Guy Kay - Ysabel

“No,” said Ned.

He walked away then, towards his father and Greg and the still-talking guard. He gestured as he went, pointing towards the road and the van across the way and the Roman arch, with the Celts in bondage on it, and taken in slavery.

They went back south through the Valley of Hell.

Greg drove past Les Baux again, turning right, heading for Arles. No one was talking as they approached the city. Ned had already briefed them, then he’d done it again on the phone with Aunt Kim.

He hadn’t told any of them about Cadell spiking the other man’s head on a stake, or threatening Ned if he didn’t get out of the picture. What was the point? Was he going to leave? Fly home to Montreal and study for a math test? Melanie wasn’t his love, or anything totally stupid like that, but you didn’t have to be in love with someone to fight for them. He should have said that, back there.

The real point, Aunt Kim had just explained—and she’d repeated it to his father when Ned handed him the phone—was that if Cadell had been at Glanum, it meant that their plan wasn’t so foolish. That was what they had to take away from this. If the two men—or at least one of them—were checking the same locations, they were on the right track themselves.

Well, yeah, the right track—plus a couple of euros—would get you a café au lait somewhere.

Ned hadn’t said that part, either.

Kimberly and Kate, with Steve, had walked through Nîmes already, his aunt reported. The Roman arena, the Roman temple, quiet downtown streets with shops closed for the holiday. Aunt Kim hadn’t picked up any sense of the others, even though Nîmes apparently had a long association with magic and sorcery.

They were in their car now, too, on their way to Béziers. Ned knew something about that now: Kill them all. God will know his own.

He was just as happy not to be going there. He wondered, abruptly, if he’d have had a reaction to that long-ago massacre, the way he’d had at the mountain. Not something he was anxious to repeat.

Greg pulled onto the ring road around Arles.

He stopped at a red light, then drove slowly, looking for a place to park. It was not quite noon. Traffic had been light coming in, but a flea market was set up inside the ring road. Hundreds of people were browsing it.

Wonderful, Ned thought. Like, we go up and down, dodge the pickpockets, and Ysabel will be buying sandals or hand cream or something.

He shook his head. Wrong way to think. Cadell had been at Glanum. They were doing the right thing. You had to keep telling yourself that.

Greg stopped quickly, put on his turn signal, and endured a blaring horn behind him till the vehicle he’d spotted pulled away from the curb. He slid the van into a spot Ned would have said was too small. They all got out. The street was shaded on this side; the flea market was in the light.

“What now?” Greg asked.

He was looking at Ned, not Ned’s father. There was still something unsettling about that. How was he supposed to know?

On the other hand, who else but him, really?

Ned glanced at his dad. “We wander, I guess. Go through this thing, then back to the Roman sites?”

“They’ll be closed. But, yeah. Are you…feeling anything?” Edward Marriner asked again. He got that apprehensive look on his face whenever he said that.

It should have been funny.

Ned shook his head. “No, but I’m really not good at this, and those guys know how to screen themselves. Believe me, I’ll tell you if I get something.”

“You didn’t tell me back there.”

Mild tone, but eyebrows raised, in a way that Ned knew very well. First “parental” comment of the day. He had been expecting more, actually. Things had changed.

“I told you, nothing happened till we were at opposite ends of the place. I couldn’t, like, ask him to hang on a sec till I got my dad.” He looked across the street.

It was noisy and crowded, cheerful people milling about on holiday. A guy in a truck was selling pizza slices and soft drinks, another one had ice cream cones. There were tables with knock-off shoes and shirts, old records, books, chairs, walking sticks, jars of honey, olive oil, skirts and bathing suits, kitchenware, pottery. A very tall, very dark man in a bright-red African robe was selling watches for five euros. Someone else had farm implements: shovels, hoes, rakes. A wheelbarrow. Ned saw a guy his own age holding a rusted old sword and laughing.

Why shouldn’t he be laughing on a spring day?

“Okay, details! What kind of woman we looking for?” Greg asked. He pretended to take out a notebook, cop-on-the-beat style. “Describe the perp?”

Ned had been waiting for this, too, and sort of afraid of it. How did you describe Ysabel? How could you possibly?

He shrugged. “It won’t work like that. You’re not going to just spot her. But she’s…tall, she’s got red hair, I guess, auburn, chestnut? But that can be covered, right? She looks young, but not…really young, if you know what I mean?”

“That’s so helpful, citizen,” Greg said wryly. “Is she pretty, at least?”

Ned looked at him, and then at his dad. He was remembering.

“You have no idea,” he said. He crossed the road into sunlight, cutting between cars, and the other two followed him.

She has spent the night in the cemetery.

When the wind picked up and it grew cold, she wrapped the stolen shawl around herself, then went to enter a family vault she knew. The bodies were very long gone: caskets cracked open and raided for whatever of value might have been buried with the dead. But the old iron key turned out to still be hidden where it has been all these centuries.

Each time she has come here, she’s expected it to be gone: found, lost, one or the other. Lost to her, because it has been found. Each time it is still under the stone.

The covering boulder was heavy, but she knew the trick of tilting it. On the other hand, the keyhole had rusted shut this time. She couldn’t turn the key any more. She stood outside, under stars, and made herself accept another aspect of time going by. It happens, one way or another, each return.

She’d ordered this tomb built herself, for a maid of honour, and that dead girl’s family had grown in significance in generations following, expanding the vault. She’d seen it, returning, in different lives.

Changes such as this, over the years, no longer disconcert her as much, though there was a time when they did. She has known too many by now. Other things might be difficult to deal with—the eyes of one man, the voice of the other, the memory of both—but not changes in the world.

Money had been a small problem when she first left the plateau in the night. The cache she went looking for was gone; the city had grown north, overrun the wood where she’d buried it seventy years ago.

And currency has changed, in any event. It wouldn’t have even mattered if she’d found her cache. Francs weren’t going to get her food or a taxi ride this year. Euros. She had allowed herself to be amused. There was always something new.

Cars were faster, and there were more of them. There was also more light when night fell. Telephones moved with you now, it seemed, unconnected to anything. Men and women walking the streets talking animatedly to someone who wasn’t there.

But in the bright, crowded city women left purses carelessly hooked on chair backs in cafés under the plane trees (the same trees, same cafés, some of them), or they left their shawls, on a spring night, when they went inside to adjust their lipstick.

She’d taken her time, up and down the wide, remembered street, and chosen a purse at one sidewalk café near the statue of King René, and a green shawl outside another one, halfway back along the street. Green hasn’t always been a colour she has favoured, but this time it seems to be.