Elisha Magus

by E. C. Ambrose

  “Thank you, I’m sure,” said Brigit, pushing up from her chair. “It is a lovely gift and a fine addition to our chapel.” She emphasized “our,” and the French lady rose, recoiling a little with a swish of her silken headdress.

  “Another dance!” cried the duke. “Please. Our pages shall parade the relic so that all may see the generosity of our neighbors.” He urged two boys to take up the cushion and make a slow passage down the table, the bishop, as well, rose to join the procession.

  Distantly Elisha heard a new tune, one of the slow and courtly dances played toward the end of an evening, and the soft shuffle of slippers as the assembled nobles resumed their fun. A gaggle of children emerged around their parents’ skirts and ankles and rushed up to view the saint’s bone in its tiny gilded hall. Alaric gazed at the French lady a moment too long before Brigit seized his hand, and Elisha chuckled. Brigit hadn’t learned from the experience of Lady Rosalynn if she were expecting faith from her prince.

  The duke’s hand settled on his shoulder, with an eddy of concern.

  Elisha immediately began, “Your Grace, I’m sorry, she asked me, and I didn’t—”

  Much to his dismay, the duke laughed. “I’ve not come to rip you limb from limb, Elisha, you can calm yourself about that. I’m only hoping we can settle the French and the prince without anyone having to invade.” He gave a sigh, then glanced up at Elisha. “Saint Louis is the patron saint of Paris. It wasn’t a gift, it was a threat.”

  “My guess was they hoped it to be a nuptial gift, but not for Brigit.”

  “Some things a man doesn’t need a knowledge of French to understand.” Then his glance turned speculative. “So what do you think of our Rosalynn?”

  Flushed from both the dancing and now the question, Elisha managed, “She seems pleasant enough.”

  “Pleasant?” The duke looked vexed. “From the way you danced, you might’ve thought her a ravishing beauty.”

  Elisha hesitated, wondering how to remove the insult.

  “Don’t be so concerned, Barber, I’m not out for blood, truly.” The duke exerted a gentle pressure, prodding Elisha into motion away from the crowd into an open-air yard. “In fact, I enjoyed it. I little imagined Rosalynn would dance again, never mind with such … exuberance. She’s been in a black mood since …” His gesture completed the sentence. “I thought the time at her brother’s would help her get over it and give me time to sort out Hugh and Alaric, besides. Now look what it’s all come to.”

  Elisha slipped off his mask, rubbing the sweat from his face. “I don’t follow you, Your Grace.”

  He tapped his fingers together, then sighed. “Hugh and I were cousins. It’s why he advanced me during the confusion after King Edward’s death.” He crossed himself briefly at the mention of the old king. “Hugh needed those around him who’d support his claim to the throne.”

  “Cousins? Good God, I am sorry.” Elisha felt he was still back in the hall, dizzy with dancing.

  “Sorry you killed him? Don’t be. Someone had to cut down the treacherous bastard. I’m only sorry it was not I who did the deed.”

  This time, Elisha held his tongue. The night air chilled his skin, despite the stillness of June all around them. Lately, he felt cold all the time, indoors or out. Ever since the day he had invited Death into himself, and it had not entirely left him.

  “In fact,” the duke continued, “I amazed Alaric right then when I failed to take the crown for myself, by right of arms aside from the ties of blood we shared.” He shrugged. “So here comes Alaric to be sure I support his claim over Thomas’s.”

  On second thought, perhaps Rosalynn had gotten her conversational style from her father—neither of them seemed to require his participation, only his attention.

  “It’s all about alliances, who can summon the strongest allies.” He cocked his head to study Elisha sidelong. “Have they started in on you yet?”

  Elisha had almost forgotten the small man in the ugly mask. “Someone sent a messenger, offering wealth and power.”

  “Not what you want?” The duke smiled. “Someone’ll find out what you do want, Barber, and offer you that. All these factions will want you for themselves.”

  “What for, Your Grace? As you say, I’m just a barber.”

  “Not just. You killed the king, apparently by magic, though few were close enough to know the truth, and every tavern and brothel from here to the border will be abuzz with stories. Every soldier you ever healed will claim himself a miracle—or a curse. Oh, no, Elisha Barber. As far as the barons are concerned, you are the most dangerous man alive, and you’d do well to remember that. They just can’t be sure what you’ll do next.”

  Duke Randall, too, wanted something from him, something more than his medical skill, and Elisha regarded him warily. “Without the talisman, I’m just a man.”

  “A magus, still, and the talisman is nothing without someone who has the insight and wherewithal to use it.”

  That stung. Insight had nothing to do with the desperation which brought him to kill. Elisha walked a few paces away, arms folded against the chill. The talisman—the sorry remains of a tragedy for which he was at least partially responsible—had lent him the power of Death, the power to kill the king. But when he woke from the long exhaustion which had overcome him after such a spell, the talisman was gone, stolen by the woman he loved. He meant to get it back, before the innocent life it represented could be twisted again to harm.

  The duke pursued him but stopped short, a soothing note creeping into his voice. “I know you don’t like to be reminded, Elisha, but you must face the consequences of what you’ve done.”

  “What,” Elisha snapped back, “will they hang me again?”

  “Holy Rood, that’s not what I meant. You stand there, swathing yourself in guilt that you, the healer, have taken a life. Have done, Elisha. Men die, you know better than most, and sometimes men must be killed so that other men can live.” He closed the distance, coming to face Elisha in the moonlight. “You’ve done no more than a thousand others in your place, but the way you did it was nothing short of spectacular.”

  The word took Elisha by surprise atop the other tensions of the night—as if he and the duke had never understood each other. “If you think that, then you’re no better than the man I killed,” Elisha retorted.

  The duke slapped him, hard and fast, his hand drawing back as if the blow had stung his palm, then retreated two steps immediately. “Sweet Jesus, Elisha, I am sorry.”

  Elisha reeled at the blow, no more than his due for speaking too freely to nobility. He’d been expecting to offend someone—just not the man who presented himself as Elisha’s protector. Elisha’s fingers trailed over the new ache. His jaw clenched. “You are all the same. Sitting at your head table, looking down on the rest of us, smiling kindly and ready to strike.”

  Dropping his head, the duke revealed a bald patch that winked in the moonlight. “I am sorry, but I know that changes nothing. Before you, I had never considered that a common man could be worthy of my friendship. It’s hard to overcome the training of a lifetime.” He put up his hands, his face drawn tight. “Please do not mistake me. Little more than an accident of birth has placed me higher than you on the chain of being. The money, the land, confer on us a chance to be educated, to think beyond our daily bread—nobility is not about blood, it’s about being at liberty to raise your eyes from the dirt at your feet and see the sky.”

  Unwillingly, still stinging, Elisha understood. The first day he had come to Dunbury, he climbed the broken steeple which became his lodging and gazed out over a landscape he had never been able to see before, a place of valleys and towers, not of ditches and walls.

  “We travel, we study, we take up art and music because some servant or another will provide our meals. Most of my peers think we’ve earned it by the blood of our ancestors.” He gave a harsh laugh. “You and I both know, if it’s blood that counts, then your ancestors have spent a lot more of it than mine.
All I mean to say is that I don’t know how to be your friend—which makes what I would ask of you that much harder.” He ran his hands through what remained of his hair.

  “And what is it you want from me?” Elisha asked, squaring his shoulders.

  The duke let out another sigh, then a weary chuckle. “I want you to marry my daughter.”

  Chapter 4

  Elisha blinked, then said, “I don’t think I heard you right.”

  The duke laughed again, with more humor this time. “Oh, I believe you did. I’ve never seen anyone look so dumbfounded since I told Allyson I knew she was a magus, and I didn’t care.”

  Dry-mouthed, Elisha repeated, “You want me to marry your daughter.”

  “Just so,” said the duke, then his smile slipped away, and moonlight etched the lines a little deeper around his eyes. “Not that you’ll be willing,” he said. “Not now.”

  Elisha plopped himself onto one of the benches. For a moment, he even forgot that he was cold. “But why?”

  “A variety of reasons, really.” With a half-shrug, the duke held his hands at his back. “Because I’ve seen you work, both medicine and magic. You’re a good man, Elisha, you have a kind of integrity I don’t see very often. For damn sure, Prince Alaric hasn’t got it. As I told you before, I want you on my side, not just because I know what you are capable of but also because I know what you are not capable of. Yes, you killed a man that day, but how many could you have killed, Elisha? Ten, a hundred, a thousand?”

  Elisha wanted to say that he would have killed at least one more—Prince Alaric himself—but he wasn’t sure it was the truth.

  “From a practical standpoint, you’d argue that I’ll have a terrible time finding someone else to marry her.” He flopped his hands into a gesture of despair. “It’s true. The only men still eager for her hand are those with little to offer in return—they want to bind themselves to me. They act as if I should be glad to have her taken off my hands.” A suggestion of anger returned to his voice. “She might go to a convent, others have, in her position, but I would like to see her happy. There’s another thing, too,” the duke said, his hands gripped together almost in prayer. “Both princes will be courting your power, and there are others in the kingdom eager to cause the sort of havoc they will see in what you’ve done. Someone has already begun bargaining for you.”

  “And someone else has tried to kill me.” He briefly told the duke about the scene in the churchyard.

  Randall’s head bowed as he listened, then he murmured, “You are a valuable weapon, a powerful threat. Do they kill you for your own sake, to take the power from me, or as justice for Hugh?”

  Elisha met his gaze once more, expelled a breath. “But I only did it to save my friends—he would have killed them all. I don’t kill people, I heal them.”

  “I know.” The duke’s smile twisted. “I know that, Elisha, but they don’t, and they will not believe you when you tell them. They are so used to lying that they can no longer hear the truth. If they can’t buy you, they will kill you.”

  The words echoed in the night and inside Elisha’s skull, redoubling until they filled his awareness. The cut at his shoulder, slim though it was, stung in mute reminder, and Elisha sighed, “Then I’m a dead man.”

  Lowering himself carefully to his knees, Randall looked up into Elisha’s face. “As my servant, they’ll kill you—someone has already tried. As my friend, they’ll simply hurt you more. These men will imagine I won’t pursue them over such a matter. But if you were my son, well, they already know I’d go to war over an insult to my daughter.” Gazing at him steadily, in the posture of a supplicant, the duke said, “I would have you as my son, Elisha Barber, but I would wish for you a better father.”

  Still steady, he reached out his hand and lightly touched Elisha’s.

  A wave of sincerity and hope and despair washed over Elisha. Through that contact, the duke laid himself open, his fears and needs warring with a genuine respect that crept into Elisha’s skin. Regret colored the contact, and a fierce fatherly love. Just for a moment, Elisha saw himself through the duke’s eyes, dancing with Rosalynn, and the swell of joy took his breath away. The duke feared that she might never recover, and to see her dance with such abandon—he knew it was born of jealousy, but still the vision gave him hope. Except when Mordecai had shared a vision, Elisha had never seen so clearly through another’s eyes. Perhaps living with Allyson had clarified the duke’s sensitivity.

  Then, overlaid with the image of Rosalynn, another woman danced, a small, round girl full of life and love, in the arms of a handsome lord. In a moment, she had gone pale and drifted away like a mist of sadness. A sister who had thrown herself to her death over a lover lost. A secret from all but a very few. For a moment, yet another face flashed before Elisha’s view, that of his own brother, Nathaniel, who felt responsible for his infant’s death and had believed his wife, Helena, dead along with the child. Nathaniel had killed himself, and Elisha concealed it to save his brother’s memory from the stigma of suicide. Elisha swallowed around the lump in his throat.

  The touch withdrew, and the duke’s eyes flitted over Elisha’s face, frowning slightly, as if he might have felt in return some of Elisha’s own memory.

  Elisha snapped his attention back to the matter at hand: Nathaniel was dead and buried, his widow was healing in her own way, and as for his baby, Elisha still must make amends. The first step would be to take back the talisman he had lost, the small pot containing the stillborn child’s head. Before Mordecai confirmed that the mystical Bone of Luz did not exist—the Bone said to lead to resurrection on the Day of Judgment—Elisha had hoped he might use the Bone to bring back the stillborn child. That was before he knew he could perform magic and the horrors it might cause if he did. Death was not a thing to be given or taken lightly. If the priest down in the village would condemn him for taking a life, how much more so would Elisha be damned for giving back a life that God had claimed?

  Behind them, the festivities had risen to dull roar of enjoyment and drink, the king’s retainers succored by the duke’s wine. It seemed unbelievable that Elisha could matter to such people—better that he retreated to his patients, to the grubby streets of that city where he could not see the sky, leaving the kingdom to its new tyrant. He imagined himself grumbling as he used to do, sharing the complaints of his neighbors over a bit of ale, powerless beyond that limited space.

  “I’ll think about what you’ve said, Your Grace,” Elisha answered softly.

  “Thank you,” said Randall. “For that and for the dance.” With a sigh and a creak of his leather boots the duke got to his feet. “Time to bid goodnight to my guests.”

  Elisha, too, rose, smoothing his palms over the fine linen of his trousers as the duke moved back toward the hall.

  Standing alone in the moonlight, Elisha’s mind reeled. Everything the duke told him sounded reasonable, and the contact they shared only re-enforced his belief in the duke’s sincerity. The slap still stung, but Elisha should not have taken his own guilt out on the duke, not when his benefactor was forced to entertain the man responsible for his daughter’s misery. Both the duke and the prince struggled to maintain an air of civil friendship. The self-declared king had to cement his authority before his brother came home from the north, leading an army—whatever army would follow him.

  Politics. Elisha snorted. Perhaps he should pack his surgical tools and sneak off into the night, disappearing back into the obscurity from which he had been torn and thrust into battle. He turned reluctantly back to the Great Hall. Returning to the head table, Duke Randall greeted the royal couple and made some remarks that were hard to hear over the crowd. Elisha edged up closer. He had to figure out what Brigit had done with the talisman, and she surely wouldn’t tell him outright. Perhaps the drink and the company would soften her defenses, and she would let something slip if he could get close enough.

  “If you really loved him, Your Grace,” bawled a young lord as he swaye
d to plant his elbow on the table, “you’d execute his father’s killer.”

  The room grew quiet, the French ambassadors suddenly keen.

  Duke Randall’s round face hardened. “My lord Mortimer, a moment later and I should have killed the king myself—or been killed by him. I challenged King Hugh to personal combat, and my champion prevailed.”

  It was not quite a lie but certainly a view of the events that Elisha had never considered.

  “You submitted a barber as your champion? You expect us to believe that?”

  “The brute Goliath was leveled by a child with a stone.”

  “A child who later rose to be king!” Mortimer lurched forward, swaying against the table, out of the grip of those who might protect him.

  Lord Robert and two of the guards leaned close, hands upon their swords, but Duke Randall waved them back, spreading his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “His Royal Highness has expressed his wish to leave the battle behind us and let matters rest. Given that you, Lord Mortimer, are his companion and a member of his household, I suggest you do the same.”

  “To let a barber strike down a king, and live to tell of it? Hah! No wonder they’re thinking they can plant their dead on English ground.” Mortimer exclaimed, waving his arm toward the fancy reliquary. With his wild swing, the golden miniature pitched from the table and smashed onto the stone. The French leapt up with a burst of fluttering words.

  With a desperate lunge, Alaric intercepted Mortimer and grasped the back of his neck, whispering as he thrust the man back into the arms of his companions to be led away. Then he gave another little speech to the French, this one more gentle, as he gestured toward the bishop, priest, and pages who reverently collected the bits of crystal. The incident left them all looking as sour as Elisha’s stomach felt.