Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

Yes, this was the man in de Chauliac’s dream.

“I’m in the right place. What is that man’s name?”

“This geezer,” Sournois said, standing up and patting the man’s soft belly proprietarily, “is no less than a Norman comte and a future king of Navarre.”

“The Comte d’Évreux,” de Chauliac said.

“That’s the one,” Sournois said, sticking a thumb in the man’s navel and pinching a handful of fat hard enough to make the barely conscious young fellow groan again.

“Get him down.”

“And put him where?” the gaoler said, growing suspicious.

“In whatever you intended to remove him with when you were through. He’s clearly not walking anywhere.”

Sournois got closer to the doctor, but the doctor did not step back.

“I have it from the Holy Father himself that this man is to stay where he is. He’s coming by personally before the feast tomorrow. Might even come tonight.”

The doctor was aware of a cold sweat beginning under his robes.

He will not come yet please not yet insh’allah.

“And I have it from the good Clement that he is to leave with me. You might recognize that seal,” the doctor said, handing his parchment to the other, who recognized his name on the outside and snapped the seal.

He frowned and stared at the writ with confusion and distaste.

“It says that you are to release your close prisoner to me so that he does not die. Which he most certainly will, and soon, if he keeps swinging from your ceiling.”

“But why’s it in Latin? It’s always in French for me. I read a little French.”

“Perhaps His Holiness forgot your lack of education. Shall we wait here for him so we may remind him? Frankly, I don’t know if I can save this man, and I would much rather have him die in your care than mine.”

Sournois put the writ in his pouch.

“To hell with that,” he said, and went to fetch a handcart.

Thomas was cold.

He hurt so badly in so many places that a strange sort of numbness had settled into him. His chief complaint was the cold, which felt as though it would never be out of him.

He did not know who the man was that wheeled him out of the oubliettes and through a door meant for horses and carts, but he sensed that he would have died had he remained. Not of his injuries. Something had been coming for him, and he had just escaped. Had he remained, he would not only have died, he would have died spectacularly.

Horribly.

The man with the fly’s head would have bitten him.

He shivered.

He looked up at the man wheeling him, and the man looked down at him with kind eyes. He wanted to ask him who he was, but he didn’t have the strength.

When he saw that Thomas was still shivering, despite the garments that had been laid across him, the wheeling man stopped and removed his robes, revealing a long shirt that bore the irremovable stains of surgeries.

He placed this around Thomas, and Thomas smiled.

A doctor, then.

He might yet get home to Arpentel and see his wife.

“Don’t speak.” The man smiled down at him. “You have only one task, and that is to live. See that you do it.”

He wanted to tell the doctor to get the arrow out of his tongue, but then he realized that was another doctor, another time. He wanted to ask him if angel’s blood was made of egg whites, but that was wrong, too.

And no wife was waiting for him.

He wrinkled up his face as if to cry, but didn’t let himself.

He lost consciousness.

When he came to again, a girl was looking at the wheeling man.

He was looking wide-eyed at her, as though he saw something Thomas did not see.

Delphine? Was that her name?

Her hair was short.

“Remember this, boy,” the doctor said to a young man Thomas had not seen before, who also stared wide-eyed at Delphine.

What were they seeing?

Delphine put her fingers to her lips, and the man and the boy left.

Now she looked down at Thomas, smiling.

Those gray eyes.

She cooled his brow with her sleeve, which had been dunked in the Rhône.

“I’m going to die,” he managed.

“You already did die, remember? You’re the dead one.”

He felt his spirit coming loose, like a ship from its moorings, but she lifted his head and pointed.

“Hold on,” the girl said, “just for a moment.”

She put her hand behind his head and lifted so he could see.

Something was coming out of the river, lit by the moon.

A man.

A man in rusty armor, carrying a sword by the blade, cruciform.

A heavily muscled man with a graying beard and a scarred face.

Him.

He weakly shook the ruined head that was not really his.

Thomas de Givras stepped dripping from the river, eyes closed, a sleepwalker.

Delphine got out of the dripping revenant’s way, and he came to the cart. Thomas was afraid. Was he already dead?

He watched himself bend over, getting closer.

Dripping on him.

He felt very dizzy; the world was going black.

He was being kissed now by his own mouth, not as lovers kiss, with tongues, but as true lovers kiss, sharing breath.

He breathed out of the comte’s lungs and into his own.

The ship of his soul lurched away from his false body.

And into his true one.

He opened his eyes.

The body of the comte twitched now, once, then twice, only now it was under him. His mouth, his actual mouth, was on the dead man, and he pulled up. He breathed in, his strong lungs filling with air, his hands clutching, ready to grab weapons or levers or to brace against the pillars of the temple. He was strong again. He ran his hand through his full beard, and tugged on his longish hair.

He laughed, and Delphine laughed, too, shushing him as he put the doctor’s robes on over his cold, wet armor.

She now bent and kissed the cheek of the dead man in the cart.

“Give the river back its due,” she said.

Thomas tipped the body into the water, and it floated for a moment, and then the darkness took it away.

“Isnard!”

The chamber boy at Elysium House peered out the window and down at the street, the darkness of which still resisted the prying of the low morning sun between the close buildings.

“Here, Isnard!”

He wrinkled his nose and put down the piss-pot he had been about to chuck. Was that his new friend, the page? And had not that page served the arrested knight?

“Diego?” he called down in a carefully measured whisper.

“Yes!” Delphine said.

She, too, was an expert whisperer.

“What are you doing here?”

He looked behind him to make sure no hand was reaching to yank his ear for idleness.

“I need a favor.”

“What is it?” he said. “And be quick!”

Why was Diego in his nightclothes?

“My master’s things—have they been taken?”

“No. The room is as it was. The carpenter is coming tomorrow to fix the door.”

“And my master’s horse?”

“In the stables, eating twice his share of hay. The English lord means to take him.”

“Open the door for me.”

“What? I can’t!”

“Yes you can. Open the door, and help me fetch out my master’s armor and horse.”

He looked behind him again.

“A horse? They’ll hang me for stealing a horse!”

“It’s not stealing. The horse belongs to us.”

He considered this.

“All the same, they’ll kill me! Then they’ll turn me out, and my father will kill me again!”