Elisha Barber: Book One Of The Dark Apostle

by E. C. Ambrose

  Carried only by the air, and by those words, the emotions still stung, and Elisha caught his breath. Two men as sensitive as himself and Mordecai should not meet so often—it threw them both off balance to feel too much.

  “What’s that about then?” Ruari asked, assuming the surgeon’s chair, tossing the little copper pot from hand to hand.

  “Thinks he should have defended me sooner,” Elisha whispered.

  “As well he should, if he’s thought so much of you.”

  Mordecai had too much to lose if his secrets became known, but Elisha could hardly tell Ruari that. “He had good reason for caution,” Elisha said, then a rustle drew their eyes to the door.

  Lisbet hesitated on the threshold, then stepped inside and dropped a slight curtsey, flicking her lowered gaze from one to the other. “Mother says I’m not to see you,” she mumbled. “We’re going. I’m sorry.” She darted another glance at Ruari, and rushed off in a flurry of long skirts.

  Rising from his place, Ruari stared after her, his hands half-raised to hold her back.

  Something in the line of his friend’s back told Elisha all he needed. “Go on,” he whispered. “I’ll wait.”

  Turning his head, but not his eyes, Ruari said, “Ye’re sure?”

  “Go, get on.” He made little shooing motions with his concealed hands.

  At last alone, Elisha slumped in his seat. There was not a patch of skin which did not burn or ache or throb or shiver. He shut his eyes and let out a long, shaky sigh. His bruised throat protested, and he winced.

  “Is it very bad?” Brigit said.

  Jolted from his chair, Elisha turned his head to look at her, his eyes flaring. He stood, staggered, grabbed for the back of the chair, but a thrust of pain from his hand struck through him and buckled his knees.

  Holding up her hands, Brigit rushed toward him. “Sit, please, sit before you fall down.” She caught his arms with a concerned smile.

  He let her ease him back onto the chair, disgusted by the rush of heat her touch sent through him.

  Still smiling, Brigit set a hand upon his knee, her fingers finding his flesh through a tear in the worn-out fabric. “Attunement,” she said, teasing.

  “You would have let me die,” he rasped.

  Brigit’s face fell, her smile turned in an instant to trembling lips. “What did he tell you?”

  “I’m not a fool,” he said, the lie twisting his mouth.

  She held up a twig of oak, twirling it in her fingers. “I was about to break the branch, to let you down a little easier.”

  His throat hurt too much, so he resorted to the witches’ way, the words not quite reaching his lips. “You let me down enough as it is.”

  “Don’t talk that way, Elisha. You know I had to make it plausible, you of all people know what I would risk by any magic, I had to save us both.” Her fingers stroked a small, hot circle.

  “Did he risk any less?” Elisha turned his face from her, struggling for his lost control.

  “Either way,” she snapped, the energy crackling in his skin, “You are alive, with magic to thank for it, and to all of them, it looks like divine providence has proved your innocence.”

  “Even a moment longer, Brigit, and I would have been dead. I could feel it, like that night you showed me the talisman, only this time for me. Death already had one hand on me, and it wasn’t you who fought it back.”

  “I did what I could, Elisha, I never left you.” She smoothed the hair back behind his ear with a delicate touch. “Earth and sky, you act as if I wanted you to die.” She held her face still, an expression of compassion fixed upon her beautiful features. What if she did? A chill tingled deep in his bones, as if death had not fully relinquished its hold.

  Brigit flinched. “Is that what you think? That I wanted you to die? My God, Elisha, what for? What purpose could your death possibly serve? That’s just your fear talking.”

  Before he could answer, he felt Mordecai’s approach. He allowed himself a slender smile, pulling away from Brigit’s touch and looking toward the door.

  Her eyes narrowed, then she, too, turned as the surgeon paused at the doorway. “I only wanted to ask,” Mordecai began, “but I do not wish to interrupt.” He inclined his head, and turned to go.

  Wait, Elisha wanted to say, and Mordecai stopped, as if the word were spoken. A man as sensitive as Mordecai did not interrupt by accident; ignorant though Elisha was, he was beginning to grasp the meaning of the magi.

  Slowly, the surgeon turned. A knot held his belt together, the damaged books hanging limp. “I merely wished to ask what became of the rope.”

  “The rope?” Brigit asked, slipping her fingers away. “I don’t take your meaning, sir.”

  But she did, Elisha had caught that much in her quick suppression.

  “Only that there are some,” Mordecai explained in his best over-educated tone, “who believe a hanging rope is a thing of power. No one seems to know what has become of it.”

  Shrugging with a roll of her shoulders, Brigit said, “I cast it aside. It may have gone in the brush, or even in the river.”

  For a long moment, Mordecai simply stared, his limpid eyes looking too weak to even see so far, never mind to carry the warning Elisha felt in waves around him. “As you say, my lady.” He inclined his head. “Sorry to bother you.” Turning back, he stepped lightly away into the hospital.

  A thing of power. A talisman marked by Elisha’s own death, and all of the fear, the pain, the betrayal that went along with it.

  Brigit’s smile returned as she reached toward him.

  Suddenly stronger, Elisha snatched her hand from the air. “What purpose would my death serve? What indeed?” Cold certainty pooled in his heart. “Is that why you made love to me? To make the rope that much stronger?”

  “I made love to you for your own sake, Elisha. That old man knows nothing about me, or you. Can’t you see how much I care about you?”

  Dropping her hand, Elisha felt the first waves of grief rise up to overwhelm him. “No,” he said aloud. “I can’t see you at all, Brigit, because I love you too much. You say that your prince knows what you are.”

  Again, she reached toward him, shaking her head, warning him not to speak such things to the open air.

  He blocked her touch with an upraised arm, the thick blanket coming between.

  Her green eyes flared to life. “My prince, as you call him, knows all about me.”

  “He knows that you would sacrifice my life to further your own ambition.”

  “That’s not so, Elisha, it never was.” She sank to her knees before him, her posture and tone beseeching even as hints of magic thrilled through her, trying to woo him. “With you, I could be so much more,” she whispered. “No wonder my mother marked you for me to find. Two such powers as you and I—you speak through raindrops, Elisha, I speak through fire—together, there is nothing we could not do. You want an end to war? You want to save lives? Think of it, Elisha, so much strength between your hand and mine.”

  Resting his head on the back of the chair, Elisha followed the cracks in the ceiling and laughed to stave off weeping. “Yes, Brigit, oh yes, offer me your hand. Haven’t you figured out by now it’s not your strength I’m after?” He squeezed his lips shut and stared at the cracks until he felt her go.

  Chapter 31

  When weariness overcame him, Elisha got up from his chair before the kitchen fire and lay down in the pile of fresh straw in the corner. He slept immediately, the herbs from the pot filling his nostrils. He awoke to the dull throb of his injuries, but felt strangely clear-headed and calm. Some combination of the surgeon’s potions and the potency of his touch worked to make Elisha feel much better than he should, even if he remained miserable.

  At the hearth before him, he could see a pair of feet beneath a long gown, feet clad in expensive boots with pointed toes. Elisha moved the arm under his head and blinked up at the figure of Benedict, his back toward him, stirring something over the fire. He recal
led the brief moment when he’d thought Benedict might be the magus who called himself Sage, and smiled a little. When he felt up to rising again, he would go to the river and listen to what they said. Then he thought of Marigold-Brigit and the smile slipped away. Who knew what she wanted, or what she might do? If he hadn’t noticed Mordecai’s broken belt, he might never have known the truth. Brigit would have been willing to take credit, and Mordecai willing to let her have it if it meant none would know the truth about him. As a Jew, the slightest whiff of witchcraft would get him killed out of hand, and without the trumped up charges brought to bear against other witches.

  Benedict muttered over his pot and checked a scrap of parchment he carried tucked in his belt, then added a pinch of something else. Lying there a few feet away, Elisha thought he could sense the tension in Benedict’s actions. Elisha, drifting in the haze of his recovery, began the process of attunement, reaching out with his new inner sense to every corner of the room and everything in it.

  He sent his awareness further with a sense of creeping along the floor like a beetle, as if some hitherto unknown antennae could feel the vibration of Benedict’s presence in the air. Mordecai’s touch, and his conversation, had shown Elisha what it meant to be attuned, not in the physical, grounded way that Brigit seemed to imply, but on a different level. It began with the physical, with an uncanny knowledge of how Benedict stood and moved, almost as if they might inhabit one body. Knowledge—the sort that Mordecai carried in his books, that Elisha had learned from setting a thousand bones and treating ten thousand wounds.

  From this new perspective, Benedict radiated tension. His fingers clutched the wooden spoon so hard that tiny slivers pricked beneath his nails, though he was unaware of them. Tension gathered in the muscles of his neck and shoulders, his posture rigid with the strain. His jaw tightened until it ached.

  Of Benedict’s mind, Elisha could sense little. Vague washes of emotion drifted there, understood not through direct knowledge, but through how they influenced the pulse and breathing: a hint of fear, a twinge of pain from the bite Elisha had inflicted, and a pang of regret. The knowledge was intimate, fascinating, and exciting—and more than any man would want revealed about himself.

  Elisha pulled back from that intimacy, tamping down his awareness, despite his curiosity. Somewhere upstairs, he heard footsteps, and felt a sudden draft of shock and fear, which blew away as quickly as it had come, leaving him chilled. He would have risen, but footsteps approached the door as well. Voices murmured, then the physician stepped into the kitchen, his presence catlike in anticipation.

  Lucius glanced toward where Elisha lay, but Elisha was perfectly motionless, allowing the skill of attunement to reveal his surroundings. “Still sleeping,” the physician muttered, then joined his assistant, staring down at the concoction on the fire. “Ah, very good,” he said, then set his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “I need to speak with you, Benedict.”

  “Of course, Sir, I’m nearly done here.” The voice shook a little, and the physician’s hand patted him in a manner intended to be soothing.

  “Come along with me now. That will keep.”

  Clunking the spoon against the pot, Benedict turned. “I thought you wanted me to—”

  “Yes, yes, but the king’s guard, you know, they’ve been prowling about, so it seems wise we should speak now.”

  Looking back as if he could see the guards, Benedict slowly withdrew the spoon and laid it on the table with curious precision. “As you wish, sir.”

  Lucius used his comforting hand to gently propel Benedict toward the door by Elisha’s head.

  “Must we go through the yard, sir, it makes me—”

  “I have not made you my assistant in order to hear your complaints.”

  It sounded as if Benedict were to have his ears laid back for some offense. Elisha almost smiled. In their wake, he remembered the fear he had sensed earlier. Pushing himself into a sitting position, Elisha waited. He felt stiff and weary, but not on the verge of death, as he had a few hours ago. Rising slowly, he shifted the blanket closer and hobbled over to the stairs. He shuffled up them, and down the hall, which he found empty. At each door, he paused and knocked, but had no answer. Two doors in a row stood open, opposite the one which was Brigit’s. His small chest stood on one of the beds, abandoned when Lisbet and her mother did their packing.

  Frowning over it, Elisha considered what to do. He hadn’t the strength to move it, not far anyway, and it contained little worth protecting. Still. He dropped onto the rope webbing of the bed and flipped open the catches, pulling back the lid.

  His one remaining shirt lay neatly folded on top, and Elisha slipped it over his head. He found a length of rope to use as a belt and emptied out a tied-leather bundle of herbs, replacing them with an abbreviated version of the emergency kit the guards had taken from him. At the bottom of the chest lay the little cloth pennant, but his tools had shifted in all the moving about, and a knife had torn through the painted hawk, leaving one wing nearly severed. Elisha plucked it free and held it on his palm, a miniature of the angel’s wing. He wondered for a moment if his own pennant-waving that day had inspired her, even as she waited for her death, to try this one last miracle. Her daughter’s betrayal tainted the memory, but he pushed it aside. Whatever Brigit had done to him—or not done, as the case may be—her mother’s touch meant something still.

  Folding it gently, he placed the cloth wing into his packet and re-tied the leather thong, tucking it into his waist. Elisha replaced the lid of the chest and let it lie. Rising again, he continued down the hall. Above the infirmary, he found another door standing open, a scatter of pages blowing in a breeze from the window. This must be Mordecai’s room, but he wasn’t there.

  Abandoning his blanket, Elisha gathered up the pages and placed them on the neatly made bed. He turned to go but frowned. The place felt hollow in a way that worried him. Perhaps it was only that sense of loss he found in the man himself, the echo of the secrets he still held. Downstairs, he stopped at the entrance to the infirmary, but found no sign of Mordecai there either.

  Perhaps he, too, had sought the river. As he walked, Elisha realized he had not heard the bombards’ blast all day long, for surely that would have awakened him sooner. Indeed, a large number of knights gathered across the river by the king’s pavilion, talking and laughing, apparently at their ease.

  Elisha glanced back, but could see nothing of the battlefield from here. Shrugging it off, he walked the few paces down and plunged his feet into the rushing water.

  Silence.

  But not silence, not really. A low moan shivered around his ankles, more a feeling than a voice, and Elisha looked upstream. At a bend beyond the monastery walls, he saw a figure emerge from the reeds and stride up, fastidiously lifting long robes, though they dripped with water. Lucius. But where was Benedict?

  Elisha sprang up the bank and pushed himself into a run, his hands curled into fists.

  He slithered down the rise where the physician had emerged and stumbled into the brush, fetching up against the massive roots of an upturned tree.

  “Benedict?” he called out, trying to push his way past the reaching roots. “Benedict!” The sense of fear, the pressure of the physician’s hand—he should have put it together.

  Bursting free from the entangling brush, Elisha found himself standing ankle-deep beside the downed tree, looking into the swirl of a pool sheltered by the looming of its branches. Something splashed like a dark, pointed fish. Benedict’s expensive boot.

  “Don’t do it, Barber,” Lucius’s voice suddenly cracked behind him.

  Spinning, already up to his waist in the water, Elisha stared.

  The physician stood on the bank, his gaunt face twisted as he drew a small crossbow from the folds of his ridiculous sleeves and held it casually at his side. “It’s too late for him.”

  But the river said differently. Even though it carried the chill of death, it carried too the submerged struggle
for breath, a struggle Elisha knew all too well. He backed another pace into the river’s flood.

  “Don’t, I tell you. It’s for your own good as well as mine. He’s the traitor, don’t you know. He wants to kill the king.”

  “Then bring him before the guards,” Elisha shouted back.

  “I’m just going to fetch them,” Lucius said, but he did not move.

  Taking another step, Elisha drew a deep breath, even as the physician slid a bolt into place. As he shot, Elisha fell back into the water.

  The bolt slid in after, as subtle as death, as swift as the river, and Elisha reached out with his mind. Contact. He caught it and forced it into the water, dissolving it into the flying current.

  Another followed in a moment, Lucius turning to keep his prey within range, as Elisha swept toward the tree.

  Elisha rolled and kicked, grabbing a branch near the entrapped figure of Benedict.

  Fighting with the tree that held him, Benedict flailed. Blood streamed in the water around him.

  Diving beside him, Elisha forced him down and dragged him back against the flow, one arm wrapped about his chest. Both popped to the surface, drawing a curse from the physician.

  Lucius aimed another bolt, but Elisha splashed his hand through the air, bringing up a stream of water that consumed the weapon as it flew.

  His mouth flapping, the physician drew back. He pointed a finger in Elisha’s direction, a finger that struck Elisha with more fear than had his bow. A gesture of knowledge and accusation.

  Their eyes met across the distance, and the physician crossed himself quickly, pulling the bow close to his chest like a crucifix. Then he backed away, stumbling over his robes and falling.

  Elisha hesitated, the water lapping around his knees, Benedict clutched in his arms. If Elisha dropped Benedict, he might catch Lucius. What had Benedict done for him, that Elisha should risk the fire?