“I shall think on it, Your Majesty.”
Charles pointed the bone at him, leaning forward. “You know that my competitor is under excommunication. You are not his subject—you have no obligation to speak with him at all—and in fact, as a Christian, you are obliged not to speak to him, to give him no comfort. Does your king not understand this?” He flung the bone away to be snapped up by a dog. In English, he said, “Ludwig is a despicable, unholy man. The Holy Father cannot abide him, nor can we. I hate to see you walk into such a meeting.”
“What do you want from me, Your Majesty? If you wish me to betray my king’s trust, it will not happen. If you think Thomas will abandon his father-in-law to support yourself, then you don’t know how much he loved his wife.”
Baldwin’s brow furrowed, and Blanche drew back at Elisha’s vehemence, her plaintive voice clearly asking for translation.
“Your Majesty,” Elisha continued. “I am no diplomat. I cannot negotiate for King Thomas. Neither will I set aside his commands. Whatever offers you wish to make, I will take them back with me, but please ask no more of me than that.”
“As a good Christian, it was my duty to warn you.” Charles turned up his palms. “When you come to Ludwig, you shall see what you shall see, and perhaps then you shall carry my good wishes back to your king. We should like to offer you our hospitality, but we understand you may not accept. Please at least take a horse from my stable by the Southeast Gate.” He gestured to a young man waiting on a stool nearby. “Clerk? A writ of safe passage. Add a note about the horse.” He waved his hand and the clerk scurried up with the document, shaking, drying sand off the fresh ink of the amendment.
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Elisha said, tucking the document into the water-proof packet he carried beneath his robe.
“If this man reaches Ludwig, Your Majesty, there will be war,” said a low, rough voice. The shadows parted by the corner cabinet, and Elisha stiffened. One of the monks approached, bowing, trailing the chill shade of death, a woman’s tortured presence that draped the shoulders of her killer.
Chapter 3
Charles cocked his head, watching the monk. “There has been war, there will be war again, and I shall win it. Have you not seen as much, Brother Henry?”
“I have seen many things, my liege. I have seen that this man is a liar.” Brother Henry gestured, his hand still hidden beneath the coarse brown cloth of his habit. “His queen, the queen of England, ask him what he did to her.”
Elisha rose from the table, the tingling sense of his own talismans swelled against his skin as he drew upon them, letting his flesh go cold. “Your Majesty—”
But Charles put up his hand for silence, his fair face troubled. “Tell me what you have seen, Brother.” He pressed his hands together as if at prayer.
“I have seen the flames of a witch’s pyre. I have seen a woman bathed in blood and crying for mercy. I see this man take her in his arms to kill her—all of this have I seen, my liege.” The hooded figure shuddered, shoulders drawn up. “God revealed this woman to me in glory, crowned and clad as a bride for her marriage. She lies now as if for her funeral and witchcraft keeps her so.”
“The queen went mad, Your Majesty. It was her mother who died upon that stake.” Elisha’s breath misted just a little. Magical assault he was prepared for, but this game of visions was a new weapon and a deadly one if it fell upon credulous ears.
Charles’s dark eyes flared. “And you, doctor? What did you do to her?”
“I induced her to sleep, Your Majesty.” This was near enough the truth.
“You claimed to come here seeking a cure.” Charles pushed himself up.
“A cure for her madness, Your Majesty. You have my oath I do not wish her dead.” He could assail the mancer with magic, but fifteen innocents shared the room with himself and the mancer—including an archbishop and a queen. Even if they were not harmed, if he manifested any magic, they would seize him or die trying. He had imagined the mancers controlled their monarchs as they had tried with Prince Alaric—openly offering power at a terrible cost. Yet Charles seemed truly driven by his faith: he may not know he was the tool of evil. Could Elisha twist the mancer’s vision to reveal the truth? “God has granted you clear sight, but He may not have revealed all. Tell me, Brother, what else have you seen?”
The shade stirred at the mancer’s back as he drew upon his power.
Elisha’s palms grew damp as he waited for the reply.
“I have seen you steal the crown—taking it with your false-scarred hands!” The monk revealed his own hands at last, knobbed with age as if he clutched at power in Elisha’s stead.
“Then you have seen, too, that I returned it, Brother. Or I should hardly be standing here as the king’s messenger.”
“It seems that the gaps in your news are larger than the news itself,” Charles observed. “You dared to wear the crown of England?”
“It was given to me by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the prelate of the realm. Thomas had been taken by magic, and my regency was the only way to hold the kingdom until we brought him home.”
Charles’s eyes narrowed, and Elisha realized his mistake: he used the king’s name without his title.
“He claims to you, my liege, that he cannot negotiate for England, he who wore that crown, who is the dearest companion of that king. Such visions I have seen! He is not to be trusted.” Brother Henry loomed in a wavering of brown wool and deathly shadow.
Archbishop Baldwin cleared his throat, rubbing his neck with one hand. “You say, Brother, that this doctor usurped the crown, and in the next breath, that he is a boon companion of the king. It seems to me, that at least he speaks the truth when he says that God has not shown you all.”
A thrill of hope strengthened Elisha’s stance as the monk’s hood twitched in the direction of the archbishop. The air chilled between the two religious men. The monk should apologize to his superior, yet the archbishop’s hands trembled.
Charles resumed his easy smile. “I trust him neither more nor less than any other foreigner, Brother, but his explanations match what you have seen.” He fit the ideal of the Christian king: martial intensity, high spirits, and unshakeable faith. People would be proud to follow him—no matter the cause. If the mancers could shape that faith to their ends, the empire would be lost. Elisha imagined a new crusade, led by an idealistic emperor with the deepest faith, and backed by the darkest power. Could this be the mancer’s true plan, not merely controlling the thrones of the nations, but shepherding a new age of violence?
“My liege, did you not feel that chill that passed the room when I challenged him?” The monk moved sideways, retreating from Elisha, lifting from the folds of his habit a wooden cross embellished with roundels. He stood now as if sheltering behind the throne of the queen. “The scars, my liege, those false stigmata upon his hands—he knows more of magic than he says!”
“Stigmata?” Charles took a few steps closer. “May we see them, doctor? Do they bleed?”
“Look to your wife, Your Majesty,” Elisha said in a low voice. “This man is no true monk. Beware false prophets.”
Baldwin made a soft sound of approval.
“Brother Henry has been in our retinue for years, doctor, and his visions have always proven true,” Charles said. “But you have not answered me. Do you indeed bear the wounds of Christ?”
“They are the brands of punishment, my liege,” said the false monk. “’tis true that King Hugh died, but it was this man who slew him—I have seen it! Praise the lord!”
The mancer damned him not with lies but with the truth. Charles caught Elisha’s wrist in a firm grip, drawing up his arm, then running his fingers over Elisha’s hand, his gaze flashing back up. “His skin is cold as snow!”
“Look to your wife, he said! His hatred for the French drives him to her, Your Majesty! Just as he ruined the fleets of your
father, he shall ruin her.” Brother Henry raised his cross, his other hand gripping the queen’s shoulder as if to defend her from Elisha’s ill-will. Blackness roiled in the glass at the cross’s center as the mancer prepared to strike in a way that only Elisha could see.
“No! Let her go,” Elisha cried, twisting against Charles’s grasp.
The soldiers started forward as he struggled with their king. Save the queen from the mancer’s assault and reveal himself for a witch, or let her be lost—and be damned for it. Taunted by a mancer whose face he could not even see.
“Guards!” the emperor shouted.
A door at the side banged open, more soldiers clattering overhead, two emerging through the door. Elisha sent a snap of cold down his wrist. The emperor cried out and released him, stumbling back. Elisha mounted the table and launched himself toward the monk even as the queen wailed in pain. He seized the cross and the monk’s fingers wrapping it, staggering them both. The throne fell, the queen tumbling out across his feet, her body quaking.
Cold, pain, and terror from the tainted cross stabbed into Elisha’s left hand. Drawing up the strength of his talismans, he sought the grain of the wood and the gleam of the glass. The cross shattered and the monk shouted as the shred of skin, bone and hair—the talisman hidden at its center—fell away.
With his right hand, Elisha touched the queen, turning cold to heat, fear to strength, pain to healing. His flesh tensed and his heart felt torn—the cold rush of death gathered at his left and forced to serve life, his every bone and muscle for a moment embodying the doctrine of opposites and he screamed.
The woman stared up at him, clear-eyed and peaceful. Above, the monk rocked away, tearing free his hand, crabbed with cold and stung with slivers. Pinpricks of heat marked Elisha’s palm, flecks of blood and not all of them his own. When the cross shattered, Brother Henry had been cut.
Shouts and contradictory orders flew around them. The mancer’s blood gave him contact as well. Elisha let go of the queen, shaking off the hand she stretched up toward him lest she be caught in the mancer’s counter-attack. Swords plunged toward him, and he let himself fall dodging beneath them, scrambling on hands and knees, snatching for the monk’s habit.
A shock of horror broke the room with a howling blast of cold as if winter tore through a gap in the air. Brother Henry opened the Valley wide, and conjured at the same time—but what? “No!” shrieked the mancer-monk, silhouetted against a backdrop of gold and red, a dancing wave of spirits: the Valley of the Shadow, the pathway through evil that would carry him away. He projected its fear and horrors, his flecks of blood carrying the vision beyond him to anyone who had been spattered, letting them see, through his contact, the realm normally only visible to necromancers—and to Elisha. “Do not threaten me with Hell! The Lord is my Shepherd—” he shrieked in Latin as he stepped away into the rift. Just for a moment, Elisha glimpsed beneath the hood, and saw the mancer’s smile. Then the rift snapped shut and he was gone.
Chapter 4
“Seize the English before he curses the queen!” “Where’s Brother Henry gone?” “—he maketh me to lie down in green pastures—”
Voices broke over Elisha’s head, shouts of fear and prayers, and a quiet murmur of French from below. He pushed himself up, dodging the fallen queen and ran for the door. A sword sliced along his robe, snicking his shoulder, then he was past, stumbling up the stairs onto the round path edging the tower roof. The remaining guards sprang upon him, but he dropped again to hands and knees propelling himself along the wall, stripping off the robe that tangled his legs and regaining his feet while they fought off his discarded garment.
Breathless, Elisha ran the length of the brick wall. Already, two men from the other end swiveled toward him, one raising a crossbow. Elisha turned and leapt the battlement. For a terrible moment, he fell, wind streaking through his hair, then his feet hit the roof of the cloister below, and he slithered down the tile, spreading himself out, his fingers scraping and finally snagging in the gaps between the tiles, arresting his slide.
A crossbow bolt cracked into the roof between his outstretched arms. Elisha glanced down then up, finding the roof peak not far above. He kept low, fumbling his way upward, gaining the peak, hurrying along perpendicular to the battlement. Another bolt cracked the tile to one side and a third struck sidelong and fell away. Too quickly, the end of the rooftop cut off his escape in that direction. To the right, another roof joined it, edging the cloister and leading parallel to the archers. Not good. Ahead, a broad space of barren ground and the city wall, tantalizingly close, still too far to jump. Elisha dropped, letting himself slide feet first down toward the outside.
Two stories down. He sucked in a breath as he hit the air, pulled his feet up, and fell.
Hitting hard on his side, the breath knocked from his lungs, Elisha gasped a moment on the ground. His ribs throbbed—something broken there, but nothing serious. He could still run. Staggering up, he strove for attunement, desperate to understand his surroundings, at least to locate his remaining talismans. The vial of stained earth bobbed at his chest, a few relics brushed his chest and arms where he had stitched them in—even his trews and hose were stitched with hairs and cloth—every thread made significant. He drew on them now, encouraging his ribs to heal, at the same time, erasing himself, imagining his own absence.
Limping along in the shadow of the buildings, Elisha forced his breath to even out, his heartbeat to slow. He could not deflect the gaze of any who had seen him fall, nor could he erase his own shadow in the fullness of the sun—but lurking here, cloaking himself with the memories of death he carried, he came as close as a man could to invisibility.
A shade unfurled in the strange vision of his left eye, a soldier enacting his death, the last moments of his fear and pain captured by the earth where he had fallen. Elisha drew strength from this man’s dying to sustain his need. The soldier wore a skirt of metal, like many of the shades he had first seen in England. Other shades rose up here and there, the now-familiar misty forms of those who had died.
Elisha kept moving, dodging shadow to shadow as men hurried past, crying out to one another, searching—but they looked for a man bent on escape, not one in hiding. There would be no escape now, not until darkness gave him the means to cross the ground to the outer wall. He sighed in relief as he passed into the shadow of the church, and found the ground no longer barren but thick with graves. He found a tilted mausoleum backed by gravestones and flattened himself into the gap between them, sinking down, the slight chill presences of the dead crowding round him like children. The pain of his ribs ached but no longer stung despite the insistent pressure of his lungs as he caught his breath.
Elisha worked his fingers through his hair, finding the indented scars of the operation that saved his life not long ago. Oh, yes, the mancers had known he was coming, and they knew how to defeat him: because they did not care for life, but they knew he did. His compassion would be his undoing. In trying to save Queen Blanche, he revealed his magic before the rival emperor and the archbishop, and dedicated himself aloud to England, and to Ludwig. Anything he had said would now be suspect. Brother Henry was right—war between the emperors would follow, now that Charles’s visionary had apparently been torn from the earth by a demonic agent of the excommunicate Ludwig. Archbishop Baldwin seemed suspicious of the monk, but given the mancer’s disappearance, and with prayer on his lips, he made himself appear to be a martyr before the court while he continued to pursue the mancer plans elsewhere.
Elisha had made a bloody mess of the moment, but he could not think of anything he might have done differently. Back down from the mancer’s accusations? But the mancer manipulated Elisha into apparently attacking the queen. Should he have let the queen be taken? What defense could he have made when the monk claimed Elisha responsible? The queen herself might give evidence, but she was a woman who did not even speak the language. He found two mancers
so far, neither of them Bardolph, and lost them both after revealing himself. He had undertaken his mission with the arrogance of knowledge and power, and already he had lost so much.
A murmur of voices rose in the graveyard, and in the gaps between the stones, he saw men and women gathering, moving among the stones in the direction of the church. Bells began to toll nearby, calling the faithful to Evensong. Elisha tipped his head back against the stone. Sunlight spread low and golden across the land—not long now until night should fall. His direct strategy had worked in that he had found a mancer in Charles’s retinue, but now that one was gone, without leading him to any others. He must learn to be as subtle as they, to seek them out without being seen.
How many people would attend the service, and would the emperor’s party be among them? How many other mancers might lurk to fill Brother Henry’s place?
Elisha slipped off his doublet and outer tunic. He turned the doublet inside out, showing its plain lining rather than the rich pattern, and pulled it back on, then tore the hem of his tunic into a few strips, binding his palms and wrapping his head with the rest of the garment, rubbing dirt into the scraps. In the dim light, he might pass for a workman, someone injured and in need. It reminded him of Thomas at the ball, dressed in rags, and aching with loneliness. Where would his friend be now? Arguing with the barons, exchanging firm letters with King Philippe of France? With Duke Randall dead and Elisha gone, Thomas must be lonely once again. That thought did not bear dwelling on. For a few minutes, Elisha imagined the man he had made himself become—injured, but not destitute, definitely local. Was there anything that revealed his origins? He thought not—not as long as he did not speak and display his ignorance or his accent. He projected all of these things, withdrawing his own presence and re-creating himself into somebody else.
Elisha Mancer Page 3