Elisha Barber: Book One Of The Dark Apostle

by E. C. Ambrose

“Matthew Drake of Gilbertston, Your Majesty. I am Mordecai Surgeon’s first assistant.”

  “What are you doing here when I called for your master?”

  “It’s the Sabbath, Your Majesty, I’m not sure where he is—where he is at worship, that is. Your man brought me in his stead.”

  “The surgeon’s a Jew?” the king asked, turning away without an answer. “I thought my father had expelled the lot of them. Should’ve known they’d be creeping back in.” He rounded again on Elisha.

  “Some of the best surgeons are Jews, Your Majesty,” Matthew supplied, in a voice more timid than Elisha had ever heard from him.

  “And the best barbers, what are they?” the king asked, his voice with an edge of humor.

  “I am not sure I take your meaning, Your Majesty,” the physician ventured, sharing raised eyebrows with Matthew.

  “Men who know when to put their tools away.” He grinned, a sharp expression to match the sharp eyes. “Fetch my throne and my crown. And Surgeon—”

  “Yes, Your Majesty?” Matthew said, springing a half-step forward.

  “Have you ever assisted an interrogation before?” He kept his icy gaze on Elisha as he spoke, his gaze like the slightest touch of Death.

  “On occasion, Your Majesty. My master has little taste for such work himself.” Matthew stood straighter, his voice and bright eyes betraying his excitement at winning the king’s attention.

  “Fetch what you need.” He twiddled his fingers over his shoulder, and Matthew hurried out. Matthew, who did not hesitate to scald their own men, would hold back nothing if granted the king’s justice upon a traitor. More so, given the antipathy between them.

  “But Your Majesty, I don’t know anything!” Elisha protested. “I have met the duke only once, and we spoke of exactly what I told you.”

  The king settled himself in the throne two of his men carried inside. A servant stepped up to place a gleaming crown upon his head. “A week ago, you saved the life of my messenger,” he said abruptly.

  Startled, Elisha frowned, glancing to the physician—who stood strangely detached, not even betraying the glee he must feel at Elisha’s downfall. Shouldn’t this act count in his favor? If so, why was the king looking ever more fierce? “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  At this, the king smiled again, tilting his head as if sizing Elisha for a noose. “And how did you know he was my messenger?”

  “The message was found, Your Majesty,” Elisha replied slowly, “when I brought him to the hospital for treatment.” His knees and bare feet leached the heat from his body into the cold earth below.

  “It was found.” The king waved a hand, and someone brought him a goblet from which he took a long swallow. “By you?”

  Wetting his lips, Elisha hesitated. Ruari and Brigit had both seen the message, and knew the mark upon it. The messenger knew all this, but apparently he hadn’t spoken of it. Neither could Elisha bring himself to lift the burden of guilt by casting doubt on either of them. His stomach clenched, Robert’s cut to his stomach stinging like an accusation.

  At that moment, Matthew popped back through the door. He approached one of the braziers to Elisha’s right and placed a few long, slender irons into it, unrolling on the floor a leather bundle full of tools not unlike Elisha’s own. Elisha’s muscles felt rigid as he recalled how each tool was held—how it felt in the hand and how it moved against the flesh. He knew intimately the incisive thrust of the lancet, the bite of the saw into bone, the smell of burning flesh.

  “Did the ground shake while you were on the field today, Barber?” the king said, distracted by the sight of Matthew laying out his tools.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Elisha said as Matthew rearranged the irons, adding to them a long blade. “It looked as if part of a hill collapsed.” The brand upon his chest ached as if in warning of what was to come.

  “Why did that happen?” the king mused, stroking his beard.

  “I don’t know, Your Majesty.”

  “Could it be that my men tunneled underneath it? That they were nearly to the castle foundation, nearly ready to spring the trap, when the duke’s largest bombard, notably absent from the fighting, blew a hole in just the wrong place?”

  Elisha bit off a breath, the questions suddenly coming together in his mind. “Is that what happened?” he said, his voice shaky, “Your Majesty?”

  Matthew pulled an iron from the fire and tested it by singeing a few of his own arm hairs, then thrust it back in with a satisfied smirk.

  Goosebumps tingled on Elisha’s skin, his fingers trembling a little. “I don’t know about it, Your Majesty. I only saw the outside of the message, and that it bore the royal seal. I swear to God I know nothing about it.” The king’s left toe went still; with a nod, Matthew rose from his place by the brazier. Elisha’s heart pounded. Death he expected. Summary execution, most likely—but the king was not done with him. “Please, Your Majesty, today was the first time I’ve laid eyes on the duke or any of his men.”

  “How shall we start, Surgeon?” the king inquired graciously.

  “Well, Your Majesty, he has a particular revulsion for burning.”

  With a graceful turn of his hand, he said, “Proceed.”

  As Matthew drew out one of his irons, two of the guards stepped forward.

  “His hands, if you please,” Matthew said.

  The belt finally tugged free of his wrists. One guard pulled Elisha’s right arm out in front of him, twisting it palm up to expose the more sensitive skin, while the other wrenched his left elbow behind his back. Pain shot through him, his back stinging with the thousand pinprick burns of gunpowder overlaid upon the welts. His flesh was a palimpsest of pain about to be overwritten with hot irons.

  “I don’t know anything!” Elisha cried, in a last bid for the king’s ear. Then heat tingled his wrist, and a fingertip of fire jabbed into his flesh. He screamed.

  “Who do you know who works for the duke?” the king asked, his voice pleasant.

  “No one, Your Majesty, I swear—” A few inches up from the first, another spot of agony flared into him.

  “How did the duke intercept my message?”

  Panting, Elisha managed to get out, “I don’t know.” A third crimson burst of pain. He bucked against his captors, succeeded only in getting his left arm pressed between his shoulder blades, a subtle twist introduced in his wrist. “By God I wish I knew,” he sobbed.

  “Your ignorance appalls me, Barber.” The king took a long swallow of his wine. “Did you mark me for the bombard shot that day?”

  The change of tack bewildered Elisha, and he wondered if he’d gone pain-mad so soon. “What?”

  At the king’s nod, iron bit his arm yet again, searing into the skin and muscle close to his elbow. His arm jerked against his will but the guard pulled it taut again.

  “How about the roots that found their way into my supper? Roots you watched that herbalist woman examine.”

  Had Brigit tried to poison the king? He couldn’t imagine it. Shaking his head, Elisha stifled a yelp at the fresh wound.

  “Then you claim to know nothing of these various attempts on my person?”

  “Nothing, Your Majesty,” he gasped. “Please.” Burnt skin sizzled. Elisha slumped, his shoulders shaking from the strain.

  “What did you and the duke speak of today?”

  “I’ve told you,” Elisha whimpered, clamping shut his jaw as the iron descended to the smooth flesh of his inner arm.

  “Can he really be so in the dark?” the king pondered.

  “Indubitably, Your Majesty,” the physician remarked. “He is only here fleeing criminal charges.”

  “Indeed? Well, that may explain it. I find it hard to believe any honest man—even a peasant—would refuse loyalty to his rightful monarch.”

  Elisha’s chin rested on his chest, jogged by quick breaths. Tears stung his eyes, but he refused to let them fall. Ruari couldn’t read, no more than himself, and Brigit—well, she could be a traitor, though h
e didn’t think she’d had the message long enough, and Ruari would have little reason to protect her if he knew she read it. But the seal had been broken when Ruari found it. Elisha tried to piece these clues together into a story that might save him. Slowly, he raised his head. “The seal was already broken, Your Majesty.”

  “Oh? Have you decided to cooperate, then?”

  Shaking his head vaguely, Elisha said, “When we—when I found it, the seal was already broken. In his fall, I thought, Your Majesty.”

  “So you are saying someone else may already have read it, is that what you think?”

  “Perhaps the messenger—” Elisha broke off.

  Even the burns along his arm chilled with the change in the air as the king rose again to his full height and glared down at Elisha. “The messenger.”

  Staring sidelong up at him, Elisha swayed a little with his pain and exhaustion, but he did not say a word. His outstretched arm trembled with foreboding.

  With a tight smile, the king said, “The messenger is my son, Barber. Prince Alaric himself carried my message that day. The only man about me I can trust these days—I received word that he has delivered his message in spite of his injury. I thought you might have recognized him, and that perhaps you deserved my thanks for tending him. It seems you were merely acting in defiance of orders once again.” He stared hard at Elisha’s face. “Or that you marked him for my messenger, and took your best chance to spy out my commands. You learned the location of the sappers’ mine and slipped the information to your master. If you had known him for my son, he would be dead, just as you’ve been trying to kill me.”

  He flicked his fingers, starting his men in a flurry of motion. Two carried off the portable throne while another held back the curtain. The spurs glittered like twin stars. “Give him another, Surgeon. And string him up at dawn. Don’t bother to wake me.”

  Chapter 27

  When the king had gone, Matthew caught Elisha’s hand in his own, gripping his fingers as he delivered his parting shot to the center of Elisha’s palm, a curl of steam rising from the burn. Elisha’s fingers jerked, and his hand went ominously numb—the hand that made his livelihood, that made his life, lay twitching, as if it were no longer his.

  Elisha screamed for the last time, not just for the pain, but for the knowledge that death would come for him. He had done all he could to forestall it, but he had lost that battle for his own life, and with it, any hope of his salvation: his penance was through.

  Dropping Elisha’s hand like a thing repulsive, Matthew stooped over his instruments and gathered them up, setting the irons upon his shoulder at a jaunty angle. With a last shake of his head, the physician accompanied him out.

  Wordlessly, the two guards pinioned his arms behind him, tying his crossed wrists with no regard to the recent burns. Elisha barely noticed through the fog of confusion and pain. He had looked for answers that would satisfy the king, but the truth only brought more torture. The prince had carried his father’s message. Not the elder one, Prince Thomas, who was off defending the northern borders, or extending them, depending on who told the tale. This was the second son, Prince Alaric, who was to have married the duke’s daughter, the one who had started it all. Twice now, Elisha had saved his neck, only to find himself undone by the messenger’s identity. The thought that followed after stopped him cold, jolted away as the guards hauled him to his feet.

  Elisha stumbled between them in the rain, sinking down again to his knees as they tied him, his elbows to either side of the whipping post, his bound hands a hard knot at his back. The muddy ground at the base of the post clung to him, and Elisha rested his head against the harsh, familiar wood. His breath shuddered as he tried to master the pain and the sudden sorrow of his knowledge.

  Brigit knew. She knew who the messenger was, and they two had some other dealings, that much was clear. From the look upon her face when she had seen the man, Elisha strongly suspected he knew what those dealings were. Trysting in the chapel, Prince Alaric had told him. With her.

  She would come to see him unless she had a heart of stone and even the threat of his death would not move her.

  Two of the guards wrapped themselves in long cloaks, dragging up a bench to keep their watch over him. They sat each on an end, facing each other and a pair of dice, shaken and tossed, shaken and tossed.

  Unlike the king, Brigit did not keep him waiting long.

  He raised his head even as she came, picking her way across the mud, a cloak drawn close about her. She passed within a yard of the guards, but they did not look up. When she drew off her hood, she hesitated, and he could feel her eyes upon him.

  After a moment of wary watching, Brigit dropped down before him, hugging her knees, close enough that the rim of her cloak fell over his knee. At least some small part of him would be warm.

  “Hanging, is it?” she asked, her fair face streaked with rain, her forehead creased.

  “Aye, and what else would it be?” he snapped, then turned from the pained look in her eyes.

  “Elisha, don’t be angry with me, I’m here to help you—”

  His chest throbbed. “You began it all, didn’t you? The battle, the siege, it’s all because of you.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked, her eyes glazing over with a strange detachment.

  “Oh, I think you know. Prince Alaric, the messenger, the man who was supposed to marry this duke’s daughter. The man you love.”

  “Elisha,” she whispered, reaching a hand toward him.

  He could not withdraw from her touch, but he tilted his head away, his face to the rain, and as she let her hand fall back, he went on. “He couldn’t tell his father the real reason he wouldn’t marry her, so he made something up: the lie for which a thousand men have died. Oh, God, Brigit, I can forgive you loving him, even forgive you not telling me, but that these men should die so that you can love a prince—” He broke off while he could still master his emotions. Memories flashed before him: the tin cross, the shattered leg, the soldiers’ struggling to save a man already dead.

  “Please,” she whispered, “please hear me, Elisha. I never intended any of this. It’s true, all that you’ve said. I met him months ago, in the duke’s own court. He didn’t like the lady in any case, and when we got to talking, I, well, he…”

  Rolling his head to the side, Elisha watched her. She bit her lip, brushing away what might have been tears, or merely raindrops. “You can’t think he’ll marry you, Brigit. He’s a prince. He is as far beyond a country lady as—” Elisha laughed, “—as you are beyond me, and further.”

  “He will,” she shot back, her head jerking up. “He will marry me, he has sworn it, but we must go slowly, we mustn’t make it seem as if…” she trailed off, indicating the battlefield with a backward look.

  “As if he started a war for you?” As he studied the line of her cheek and the glimmer of her eye, he thought he himself might have done it. He would start a war for her, if he thought he could win some day. If the countless men who died meant no more to him than so many cattle. Then, he knew he was wrong: he could never have done this. He had been too close to death for any man’s life to mean so little.

  She held a palm over her mouth, nodding slightly. “I never intended any of this. I didn’t understand, when we began, and now it’s too late to take back the things that have been said. It’s not about him and Duke Randall’s daughter, not any more. And neither of us knows how to stop it.”

  “I know how! ‘Excuse me, Your Majesty, I lied! I claimed that girl was a whore just so I could marry someone who really is.’” Elisha stared at Brigit, wanting to hurt her, wanting to matter more to her than he ever possibly could.

  Trembling, she kept her face lowered, one palm still at her mouth, her other hand gripped in her skirts.

  Looking away, Elisha studied the guards, who still took no notice. Some magic defended them, muting their words and hiding her from watchful eyes. “Does he know what you are?” Elisha asked du
lly.

  “Of course he does. Don’t you see?” A pleading note edged her voice. “Suppose I marry him, we take up his estates, we live as respected nobility, and then I can reveal that I am a witch. Don’t you see what that could mean for all our people? Not just for me, but for any of us. What if they never burn another witch, Elisha? You say that all these men have died for us, for me—what if their deaths enable our people to be freed? Imagine greeting another magus on the street, speaking openly about yourselves, offering your services to those in need without fear of the fire. Earth and sky, Elisha, the vision is so sweet sometimes it tastes like honey on my lips.”

  Drawn by the sound of her voice, Elisha saw her green-eyed gaze searching some far distant place, an image only she could see of the world she longed to bring about. “I have no such dreams, Brigit. I’m just a barber sick to death of saving men only to see them dead for such a war.”

  “Just a barber? You most certainly are not.” Her gaze snapped back to him with a piercing intensity. “What happened to those arrows, Elisha? Did you see them fall? Oh, I’ve heard that Jesus took the field today, turning back the killing for his faithful flock in this righteous war.”

  “There’s nothing righteous about it!” He pulled forward, felt the strain in his arms and slumped back again.

  “So what happened to the arrows? If Jesus wasn’t there, who was?” Her lovely lips curled into a smile. “I wish you could go to the river tonight, Elisha. The water is abuzz—how was it done? How can so many objects be transported at the same time, or were they destroyed? And could any magus alive have done such a thing? Who has done it? ‘Is it you?’ ‘Is it you?’” She turned one way and another, miming the astonishment, then stared directly at him. “Is it you?”

  He dropped his gaze, the breath catching in his throat. She must be exaggerating; there was nothing so complicated in what he had done. Just the first law, the only one he understood. Anyone could have done it, in fact.

  “It was you,” she breathed. Brigit inched forward, her knee pressing against his as she spoke. “How did you do it?”