people to flee her presence, but sweetness never failed. “Be swift, and be kind. Bring Pauline to me once you have found her.”

  At the maid’s anguished cry of protest, Chantal turned and bestowed a comforting smile upon her. “Pierre will not wish to harm his sister again. Do not fret.”

  The calming effect of her voice produced the desired result. She knew she played upon their emotions, but she could not regret her manipulation if it saved Pauline. The maid’s frown disappeared, and she curtsied. Girard smiled approvingly and bowed himself out. No further argument strained Chantal’s already fragile patience.

  Her father had scolded her often enough for using her appealing ways to encourage others to do what they should not, but sometimes it was difficult to differentiate between right and wrong. This was one of those times.

  The law was unfair and ridiculous. Let the pope go to jail. Let the Assembly go to hell. Priests ought to be loyal to the church.

  She paced the floor, allowing her true feelings to emerge in an angry hum. She must calm down. She did not want to be out of sorts when her father arrived. He’d not been himself lately. The schism between the radicals and conservative Jacobins was widening, fraying the glorious Revolution that had made all men equal.

  Wiser minds would surely prevail, Chantal told herself. She would secure Pauline’s freedom, and this episode of wrong thinking would be forgotten in a few weeks. That was the way of it here — the mood of the city shifted with the wind.

  She should order rooms prepared for the children. They would be horribly frightened. She would write them a song!

  With the relief of returning to some small part of her ordinary routine, she retreated to the marvelous piano her father had ordered all the way from Austria. She’d been told that Wolfgang Mozart composed on one just like it. The lighter tones suited her ear better than the heavy English one she’d learned on.

  Earlier, she had composed some simple lyrics for the rollicking notes of the “Carmagnole,” the dance tune she’d recently heard in the streets, but they did not buoy her sagging spirits. She played through the triumphant opening of another revolutionary song she’d introduced to her father’s friends — “Ça ira!” — “We will win!”

  Except, since her first innocent version, new lyrics had emerged to express bloodshed as victory. People were fond of desecrating pretty tunes with violent images.

  The songs no longer made her feel optimistic. She was like the clapperless bell, echoing the empty chimes of others and not ringing proudly with her own music.

  It wasn’t like her to be out of sorts like this. She sat on the piano bench and forced her fingers into a tune that the children would enjoy. Little Marie was only three — Chantal ran a light trill of notes that she heard when Marie laughed. Anton was five and much like his big barrel-chested father, who had died last year from an infection after being maimed in a duel. Foolish man. Deep bass notes crashed from her fingers.

  Dead, all dead played from the keys.

  Shoving the bench back, she stood and paced again. She could not expect Pauline’s immediate return. Girard would have to find the right prison, locate a malleable guard, grease many palms, negotiate, and maneuver. Perhaps they would let him visit with Pauline, reassure her. Nothing was ever done swiftly these days. Maybe tomorrow…

  She couldn’t bear to think of Pauline rotting in prison for even so long. Her sister-in-law was gently raised and frail, and the children were too young. This was such foolishness.

  Chantal returned to the piano and crashed a few chords of thunder and lightning. Her fingers tumbled across the keys like rain. She was a whirlwind of anxiety and doubt. These past months since she’d owned it, the bell had soothed her, but now that it was gone, her fears raced out of control.

  She let her emotions flow in her voice and released them in song.

  She didn’t hear the maid announce a visitor. She turned because a large block of silence mysteriously absorbed her chaotic chords.

  She gaped in shock.

  A monk in long brown robes stood just inside the doorway. A cowl hid his features, but the soft linen of his robe did nothing to disguise his wide shoulders, lithe grace, and air of authority as he strode into the music chamber. A rope belted his narrow waist, and his long brown fingers clenched a gnarled oak staff.

  “I have come to retrieve my chalice,” the monk intoned in notes that shivered up and down Chantal’s spine like a sensual caress.

  She had no idea what chalice he meant, but there was something about the confidence with which he spoke that almost convinced her that he had every right to take it.

  Two

  Ian Olympus controlled the effect of the exotic female on his gyrating wits by gripping his staff. Exhausted by his extraordinary journey inland to a gated city teeming with the best and worst of humanity, he had wanted only to claim the chalice and head home.

  Her musical voice had reeled him into this cold chamber as effortlessly as if he were a fish on a hook. He, the powerful Council Leader of Aelynn, had been caught by a shimmering minnow.

  Accustomed to Aelynn’s fresh sea breezes and the silent peace of his countrymen’s shielded thoughts, Ian had chosen to travel as much as he could by water. On rivers, he needn’t deal
with the maddening blasts of excessive passion from Others. Upon arrival in the city, he’d shut his mind to the thoughts bombarding him, leaving open only his Finding ability. But the stench of sewage and unclean bodies, the crowded, shouting masses of humanity, the hundreds of beasts and vehicles in one small land-bound area, had assaulted his physical senses as much as his psychic ones. There was more than one good reason why sensitive Oracles did not leave Aelynn.

  If fate decreed it, he would gladly sacrifice his life in noble battle with enemies or in saving the sacred chalice. But he seriously objected to losing his mind to an unwashed mob.

  Except that the final jolt threatening to knock him over was not the city, but the shock of finding his intended mate.

  She was an oasis of peace. In her presence, all else fell away.

  And she was exquisite — a frail gardenia blooming in the midst of hell, a lady of the finest sort in a city of Philistines. The stars had not given him any sense of her delicate perfume, or showed the poise with which she moved, or the golden melody of her voice. As he’d entered the chamber, her song had pierced his chest.

  She was so… fragile. He could snap her delicate wrist with a twist, encompass her waist with his hands. All Aelynn men were warriors by training, gifted to protect the island and its sacred objects, but he felt as if he’d just been dealt a blow that laid him flat.

  Her complexion was as pale as the silvery moon, with hearts of heightened color on her high cheekbones — probably due to his rude stare. But he couldn’t help himself. She had hair like sunlight, and eyes… intelligent eyes, the rarest magical blue of topaz — to his disappointment, not multihued Aelynn eyes.

  But right now, that did not matter so much as the song thrumming through his blood and the sense of coming home to a woman who soothed his senses.

  “I beg forgiveness for my rudeness,” he said, still seeking balance. “The journey was long, and I came here directly without resting. The chalice is extremely important to my people.”