Constantine

by Heather Grothaus

  She came to the end of the tunnel and raised up on tiptoe to see over the cusp of the rock. Nothing but grass and growing darkness moved beyond, and yet she trod on soundless feet, each step measured and careful. Dori moved around the frozen wave of rock washed out into the ward and again crossed to the set of steps leading to the curtain wall. Not so much as a shadow twitched, nor did even a bird swoop through the space. Dori skipped up the stairs lightly, eager to gain the top of the wall and to see the black form of the man growing smaller as he walked away from the castle toward the village.

  She dashed to the nearest embrasure, catching herself on the chest-high stone gap and looked, The road was as empty as it had been moments before.

  Dori knew a thrill of cold fright as she pulled herself partway up on the stone and peered over the battlement toward the ground, her eyes darting from shadow to shadow along the base of the curtain wall. Where was he? Where was he?

  She felt the hard point dimple her skin painfully over her right kidney before she heard the even harder voice behind her.

  “Leave the blade on the stone and turn around slowly.”

  Chapter 3

  It didn’t matter to Constantine that the slight form turned away from him belonged to a woman—a small, stooped woman whose blade he’d seen as she passed him was nothing more than a broken eating knife of the sort little children were first given. She was a trespasser, an interloper who had intruded upon Constantine’s deepest grief and was even now standing upon the sacred ground that had at one time been the center of his world. She trod uninvited on his memories, his pain. Her very presence was an affront.

  But the woman had neither moved nor responded at all to his command, and so Constantine pressed forward with his sword until she gave a warbly, frightened cry. “I said, leave the blade on the stone and turn around.”

  He heard the tinny scrape of the knife against the shelf of the embrasure. The sides of the woman’s faded and threadbare cloak lifted even as the deep hood cocked, and Constantine saw that she had raised her hands before her face so that her palms were toward him, shielding her lowered countenance as she turned.

  “Please,” she whispered. “I beg you, harm me not. I have nothing of value.”

  “What are you doing here?” Constantine demanded, still leveling his weapon at her as she cowered against the wide merlon. He tried to see past her raised hands in the gloom.

  “Only exploring the ruin.”

  Constantine’s eyes narrowed as he took in the details of the woman’s costume, illuminated by the misty dusk. The slippers poking from beneath the ragged and filthy hem of her skirts were so thin that Constantine could see the outline of her toes even in the shadows. These were no sturdy peasant shoes; at one time, Constantine imagined they had been quite fine. It appeared that part of her outer skirt had been torn off near the bottom, revealing only one thin undergarment and bare, sticklike calves above white, bony ankles. Her sleeves were also jagged and frayed, and the protuberances at her wrists seemed like bolts, her fingers like thin, trembling twigs glowing in the twilight. And yet they served to hide what little of her face Constantine could have seen in the black recess of her hood.

  “You live in the village?” he asked.

  “Yes. Yes, I live in the village.” She paused. “My . . . my husband will be expecting me home. He likely seeks me now.”

  Constantine felt his brows lower. “Liar.”

  The hood twitched up as if surprised at his accusation, but she didn’t insist upon perpetuating the untruth. “Please don’t hurt me,” she whispered again.

  “Lower your hands so that I might see your face,” he commanded. “And step away from the battlements lest that sliver of metal behind you tempt you to foolishness.”

  She sidled away from the embrasure obediently, her hands falling beneath her pitiful cloak once more, but she angled her face toward the walk so that the soft hood fully concealed her features. Constantine glanced over to be certain she had indeed left the blade on the stones and was reassured to see its pathetic length.

  He turned his head back toward the woman. “Now, tell me tru—” He hadn’t finished the order before he saw a flash of movement from beneath that black cloak, a blur of upward motion, and then felt a stabbing pain explode in the muscles of his right forearm, causing his hand to flex open and his sword to clatter to the stones.

  The woman jerked her handled weapon free of his flesh and then turned with a swirl of black to dash into the shadows past the keep, where the stairs to the inner ward leaned.

  Constantine recovered quickly, swooping to pick up his sword and giving chase into the growing night. He could hear the woman’s slight scraping footfalls over the uneven stone, and whereas Constantine still knew and remembered every corner and inch of the Benningsgate in his memories, the reality of the place since it had been abandoned thwarted him with its cants and crumbling stone. The woman ahead of him, however, must have been intimately familiar with the Benningsgate of the present, for she seemed to fly from Constantine’s reach with all the fleetness of a forest deer.

  But he had been right that she was weak, frail, for when he gave chase in the open field of the ward, her strength flagged and each loping stride brought him closer to the flapping tail of her cloak. She glanced over her shoulder twice, and the second time her hood fell back, revealing a halo of choppy black locks. She must have known that in another moment he would reach out and seize her, for she suddenly stopped and spun around with a fierce cry, swinging her crude weapon in a wide arc toward Constantine’s middle.

  He arched his body back, but whatever sharp implement she’d impaled on the short handle snagged the wide woven fabric of his tunic and caught the skin of his ribs. He hissed as he felt it slice him but in the same moment brought the butt of his hilt down upon the woman’s forearm, causing her to shriek in pain and the weapon to fly off into the night-soaked weeds.

  Constantine didn’t wait to see if she would produce other hidden armaments from her raggedy costume, stepping forward and taking her feet from beneath her, his left hand already at her throat as he followed her down to the ground. He pinned her legs with his own, held her arms close to her sides as he gripped her narrow neck just below her jaw.

  Her breaths whistled in and out of her nostrils even as Constantine’s own chest heaved, but she didn’t cry out again, didn’t beg him for mercy this time.

  “Who are you?” he growled.

  He flinched as the hot wad of saliva found his eye, and in the next instant the woman’s forehead shot toward him, busting his nose. He dropped his sword as she thrashed and bucked beneath him and nearly squirmed free, but Constantine jerked her aright once more, feeling warm blood trickling down his chin. He drew back his right hand and struck her across the face.

  The next moment found him effectively blinded as the handful of dirt and rubble she threw at him found its mark in his eyes, and then her knee raised beneath him and drove his vulnerable manhood into his stomach. Constantine gasped and curled into himself as the woman bucked free, but even in his sickening agony, he remembered his sword laying on the ground behind them.

  Constantine fell sideways, reaching for the weapon even as the woman dove for it. His hand curled around her arm and jerked her backward; her small, bony fist found his throat. He yanked her again, pushed her behind him as her feet continued to kick out into his ribs, his flank, his left kidney.

  Constantine wondered if anything short of death would stop this woman.

  He finally felt his fingers curl around the hilt of his sword and he gained one knee as he swung it around to point it at the woman who was now also kneeling on the ground. She stopped her lunge toward him and wobbled for a moment. They each gained their feet as if mirror images, their eyes never leaving one another.

  She spat into the weeds and then brought the tail of her cloak up to press it to her mouth. After a moment she held it before her face and glanced down with a grimace.

  “Bastard,” she mutt
ered and then looked up at Constantine as the moon peeked out from behind a cloud, its pale light glancing off the woman’s sharp jawline, the flipped up ends of her strangely cropped hair, the dark slant of her eyebrows.

  Constantine stared at the woman, the moonlight revealing such a specter of his long-ago, happy past here in this haunted field of despair.

  “Lady Theodora?” he said, the tip of his sword wobbling.

  The woman stilled, her eyes widening the slightest bit as her already swollen lips parted. Her fine brows raised above features much too sharp to belong to the only child of Benningsgate Castle’s neighboring lord, but too remarkable to be owned by any other.

  “At last,” she whispered and then looked down at the bloodied hem of her cloak as if to confirm it. Her gaze found Constantine’s again. “I’ve gone mad at last. You’re dead.”

  He shook his head, his thoughts loud and buzzing like a hive of bees. “What are you doing here?” And then, through the deafening hum, the recollection of her name fought its way through the confusion of Constantine’s mind.

  . . . celebrate the installation of Lord Glayer Felsteppe as Earl of Rosemont, as well as his marriage to our beloved Lady Theodora while on their travels to that Holy City of Jerusalem . . .

  Theodora Rosemont began to chuckle, drawing Constantine’s attention back to the present. Her laughter deepened and she brought her fingertips to her mouth again. “What am I doing here?” Her hands raised up to cover the ghastly black hollows around her eyes even as her shrill laughter echoed in the ward. “What am I doing here?” She dropped her hands to her sides and stared at him, her shoulders still hitching with senseless mirth. “I’m here because I’m dead, too. Benningsgate is the perfect place for those who have lost their lives through unimaginable tragedy, wouldn’t you agree? You must, else you wouldn’t be here.”

  Constantine’s heart flinched but still held his sword pointed at Lady Theodora; what had they called her all those years ago?

  “Dori,” he remembered aloud without meaning to.

  The name hung between them, and it was as if his speaking it broke whatever spell of desperation and madness gripped the broken woman before him.

  Her face went slack, her eyes—black in the night of the ward—empty. “You’re too late,” she accused, and her voice was so full of bitterness, of resentment, that Constantine felt she was holding him liable for her trials.

  What did she mean? That Constantine was too late to save Christian, Patrice? Too late to prevent the destruction of Benningsgate? Too late to stop the marriage of the daughter of a noble ally to his own greatest enemy?

  “I know,” he answered. She continued to stare at him and so he aired his own grievance against her. “You married Glayer Felsteppe.”

  Theodora nodded.

  “Are you . . . living here? At Benningsgate?”

  After a moment she nodded again. “He thinks I’m dead.”

  “You look as though you nearly are,” Constantine blurted out.

  She neither agreed with nor disputed the observation as the night chill descended in the ward, as if someone had suddenly thrown a great, cold, wet blanket over the ruin.

  “Glayer Felsteppe killed my wife and son.”

  “I know,” she said, repeating his earlier answer.

  “I’ve come to kill him.”

  Theodora Rosemont shook her head slightly. “You can’t do that, Lord Gerard.”

  And Constantine felt in that moment that he knew what Theodora had experienced when he’d said her pet name aloud. The sound of his title on her lips was a foreign thing, startling and bittersweet; that name belonged to another time, to another person in a different life.

  She turned toward Benningsgate’s crumbled north wing and began walking away from him, her stooped posture returning. Constantine wondered that this was the woman who had, so recently, seemed more than capable of fighting him to the death.

  She called up to the sky. “I hardly think it appropriate that I invite you in to your own home.”

  Constantine didn’t know where she meant to go, approaching what appeared to be nothing more than a pile of rubble where once family apartments and garderobes spanned the curtain wall between the hall and the tall oratory tower. He suddenly found that his own feet would not move.

  Theodora Rosemont looked over her shoulder, and when she saw him still standing in the ward, she stopped and turned to face him. She waited.

  It took him several long moments before he found the courage, not knowing what devastating memories he would encounter on the other side of the rock. But eventually he lowered his head and commanded his boots to move forward, following Glayer Felsteppe’s wife into the corpse of his past.

  Chapter 4

  Dori’s face throbbed and her shoulder ached from her battle with Constantine Gerard as she led the man himself toward the pile of toppled battlements stretched out in the ward like a fallen dragon. She didn’t hesitate when she came to the barricade of rock but clambered over the summit and then moved to her bottom, ready to drop over the side. She paused, turning her head slightly to make sure he still followed.

  He was right behind her and glanced up as he climbed. “The doorway still stands?” he said, speaking of the small entrance to the middle corridor, partially below ground.

  “Yes. But the upper corridor has collapsed,” she warned and heard the rasp of disuse in her voice. She hadn’t spoken to another living soul in nearly two months. “Mind that you don’t disturb it further.” She slid in hitches and jerks down the fallen slab that deposited her into the shallow stairwell abutting the doorway, not caring if it sounded as though she was ordering him about; she was. If he caused the tunnel’s complete collapse, her refuge would be gone.

  Theodora Rosemont hadn’t survived the past months only to be thwarted by his high-and-mighty Lord Gerard’s return.

  Her feet touched down on the crumbled rock spilled out through the doorway from the corridor. She ducked through the arch and into pitch blackness, the gaping holes in the wall walk above too far away to let the moonlight through.

  “This way,” she called over her shoulder as she began to duck walk over the rubble, one arm stretched out, her fingers skimming the soot-gummed rock for the telltale hole where a wooden beam had once rested.

  Behind her, Constantine Gerard coughed, and Dori remembered that the corridor still stank of old fire. She had simply become accustomed to it.

  Her fingers found the hole and she cupped her palm around the edge while moving to her bottom and turning her chin over her shoulder once more. “Careful,” she warned sharply, feeling the warmth of him come upon her suddenly, sending a little cascade of silt and debris before her. “The way ahead is collapsed. Give me time to go through before you follow.”

  The only answer he gave was in his labored breaths. Dori didn’t think the journey arduous for a man of his strong appearance, so his efforts must have been of the emotional sort. She braced her right hand on the last crumbling edges of the upper corridor floor before lifting herself up and then into the black.

  She tottered a bit when she scrambled to gain her feet from the pile and remove herself from the path of Constantine Gerard, who came through almost immediately after her. He tumbled to the lowest level of stone if what she heard was any evidence, little pebbles rattling across the floor around his muffled curse.

  Dori sighed to herself. “Are you injured?” She couldn’t see him at all now, the lower corridor completely cut off from above.

  “No,” he answered curtly. “Where are you?”

  “Here,” she said, turning. “Follow my voice. We’ll have light in a moment.” She heard the closeness of her words in her own ears. “The floor is mostly clear at this end of the passage.” She heard his muffled oof. “Mostly.”

  She found the handle with her outstretched hands and moved the latch. An instant later, what seemed to be golden rays of sunlight poured into the black corridor, although Dori knew it was nothing more than the
meager light of a single candle.

  “The oratory,” Lord Gerard said, although she was certain the words weren’t for her benefit.

  She passed into the small, square room and closed the door after he entered, bending to drop the slender stake into the groove in the floor. It wouldn’t stop someone intent on entering, but it would give her enough warning to prepare to defend herself.

  When she looked around at him, she found him staring at the walls, at the altar she was using for a mundane table, the bench that doubled as her cot, made up with the holy cloths from the altar. She knew he was looking at her small pile of hay in the corner and was glad she had burned most of the soiled portion the night before.

  He turned his face toward hers in the cold room that never seemed to warm sufficiently. There was a spark in his green eyes from the candle flame, and the light burnished the long plait hanging over his shoulder. “How long have you been here?”

  “Forty-seven days,” Dori answered without pause.

  He stared at her. “Why?”

  She responded with her own question. “Have you anything to eat?”

  “In my satchel,” he said and then glanced toward the door. “I stashed it above when I heard you on the wall walk.”

  “So you did hear me,” she said. “You didn’t give sign that you had.”

  “I know,” he said, and then turned to the table and picked up one of the precious long candles she had left to light it on the little stub of flaming wick.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. “Those are my only candles. I must keep one lighted at all times, lest I have nothing with which to start my fires.”

  “They’re my candles, actually,” he said and walked to the door, pausing to remove the stave from the floor. “I’d see the true condition of the corridors we traveled, determine whether they’re in imminent danger of collapse.”