Gaius Julius grunted, his left eye twitching in suppressed anger. The girl, dressed now in a simple black tunic and a midlength gray skirt, slid past him and out of his line of sight. The razor-sharp iron tip of the spring-dart traced a line along the folds of skin at his neck. / never should have caught her that day, the dead man growled to himself. / should have let her go…
Upstairs, the rain had settled into a steady downpour, intermittently lit by the rumble and crack of lightning in the hills around the villa. The dead man carried the Prince to the north bedroom and lay him in a bed that had been carted up from the city a week before at Krista’s command. Gaius Julius pulled heavy quilts over the trembling figure of the boy, while the girl relit the fires in the grate and the braziers near the windows. The heavy shutters had blown open; now she closed them again, securing bronze wheel latches shaped like asps. The sound of the storm receded and Gaius Julius suddenly felt weak himself. His hands shook as he sat down. The boy’s color had grown worse.
Krista caught the dead man’s eye and nodded.
“You will die as he dies,” she said. “I saw you thinking, down there, that you might be free. You won’t. If he dies, you go back to the worms. Do you want that?”
Gaius Julius did not answer. She met his gaze.
Finally he shook his head. “No. I want to live.”
“Then go and bring strong wine, whatever broth or soup you can find, and more firewood.”
Krista searched the other upstairs rooms while the dead man was gone, finding two more blankets and another brazier. She dragged the heavy thing, ornamented with legs carved like dolphins, their mouths holding up the corners of a fluted shell, back to the bedchamber. Her fingers were quick to sprinkle oil over the dead coals and then to strike flint. Little flames curled up and she blew gently on them. When Gaius Julius returned, laden with a stewpot, two amphorae, and three stout logs, the room was lit with a cheerful glow.
Krista broke the seal on the jugs of wine and poured the thick burgundy fluid into a shallow copper bowl placed over the nearest brazier. It steamed as it hit the hot metal. After a moment she lifted the bowl off the flames and poured it into a heavy mug of dark-green glass. A ladle of the soup broth followed. Crouching on the side of the bed, the girl peeled back the eyelids of the Prince. His skin was chalky and his breath was very faint. To her delicate touch, his face was cold as stone. Hissing in despair, she pried his teeth apart and spilled the warm mixture into his mouth. He twitched and nearly knocked the glass from her hand, but she stroked the side of his throat with her fingers.
His throat muscles convulsed and he swallowed the broth. Krista held his head up, making sure that he could take it down without choking on it. This done, she poured more into his mouth. A faint blush began to tint his lips.
“Make more,” she said to the dead man. “We give him as much as he can take.” Gaius Julius nodded and began heating more wine in the copper bowl.
Outside, the mutter of the storm continued and the streams that flowed from the hills rose steadily toward their banks, clogged with the pale corpses of fish and frogs.
Krista and the dead man sat in the bedchamber. The girl was under the covers, holding the sleeping body of the Prince close. He was still cold, but the dreadful pall had left his face and hands. A small black cat with sleek fur was curled up next to her on the pillows. Gaius Julius was sitting next to the fire, feeding small sticks into the steady flame of the logs. The twigs snapped and crackled as they were consumed. A light piney smoke drifted up from the lip of the grate. By a clever trick, the heat of the blaze radiated out into the room, warming the dead man’s cold bones, while clay pipes took the smoke away and out of the roof of the house.
“Why haven’t you left?” Gaius Julius’ voice was quiet with exhaustion and the fragile peace that had settled over the firelit room. “There’ve been no lack of chances since that day I caught you on the stairs.”
Krista considered for a moment, then said, “The day after you caught me and locked me back up, the Prince came down to see me in my cell. He told me that he and the Persian had discovered that a terrible curse lay upon everyone in the city. Only he and the Persian could know of it and live by their powers. He said that he would not tell anyone, even his brother, of what he had found unless he could lift the curse. I didn’t understand, so he unlocked the door of the cell and took me upstairs.
“There was a wicker box on the garden porch with a pigeon in it. The Prince said it had come from the city just thafday, from the palace. He wrote a little note on a scrap of paper and put it in a little tube on the pigeon’s leg. The pigeon flew from his hands, out over the garden. Do you know what happened to it?”
Gaius Julius stood, his hands stretched out to the fire. The shutters rattled a little as thunder boomed over the dark hills.
“No,” he said. “What happened to the pigeon?” Krista curled closer to the Prince, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. “When it flew out of the garden, there was a dark flash, like a great bird striking. Then there was nothing but a cloud of feathers falling out of the sky. I said that an owl must have seen it, but the Prince took me to the edge of the garden, where the Persian had put those piles of stones. The pigeon was there, or what was left of it. It was already rotten with worms and fly eggs.
“ ‘See?’ he said. ‘Everything that knows this secret dies unless it is protected. The house is safe; you are safe if you are with me or with Abdmachus. There is no better cell than this knowledge.’ So, old man, I stay here, because there is nowhere to go. It is the same for you, or for the servants.“
Gaius Julius stood in the darkness by the window. He had feared as much. The confusion of plans and stratagems that had been fermenting in his mind for the last two weeks condensed, a dewdrop trickling down off a leaf to drop, a pure sphere, into a pool of still water. He turned toward her.
“There is only one thing to do, then,” he said. “If either of us are to escape this, we must do everything we can to help the boy destroy this curse.”
Krista opened one sleepy eye and peered at the old man. “Are you saying, confused old man, that we’re not doing everything we could to help him?”
Gaius Julius smiled? the firelight throwing deep canyons onto his face. “No, child, we haven’t done everything we could. If I understand this aright, we’ve only just started doing everything that we could do.”
Krista sniffed and pulled the quilt over her head. It was very late and she was very tired.
The old man sat for a time thinking, feeding the last of the twigs into the fire. He realized that this was the first time that he could remember since he had been a boy that he had actually been alone, in as safe a place as he could reasonably expect, with the time to think. The first time in many years of his memory the pressure of his dreams did not trap him. He started and stood up suddenly.
He did not dream!
Gaius Julius grinned in the dark room, a wide smile, from ear to ear. He thought back to the first moment of his new life, sprung from the moldy earth of the tomb, and realized that he had not dreamed, not once. Weeks had passed and when he closed his tired eyes, only an“ abyssal blackness waited, free of voices and portents.
“I am free,” he said aloud, but Krista was asleep and the small black cat only yawned, showing a pink tongue and white fangs before tucking its nose under its tail and going back to sleep.
The narrow valley led up onto a barren ridge. Wind whipped across the rocky summit and the Gothic bodyguards drew their cloaks tightly around them. Maxian wheeled his horse, staring out over a vast landscape of pinnacles and rounded, rocky mountains. Clouds and fog filled the canyons between the peaks, making them helmets of unseen soldiers rising from a sea of white froth. Maxian’s father ignored the cold, though it blew his fine white hair into a faint halo around his head. He pointed west, across a valley filled with smoke. Maxian turned and saw, as he had as a boy, the citadel of Montsegur, aflame.