Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“They won’t turn you out. You speak French, Italian, and Provençal. How many times have they used you to translate? Just let me in, and I’ll do most of it.”

“They’ll see you.”

“Not if you distract them.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Fall down the stairs with something loud. A pan or something.”

This was beginning to sound fun.

He would get a beating, but some things were worth a beating.

And he liked the little Spanish page with the French accent, even if he looked a bit like a girl.

“Why should I?”

“If you do, I’ll give you this ivory comb I found in the street.”

He licked his lips.

An ivory comb.

“It has angels painted on it.”

Isnard liked angels.

In fact, he thought he’d seen one last night.

Delphine and Thomas rode past the tanners and parchment makers on the banks of the canal fed by a branch of the river Sorgues, smelling the stink of their industry. He rode Jibreel and she rode her little palfrey. The horse felt good under his hips. He thought this might be the last time he ever rode a horse, but he didn’t mind. He had died this morning, and he knew what it was now.

Tonight would bring more death, probably his.

He was ready.

This would be worse than Crécy, but sweet where that was bitter.

The fine armor he had worn in another body mostly fit him, though the chest was tight and the belly loose. The breastplate and leg armor were all Delphine could get out of the house, so his own rusty chain sat beneath them. He had also left behind the Navarrese surcoat and rode with his breastplate gleaming, though dented, and his head bare—nobody would take him for the Comte d’Évreux now.

They left the city by the Imbert Gate, but they did not travel far. In fact, they called at the first large building they found, just by the river.

The Franciscan brotherhood lived in a large, proud building, as befit the large, proud city it served; this did not sit well with all of the brothers, whose attraction to the order had more to do with Christian poverty than ecclesiastic pomp. And yet, here was the capital of Christianity, and here they could do the most to protect their order from charges of heresy. Better to let the popes build them fine churches than to be burned on humble pyres. They allowed the rich to bury their dead in the churchyard, as though the Devil were too simple to find a bad onion in good soil; and when the affluent tried to buy back their wasted lives, showering the monks with money from their deathbeds, the brothers used their wealth to spread the word of the impoverished Christ.

They never closed their doors to anyone, and their hospitality during these months of pestilence had exacted a heavy toll.

Only seven brothers remained of forty.

Brother Albrecht, an Alsatian with the beginnings of cataracts, welcomed the knight and his daughter.

He helped them stable their horses.

He showed them to a room where they could sleep through midday, and then showed them to the altar of the Virgin, where they could pray.

They told him they wished to have strong bodies and pure hearts.

They were going to the feast in the Courtyard of Honor.

Some lad of dubious merit was to be given a cardinal’s hat.

It seemed curious that the knight wished to borrow a friar’s habit, but Brother Albrecht was used to the vanities of the worldly—many men asked to be buried in the brown of St. Francis (as though a feathered stone might fly!). Brother Albrecht felt the man’s chest and cheeks (was he preparing himself for the day he would need his hands to read faces as well as hearts?) and found no harm in him, but rather a long-buried goodness. So what if he wore rusty armor beneath his shiny breastplate; so what if his beard was unkempt and his fingernails long? Who refuses a gold coin because it has a little mud on it?

He gave him the new habit Brother Egidius had never gotten to wear, having caught the Pest the day it was given to him.

God knew they had more habits now than living men to fill them.

“You’re not going to do anything to shame the order, are you?”

“No,” the big man said.

“How about you, little one?”

She shook her head, smiling.

She had been smiling since she got here.

Brother Albrecht understood.

Blessed Francis just called some to him.

It was getting dark.

Delphine took Thomas’s sword from its sheath.

“What are you going to do, break it so I won’t hurt anybody?” he joked. She gave him that dry, tight-lipped head shake he knew so well. Then she did something that made him gasp.

She cut her hands on the blade.

Quite deliberately.

She smeared her blood up one side of it and down the other, massaging it into the runnel, on the point, on quillons and pommel, and into every notch it had gathered in the tiltyard and on the field and in the furtherance of theft.

As if it were a holy oil.

It is.

He gasped again, but this was a gasp of recognition.

Jesus whoring Christ, do I have to watch you every second?

You bleeding all over my things doesn’t help me, you, or anybody. Understand?

The thing in the murk had not been bothered by the billhook or the boar spear; it recoiled only when struck by his sword. His sword had killed it.

Her blood killed it.

Her blood in its heart.

The armorer at the night tourney would not touch it.

Christ, what the hell is on this thing?

I killed something foul in a river.

Hey, Jacmel, you want any of this?

He kissed the bloody sword now, and put it in its sheath.

She took the spear from its case and gave him that, too.

He threw his dagger to the floor and wedged the spear into the sheath at the back of his belt. He smiled to think he had just shoved a relic worth the whole of Avignon into a piece of greasy leather near his ass.

She bent him down and kissed his cheeks.

Daughter witch page saint prophet angel what are you what are you You

Delphine

“What are you?” he said.

“Two things, I think. But soon I’ll be just one.”

He shook his head to keep from crying.

He could not, he would not watch her be hurt.

Not if it meant his soul.

“Am I still not to kill anyone?”

“Not men.”

“What does that mean?”

“We won’t be facing men.”

Robert Hanicotte spent the night before his elevation in a state of bliss only mildly tempered by the memory of the things he had seen in the vineyard. He ate the game fowl and sausages and even drank the wine, sweet from its late harvest, and with just a hint of something

dead feet corpses’ feet

else. The something else was easily forgotten, though it tended to bob back up again, requiring further attention at inattention. So much of life demanded a kind of truce with perceived facts—one could not allow the suffering of the kitchen women, for example, to spoil the taste of capon. Neither would those women trouble themselves about the gnawings of a rat at the summer sausage; just cut that end off and serve the rest.

Silently.

He did not know, now, what he had seen at Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but it did not bear further thought. He had done the right thing warning His Holiness about the little witch.

goodness came from her she was benevolent like Matthieu her priest you betrayed one of your brother’s flock