Sorry about the first post of this chapter. FF got rid of all the line breaks I added to divide everything up.
Chapter Nine: Winter, Benjamin
Benjamin's life was a series of confessionals.
His penance never seemed to stick.
He entered the box, he said the words, he crossed himself, and then he lied.
"That is all I remember, father," he would say.
He said this more times than he could count. It had been countless days since he'd last been human, but years? Those had been about a hundred and twenty-two. And still in all that time, he could not sleep. And the sun still burned his eyes when he went out walking in the day.
He'd encountered other beasts of his kind. They did not share the same plight as he. They could walk in the sun without their eyes burning. They could control their urges. They no longer suffered the unending burn that lingered in the back of their throats.
He killed his kind too, relishing, at least in part, that they were gone. Finding meaning in the burn of his eyes and of his throat – reassured in his belief that they were signs of God's favor. That he suffered and endured because God had not yet finished testing him. Found solace in the fact that he burned because one day in the end, when he'd fulfilled the lord's task for him, all would be absolved.
Once he ended the line that began it all, he would be free of all sin. He would be free to return to his father in the kingdom of heaven.
This was the path of the martyrs. This was the path to salvation.
And so, he lied in every confessional.
"That is all I remember, father," he would say and then he would perform his penance with a hollow chest – a void where his soul used to be – and he would tip his hood over his eyes and walk back out into the burning sun, and he would carry on with his never-ending existence. Moving from place to place, ripping into the throats of his unassuming prey – forever, this was how his life would continue to be.
Undying. Unresting. Unsatiated.
He never mentioned everything he remembered.
He never told them about the demon who had cursed him into this infernal existence. Never told them that he met his maker, not in a church, but on crusade. He never told them how he had been unmade from the image of God.
The sun had been hot, and his armor heavy. He walked alongside a knight who rode a magnificent steed. Just another man he'd met along the way. But this man, he would soon find, was far more than he appeared to be. They were allies, but they were not the same. Their people flew different banners. They hailed from different kingdoms. They had endured different walks in life. All this aside, the knight had been kind, if a little reserved.
Benjamin walked.
Matthew rode.
His cloak was white. The cross on his chest was red, announcing to all who the world he was and what he fought for.
This was not Matthew's first time to the holy land. He had gone and fought, returned home, and journeyed back again. He was a templar who attended the Council of Clermont. He was a warrior from the Auvergne.
Benjamin was an infantry conscript from Kingdom of Germany.
He did not speak Occitan as the de Clermont bannermen did, but Matthew was important. He was high born and educated, so he spoke to Benjamin in his native tongue.
"We fight for something more," Matthew had said.
His voice was wry, though Benjamin did not catch it then. Deceptive, though Benjamin had not thought such things at the time. He'd been naïve.
"Same as you," Matthew had acknowledged him as a brother in arms, had acknowledged him as someone who was doing the right thing.
Benjamin nodded, a smile on his face, the brand of the cross on his forehead—a sign of his undying faith. There was triumph here yet to come.
"To liberate our holy kingdom," he said for Matthew – who was far subtler and more reserved than he. The other man smiled in an arch manner and nodded.
"In two months'time," Benjamin continued, resting his hand proudly on the pommel of his blade. "Jerusalem shall be free."
"That is all I remember, father," he would say again.
But he never talked of the things he saw in battle those days. Of the deaths that were far more brutal than the meeting of man and blade. He never told the priests of the men who fought with the cross on their backs but tore at their enemies with their teeth.
He saw Matthew then. His eyes cut through the chaos to the other man he had briefly considered a friend. The warrior whose eyes had gone black in battle; darker than any man's eyes he'd ever seen. And his skin which had gone taut as though in sickness, and wrinkles, like veins, that spread out around his eyes.
"What are you?" Benjamin whispered and drew back, pulling his blade from the belly of the man he had slain.
Matthew turned from him as though he had not registered Benjamin's scrutiny. Or even more so as though he were a demon too hell bent and too twisted to care.
Benjamin watched as the Chevalier de Clermont reached into the throat of another and ripped him clean of his vocal cords and his tongue. And then, from this man too, Matthew drank his fill. Mouth coming away from the fallen body, coated and dripping with blood.
"Foul beast," Benjamin whispered and crossed himself. He backed away as though he were not on a battlefield. He backed away as though there was no danger here aside from the danger presented by Matthew himself.
"Our father who art in heaven—"
He whispered a prayer, beneath the noise of the battle his bannermen waged. He cut his own path through the bodies that clashed and did not stop to count how many men he had slain.
"—Hallowed be thy name—"
When the violence calmed and the other side retreated, his leaders and captains called for their men to collect the martyred dead. Benjamin picked through the bodies, still praying. And when night fell, he found he could not bring himself to go to bed.
"That is all I remember, father," he would say.
But he never mentioned the night everything changed.
Demons had cloaked themselves in human skins.
Benjamin trembled in the basement of a church beneath the place where the monks and priests chanted and prayed.
Demons had cloaked themselves in human skins.
He crossed himself. His hands were clean now. Scrubbed of the blood and excrement of battle. His torn tunic had been mended. His blade, wiped clean.
But he could not erase the things he had seen that day in battle.
Demons had come for the holy land. Matthew – who bore a cross same as he, who spoke of the same ideals, the same search for meaning – was no man at all.
He was not a man.
He was something more. Something worse.
Straight from the fiery pits of hell he had risen; he had donned the lord's armor; he had robbed a saint of his holy name. Now he sought to take the Holy Land for himself, and others like him.
Now, he sought to tear the Christian kingdom asunder. Sought to ruin Jerusalem from within.
Benjamin trembled and shook his head.
Today he had killed only those God had put in his path. It was the way. God forgave all sin.
But could God truly forgive a coward for running?
For that is what Benjamin had been. He had seen Satan's forces at work today on the battlefield and in the hearts and minds of men. He had seen the brutality that hell's forces had wrought.
And he had run.
Like a coward, he had run.
He had not acted in faith. He had not walked forth in the light of the lord and done as duty bade him.
He had fled from the horrible seen and now he sat curled in on himself in the basement of a church, praying for a mercy he did not deserve. Trembling from the terror that had forced him to flee.
No.
No, God could not forgive this grievous sin.
Benjamin would have to make amends, and all the while through his fearing and trembling the young crusader continued to pray.
"—Hallowed be thy name—"
And as he climbed the steps from the church basement to the world above, he did not greet the priest who spoke to him. He did not blink. He did not stray from the path he had chosen for himself – the one that led to his salvation. That led to penance.
And still he continued to pray.
"—Forgive us our debts, for we have also forgiven—"
And then in the entrance of the tavern now, where the men of God, and Satan's unholy demons, drank together and sang together and gambled their souls away, he lingered. There at the far table, amongst a group of white cloaked demons masquerading as men, was the one who disguised himself as Matthew.
"—lead us not into temptation," he whispered to himself as he made his way through the crowd. "—deliver us from the evil one."
Matthew's eyes flickered up to meet his. And they were still as black as the battlefield they had last seen each other on.
His memories were vague. Dark. There was a stone wall stained with water that leaked down from somewhere above. There was the cool touch of earth on his skin, and the harsh burn of need in his throat.
A wrist. He drank desperately. It coated his tongue. Soothed the burn.
Darkness, and the woosh of a presence quietly beside him.
He felt unlike himself.
He was bigger than his body, hollow where his soul once had been.
Everything hurt and he was exhausted.
But for days he did not sleep.
Could not sleep.
Benjamin wondered if he would ever sleep again.
For days he felt in him the sinful craving of a beast.
And he took from the wrist that which should not have been given.
He broke the stone wall where the water dripped down from above.
He took a step, and his foot disappeared into the earth. And a wave of terror washed over him at the thought that God allowed the lawless place beneath his feet to take him down. That his foot buried there in the earth was his first step in his eternal descent into hell.
And then a hand around his throat, a whisper that rung in his ears like a yell, and the black eyes of the demon that cloaked himself in the skin of a man and called himself Matthew.
Benjamin had struggled. Raged. But the demon held him still and the beast inside of him quieted and he burned again, and then a wrist to his mouth, and the soothing flow of lifeblood coated his throat.
It took the demon three days to realize Benjamin could not be tempted any further by sin.
It took the demon three days to realize Benjamin would still reveal him to the world, and they would burn together for their blasphemy.
Matthew left him in the desert. Deserted him, stumbling in the midday sun. Benjamin broke the earth with every step. Clawed at his blinded eyes with desperate hands.
And burned with the need for that horrible nectar. He suffered waking dreams of the man who had turned him, suffered dreams of Matthew's bleeding wrist. With eyes closed against the light, and feet dragging in broken earth, his mouth tingled with the memory of skin breaking for his teeth, and blood filling his wanting mouth.
He reached civilization far sooner than he had anticipated. And only then did he realize he had moved with the quickness of a demon unleashed from hell. He no longer walked with the steady tread of man.
There was a monastery.
The monks never stood a chance.
He had knelt amongst their bodies. Blinded still. Exhausted but unable to sleep. Burning.
Always burning.
Forever, Benjamin would burn.
And he prayed.
Begged and prayed for God to release him of this horrible sentence.
Begged for salvation.
Begged to be unmade. Unborn.
But God did not answer, and so he wandered still closer to town, cursed forever to be one of the damned.
He'd lost track of the days, the weeks, since Matthew had left him in the desert to wander in agony, to contemplate his sins. He'd killed the monks in the monastery. Drained them dry. Begged forgiveness.
Killed others. Wandered still.
He drifted into towns he once knew the name of, but now he only knew them by their blood.
People were cunning. They were sharp. They knew when one of Satan's creatures walked among them. They watched each other and the desert with fear and suspicion. They hung curtains on their windows, barred their doors, hung crucifixes up on their walls where all could see. To bar off evil, and to tell their neighbors that their home was not where evil had found an open door.
Benjamin had been aggrieved very early on to realize that no cross could keep him out. That hallowed ground was still his for walking and taking, that there would be no place where God's children could hide.
He was aggrieved to find that he would not die in the sun as he often felt that he would.
And still sleep would not come. And he wandered in exhaustion.
Night fell. Mass was given. Benjamin did not attend. He would have bled the congregation dry.
But he slipped through the doors, quiet-like and quickly. Far too quickly for the eyes of anyone but God and the devil to see.
He fell to his knees before the altar, flinched in fear of retribution as he made the sign of the cross. He was a beast now, a creature of hell. He had taken the blood of his demon maker and craved it still.
Then he entered the confessional, the box sequestered off in the corner of the room. He entered and pulled the curtain closed.
He could hear the heartbeat of the priest down the corridor, and the hurried footsteps of an altar boy as he ran to tell the priest of his late-night confessor.
Benjamin waited. Waited and burned.
And then the priest entered. The priest entered and waited quietly for Benjamin to begin.
"Forgive me, father," he said, and his voice was so unlike him now. It was hollow and cold; he could taste in every word the blood he had spilled on the road from salvation. "Forgive me, father, for I have sinned."
The priest remained silent, still waiting. Benjamin swallowed around the burning in his throat. He could hear the blood rushing through the other man's veins, he could smell the heady scent of the body's nectar as it gave God's earthly representative holy life.
And he craved it.
He could feel the skin of his face grow tight and angry with need. His ears filled with the steady rush of blood through the other man's body, and Benjamin clawed aggravatedly at his thighs to contain the beast within.
"It has been—" he could not remember the day, the week, the month. How long had he wandered? How long had it been since Matthew had changed him? How long had it been since he'd been a man worth saving? "—countless days since my last confession."
He fell into silence then. And the priest waited for a time before he spoke, prompting Benjamin to continue.
"Tell me, my son," he said.
"I—" Benjamin stopped and he recalled as though in a haze all the wrongdoing, all the evil deeds he had committed since Matthew had abandoned him in the desert three days in.
He could not possibly. How does one confess such savagery? He shook his head, brought his hands up to claw at his miserable eyes, and scratch into the wretched skin of his cheeks.
Others had scratched him there, and they had failed to leave a mark, but Benjamin's hands came away bloody. And his nose filled with the metallic scent of his own blood, stolen from another person's body.
"I came on crusade, father."
He paused again, turned his head away.
"I came on crusade. I saw— I saw terrible things. I killed many. So many. I am covered in the blood of martyrs. I am covered – I feel the urge to kill more even still. I want to take from them that which should not be taken, father. Please father, everything inside of me burns. I am burning. I feel God's wrath even now."
"Did you relish in these sins, my son?" The priest asked him.
"Not in the beginning, father. I came only to defend God's will. But I fear I am being tested. I fear I am bound to fail."
"My son, surely you know, that those sacrifices made in the defense of God's will shall be forgiven. On this most holy crusade, in the end all will be absolved."
"But I have strayed father—"
"Then perhaps the path you have taken, is yet another of God's most mysterious plans."
"How could this possibly be his plan? I have been tempted. I have given to temptation. I—"
But the priest cut him off with another word of absolution Benjamin did not feel he deserved. Even the priest could not hear him now after all he had done. Even the priest could not understand. He was given his penance, he paid the fee, left the box, knelt before the altar, pressed his face to the ground beneath the savior's feet. And he uttered his given prayer, his penance, his plea, over and over again.
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti,
beatae Mariae semper Virgini,
beato Michaeli Archangelo,
beato Ioanni Baptistae,
sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo,
et omnibus Sanctis,
quia peccavi nimis cogitatione,
verbo et opere: mea culpa,
mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Ideo precor beatam Mariam semper Virginem, beatum Michaelem Archangelum,
beatum Ioannem Baptistam,
sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum,
et omnes Sanctos,
orare pro me ad Dominum Deum nostrum.
Amen.
Muttered it low beneath his breath, swallowing around the burning in his throat, nails digging holes into the stone floor of the church.
And then again.
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti,
beatae Mariae semper Virgini,
beato Michaeli Archangelo,
beato Ioanni Baptistae,
sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo,
et omnibus Sanctis,
quia peccavi nimis cogitatione,
verbo et opere: mea culpa,
mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Ideo precor beatam Mariam semper Virginem, beatum Michaelem Archangelum,
beatum Ioannem Baptistam,
sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum,
et omnes Sanctos,
orare pro me ad Dominum Deum nostrum.
Amen.
But he felt no absolution. He felt no presence of any other maker but the one who had taken his soul and fed it back to him from a bleeding wrist. The one who had cursed him with this most wretched craving for blood.
He groaned against the hollowness. The absence of salvation. He groaned and dug his nails even further into the floor made of stone.
And he uttered it again, though his nostrils flared, and his eyes narrowed, and his skin grew taut, as the beast fought its way out of him.
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti,
beatae Mariae—
The priest had vacated the confessional, made to leave again down the corridor, back to the place where he lived. Benjamin felt nothing inside of him anymore, and his prayers fell on God's deaf ears, but the priest had told him he'd be saved. The priest had told him all would be forgiven.
Nothing had been forgiven. Nothing would be forgiven.
Benjamin let out a haunted moan. Pained. Exhausted. More creature than human, his head snapped up to the retreating form of the priest. Neither man nor beast noticed when he moved, but it was too late once he did.
Summer, 1173, Byzantine Empire (seventy-six years, countless days)
The air was thick with the scent of spices and perfumes, human sweat mixed with the sharp aroma of witches' blood and the incense of daemons. Life and creature aroma flooded the marketplace, and the sound of voices and carriages clamoring together over the din surrounded him on all sides.
Benjamin had been in Constantinople for a handful of months. Not for long, most certainly never to linger. But the capital of Byzantium was as full of secrets as it was of life, and the young pretender had heard a rumor he needed confirmed.
He was ducked into a fabrics stall, caught between a yard of silk and a piling of colorful linens that caught in the breeze. The woman who ran the stall did not know he was there, hovering silently among her wares as she spoke to a lesser lord about a gift of fine fabric for his mistress.
Benjamin's lip curled at the audacity of the man and uttered a quick prayer to God for yet another soul corrupted and lost to the world. But these ordinary people were not the ones who drew him here on this day.
Down the lane that cut through the various stalls of the busy marketplace, across the way, was a contingent of guards. At the center of which were two women.
One was fair, even through the sheer pink covering she used to veil her hair and obscure her face, he could see white, blonde locks carefully hidden from view, perfectly shaped eyebrows as pale as a delicate flower were arched carefully as she considered a vendor's stuttering words. Her blue eyes were sharp as a mountain cat's, and even from distance, all who saw her knew she suffered no fools.
Next to her, equally as fierce, and yet incredibly bird like and delicate looking was a dark-haired woman with brown eyes and a button nose. She could be mistaken for a dancer, or a child's doll, if not for the way the people of the market seemed to flow around her, like water around a rock. She had a center of force that acted as a warning to all – to collide with her would be the last thing you ever did.
Beside these women, standing back two steps, and waiting with an air of stern patience, were two other women who appeared to be their most loyal maids. Their most trusted servants.
Behind these maids were a contingent of men. All of varying ages, ethnicities and creeds. And yet to look upon them was to see a united front, a loyal front, the likes of which no one else in the world could have known but for a very integral few.
Benjamin crept closer, minding the bustling of the vendor as she neared him to grab something from the back of her stall. The lesser lord waited impatiently for the woman to hurry her task so that he could be on his way.
His impatience irked Benjamin who understood the power in watching and waiting and biding one's time.
He turned his ear, catching the blonde woman's voice on the wind.
"Surely this will suit him," she said and held a small golden trinket out to show her dark-haired companion. "Do you not agree, Verin dear?"
Verin, for her part, studied the item with an air of boredom that exasperated the blonde. After an extended viewing of the proffered object, the birdlike woman shrugged.
"I suppose, if you must, it will suit him well enough—"
"Honestly, sister, if I must? Of course, I must—"
"You will spoil the boy—"
"He is our first nephew—"
"He's hardly legitimate—"
"You know that to be untrue—"
"Honestly, Freyja, your innocence astounds me—"
"Careful, Verin dear, too much venom will poison even the most unkillable soul."
The dark-haired sister curled her lip in warning at the blonde, but Freyja only shrugged and ignored Verin's difficult mood. She turned back to the vendor with a sharp smile and nodded at him in approval.
"This will do," she said to the man who let out a sigh of relief and gave a stiff bow.
She waved a hand and one of the men behind her stepped forward with a purse full of coin. Payment was pressed into the vendor's hands and the man bowed again but Verin and Freyja had already moved along to another stall. Their maids dutifully following behind them.
Benjamin watched the vendor reach up to wipe the nervous sweat from his brow, and slunk back into the shadows to follow the contingent from a distance.
A nephew.
Their first nephew.
He turned this over in his mind and felt an odd twisting in his gut.
They had stolen another of God's children. They had robbed the earth of another human soul. But this nephew of theirs was not the first they had done this to. Benjamin was living proof. He was the walking damned same as them, their cursed brother's blood had taken him and created him anew. In the wrong father's image, he had been reborn.
His hand drifted down to his bitter blade, the one he had twisted into his own chest the night he'd killed the priest in Jerusalem. The blade that had failed to kill him. The blade that had forsaken him in the same way his soul had been forsaken by God.
A cart clattered through the middle of the road, hurtling in the direction of the de Clermont women and their entourage. Benjamin paused, as did several others, to watch as the cart drew closer and closer to the contingent, which carried on as though unbothered by the clamor and the speed with which it traveled. All around people flew out of the way of the horses and wheels. One of the de Clermont guards called out a relatively calm warning to the carriage, and the driver cried out in alarm, recognizing the insignia on the man's lapel. The horses cried out as the driver called them abruptly to a halt, and the de Clermont women carried on as though they had not impeded the traffic of whichever important man or woman traveled through the market by carriage.
The guards eyed the nervous looking driver with neutral expressions that Benjamin regarded with absolute disdain. He sneered and edged closer, eager to witness more of the exchange.
Freyja continued with Verin as though nothing uncommon had occurred, as though she had not noticed anything at all. Verin had cast the carriage an annoyed glance but otherwise she too was unbothered by the disruption to her otherwise peaceful day.
"Two already," Freyja said with a smile at her maid, Francoise, who held up a rare truffle for her mistress to examine further. "Can you believe it sister? The youngling will be approaching his first century with us before we know it."
Two years.
Benjamin's chest panged with some foreign feeling. He scratched at it as though the drag of his nails could drive the feeling away.
The newest de Clermont was little more than an infant.
"We shall see, sister," Verin sighed as though she tired of the conversation.
"Honestly," Freyja said. "We all knew Hugh would defy Philippe's order."
Benjamin startled at this.
Had it been Hugh who sired the newest de Clermont? Surely not.
He stepped along as they moved on to yet another stall.
The person of importance had stepped out of their carriage – the praetor, himself, Benjamin noted with surprise – to have words with one of the de Clermont guards. His voice was raised. The de Clermont retainer was neutral. De Clermont retainers maintained still faces through all circumstances, Benjamin knew. They were rarely fazed by the things they encountered day to day.
And he raged at it. The neutrality. The placidity. He raged at Philippe de Clermont, and his heir.
Hugh de Clermont had sired a son.
"He should not have—"
"He found his mate," Freyja rolled her eyes. "He didn't stick a blade in Caesar along with all the rest of the senate against father's orders. He didn't overthrow Baldwin and take over a crusader state as Ysabeau did. He didn't sire a little blood raged heathen like Matthew—"
Benjamin drew back at the mention of his maker. At the mention of the demon who had made him into the monster he was today. His throat burned with the urge to tear at something. He thought of the woman – the vendor in the silk stall – and imagined his teeth ripping into the delicate flesh of her throat. He imagined her body littered with the marks of his bite. He imagined the warm flow of blood in his mouth, coating his tongue and his throat, filling him with the sweetest nectar he had ever tasted. His hand flashed out to a barrel of grain and ripped into it. Around him people cried out in alarm. Grain spilled out around his feet, and he could feel in his spine the urge to go hunting.
Heathen.
They dared call him the heathen.
They dared call him that when the de Clermont heir had sired his own heathen son.
Benjamin quaked where he stood, the Praetor had finally discovered who had stopped his horses in their tracks, and now seemed to have grown placid and weak. He made his way to the de Clermont sisters, his manservant equally reticent by his side. The guards stopped him before he drew too close, and he swallowed and cleared his throat.
"M-my ladies de Clermont," he said. And both women halted their conversation, two pairs of razor-sharp eyes and perfectly complected faces turned to the important man. They seemed unconcerned by the inconvenience their presence in the market had posed to the man who governed the capitol of the Byzantine Empire.
They said nothing as they waited for him to speak.
"I am Licinius Damianus Comnenus, the—"
"Praetor of Constantinople," Verin supplied and waved an impatient hand. "Yes, we are aware."
He wrung his hands together.
"Would the most venerable ladies de Clermont, do myself and my wife the honor of joining us in our apartments for wine and refreshment, on this day of most unforgiving heat?"
The sisters regarded the man as neutrally as their guards before Freyja offered another one of her sharp-edged smiles and gave an imperious nod.
"Very well," she said. "We will accompany you now. Francoise," she turned to her maid. "Take a guard. Retrieve our coach and bring it to the home of the Praetor."
Francoise, the stern-faced maid, curtsied and murmured a quiet, "yes, milady," before turning with the retainer to go back the way they came.
The de Clermont women, accompanied by Verin's maid, climbed into the Praetor's carriage.
Their guards lined up around the place that concealed their mistresses and once Licinius had followed the women inside, the driver urged the horses along. More slowly this time so as to accommodate the guards as they walked alongside him with a steady human stride.
Benjamin still stood in a spilling of grain, and he raged. Night fell before he moved again, and a vendor came to rid the market of his presence. To make him pay for the damages to the barrel of grain.
And the vendor fell at his feet with a gurgle. He'd no time to cry out despite his pain. Benjamin left no blood to spill onto the ground, no blood to soak into the grain that he had spilled around his feet.
When the authorities found the body the next day, they would find the vendor to be nearly unrecognizable. His face would be marred. His throat would be torn. His fingernails would be broken from his efforts to tear at his cursed attacker's terrible flesh. And he would have had no blood left to bleed – that too would be gone forever with the man who had stolen it.
"Forgive me father for I have sinned."
He crossed himself.
"It has been three days since my last confession."
Tell me, my son.
"I have killed a man, father," he said. "I have killed a man in cold blood."
Sacrifices made in the defense of God's will shall be forgiven. Did you relish in these acts?
"Not in the beginning. I—I came on crusade, father. I killed many. I am unwell, father. I have urges that leave me weak."
He stared down at his hands, still coated in blood.
"They leave me wretched."
All will be absolved, my son.
But Benjamin knew enough by now not to believe him. He shook his head. His hands trembled. And he burned with the urge to kill and kill more. The urge to do what must be done. The urge to finish the demons that ruined him once and for all. He had come on crusade. He had—
"Forgive me," he trembled. "Forgive me, my trespasses."
But the voice of the father was gone. And Benjamin was alone in the cold, dark room of an abandoned home.
"Forgive me," he whispered.
But there was no voice to receive him.
"Forgive me, my trespasses."
There was no God to hear him.
"Forgive me father, for I have sinned."
Benjamin turned away from the crucifix on the wall. He turned away and instead made for the door of the house that he and his children had stripped bare.
He walked past the bleeding miller, who gurgled out a final plea, and stepped over the apprentice whose eyes were glassed over – soon to never again see.
And Benjamin couldn't help but think that none of this would have happened if the de Clermont had simply refused temptation. If Philippe had never been tempted by this life of sin. If he had never sowed Satan's seed. If Matthew had only resisted the call of his beastly urges. If Hugh had never sired Sorley.
None of this would have happened.
He turned to look down on the dying men. The wretched men. The weak.
They would go on to the kingdom of heaven.
God would see this sacrifice as worthy.
Benjamin uttered a parting prayer, tugged at his hood, and departed for the dark of the trees.
Fall, Pamplona, 1219 (one hundred and twenty-two years, countless days)
Benjamin had made many others like himself. When he learned how a siring took place – how his own siring took place – he had not been able to resist.
He had killed many. But the temptation to resurrect the dead was strong within him. The temptation to undo every taking of every life. Yet another unforgiveable act in defiance of the God he loved so wholeheartedly.
He killed. Again and again, and then in his grief for what he had become he tried again and again to undo what could not be undone.
And when they rose again, the heathen children he sired drank from his wrist that which he gave them. Craved that which should never be craved. He fed them their own blood back to them from a wrist he'd cut open with his own teeth. And he hated them for it.
They were weak.
If they had been worth anything at all, they would have resisted the blood he offered them.
But they never did.
One such child had been a blacksmith in his past life as a human man.
From him, Benjamin had commissioned a badge. A pilgrim's badge, much like the one he carried with him, the one he kept pressed tightly to the base of his throat as a reminder.
He kept God close to the only violable part of him he had left.
This badge he commissioned, contained the image of Lazarus stepping from his coffin. And because his heathen son was very talented at what he did, there was an ouroboros strung around the undead man's neck too.
This was Benjamin's meaning.
This was his path.
His penance.
The road to salvation would be paved by the deaths of undying men.
Benjamin's son passed the badge to him on the steps of the Iglesia de San Nicolas. The church itself stood like a fortress, though it was yet unfinished and missing one tower. It was located right at the very heart of the burgo from which it had received its name. San Nicolas was busy and sweltering this time of year. Life bustled around him. People were too busy and too clueless to care about the dangerous creatures that lurked on church steps and in the markets.
He cocked his head curiously as he watched another such creature stride forcefully from the treasury doors, and dash with purpose down the steps into the heart of the square.
There were creatures among the nobility too – whispering into the ears of important men – Benjamin smiled darkly at an unassuming family of commoners that wandered between him and one such creature. He watched from a distance, hood hanging low down over his eyes, and a pilgrim's badge turning over in his nimble hands. The Gonçalves mounted his steed and tugged calmly on his reins, clicked his tongue and turned the wild beast in the direction of the burgo's impenetrable gates.
Fall, 1219, Roncesvalles
Rumor carried him in the same direction the Gonçalves had ridden. Rumor had carried him to Roncesvalles, the small community that rested beneath the peak of Mount Ibañeta. He sneered at the thought of these demons corrupting the path that led innocent pilgrims along the Way of St. James.
He thought at first it was rumor that brought him there, but in the end, he knew this was a message from his God.
He met her in the town.
She had travelled with an undercook and another maid to gather some last-minute wares for the estate up the mountain. La Ithuriana, or so it had been called. The Gonçalves estate, where there resided a de Clermont.
Her light brown hair had been covered by a raggedy scarf that did nothing to hide her beauty. She was... not plain. Never plain, Benjamin thought, but humble in her features. Respectable.
Her father had left her, same as his. And her mother had always been gone.
And when he asked her for her name, she had none to give, but he knew – as one always knows – that in the end she would be his.
They stole moments together underneath the trees, in the village, and, once, even in the gardens when no one else was around.
They walked together and that was when Benjamin had met a farmer. A man of middling age who had glanced at this respectable girl – who Benjamin loved – in a way that caused Benjamin to take exception.
And he thought this too was a sign from above. He laid his sins down right there at the de Clermont's feet. In a maze where sat a girl who smelled of blood, and berries and honeyed mead.
The next day he petitioned the respectable girl he loved for a scarf. One that was owned by the girl he had discovered in the maze. Told her he wanted to take it to a seamstress and commission one just like it for her. Told her that he wanted her to pick the scarf she favored most in all the world.
And his respectable love did not disappoint him.
Winter, 1219, The Cave
They found themselves a hideaway up the mountain with a glorious view.
It was within ease of reach. She was human after all. Meek and uncorrupted.
He intended to keep her that way.
Innocent, and forever one of God's children. Not a demon masquerading like him.
Late in the night and early in the mornings she would come to him. She would bring him scarves for commissioning and when he was finished, he would return the borrowed items to the family she had taken them from. Her theft had a higher purpose, but with each return he assured that her score was settled with the Lord.
He had become fascinated by the other girl – the one from the maze – who resided in the home of the de Clermont and the Gonçalves. A human girl who had no family or money to her name. A girl who every day was corrupted a little more by these demons who masqueraded as men.
They called her Fernanda. Lady Fernanda Gonçalves.
And Sorley – Eric, now they called him – he loved Fernanda as Benjamin loved his girl who was more loveable and respectable than Fernanda could ever be.
Benjamin knew what one such as Eric de Clermont was capable of. Knew that the young human Fernanda, in the heart of the household, had been corrupted beyond saving. Knew that there would be no hope for her or for him when they met their end.
The young de Clermont – Benjamin sneered – was just as bad as the rest of them. A templar already – a knight of Lazarus – who had the approval of Philippe. Eric abided by Satan's forces as they toiled away on the good souls of the mountain, and those of the world.
As he had done for some weeks prior, Benjamin came to the cave again at the agreed upon time. He traversed the mountain and the snow to meet his love there, but this time there were voices. Male voices. And scents he knew only from a distance.
Benjamin froze.
It couldn't be. He crept through the thicket, trying better to see with his demon's eyes and felt the burning in his throat begin – the skin pulling taut around his eyes. The urge to rip at something. To tear someone to pieces.
The young de Clermont was in his cave.
The young de Clermont, and one of his undying knights, were in his cave.
Benjamin hissed. His eyes burned as the sun glinted off their blades. He lingered long enough to ensure that his love was not there. Just long enough to assure himself she was safe, and yet he lingered too long.
His cousin was rather leonine, he supposed. The way he carried himself at the mouth of the cave spoke of the giants of old. Benjamin frowned at the sight of him. Then they locked eyes.
Much to his eternal regret, Benjamin did in that moment as he had done over a century ago. He'd rage against himself for ages anew as he looked back on this moment and the choices he had made.
God did not forgive the cowards who fled. But at the sight of the demons pursuing him, Benjamin could not find it in himself to stay.
Idir had been in the town of Roncesvalles for three days. Wandering among the people there who shied away from each other in the wake of the murders, and who hunkered down in their homes to escape the cold.
He entered the tavern, as he had done every evening after a day full of hunting and staking out places Benjamin may have found worth hiding in. He made his way to the bar, leaning on the surface and stripping himself of his gloves.
Idir drew his blade, and laid it bare on the surface, within ease of reach. The energy of the tavern ticked at the sight of the Berber's blade, but he paid the onlookers and tense patrons little mind.
He held up a hand for the barmaid to bring him a brew. He cared not for which. It wasn't likely he'd drink more than a sip. She slid him a pint; he dropped a handful of coin. Affording her and the man who employed her far more than the swill would be worth.
He felt the gaze of the creature on his neck. Turned his face, caught the scent.
This was not the one he sought. But they were similar enough.
Idir grinned, a slow stretch of white teeth that glinted in the candlelight.
The young pretender had been busy.
When the hand landed on his shoulder, he had to admit the boy's son had far more fire in him than his elusive father seemed to have.
"I am just passing through, my friend," he said in the most passive voice he could muster.
Allowing the other man this one chance to leave him in peace and wander on his way. He need not meet the same end that was fated for Benjamin.
The young manjasang growled and made a grab for Idir's resting blade.
Sighing at the disrespect, Idir caught the younger man around the back of his neck, slamming his face down onto the bar top and watching as his head bounced off the surface.
He dropped the novice child and watched him slide to the ground in agony.
Noting the frozen barmaid, Idir reached into his pocket, tossed another coin into her hands for the trouble, the disturbance, and the giant crack in the solid oak bar.
The young manjasang stumbled back up to his feet with a snarl and a swipe that Idir easily evaded.
The old Berber warrior caught the young blood-raged fledgling by the collar and lifted him back up to height.
"Leave this place, boy," Idir said in a jovial voice. "Live to fight another day."
The boy snarled and spit, his eyes had gone black with uncontained blood rage, and Idir frowned.
"Contain yourself," he urged the boy quietly, wishing he would not have to dispel of him for his affliction. "We are in the company of warmbloods."
At this very calm reminder from one vampire to another, the younger seemed to snarl and gnash even more against the hold Idir had on him. Idir adjusted his grip, grabbed the boy around the throat and pressed him into the ruined bar as human men gathered to stop them, and human women ran screaming.
"This is a bad look, child," Idir said in exasperation. "Has your sire taught you nothing of control?"
When the blood rage took the fledgling over completely, and lended him its own sickly strength, Idir was forced to either end the child's suffering or die in an act of foolish mercy. He snapped the blade up from the bar top, plunged it into the young man's throat, and pressed his face to his neck as though to whisper a parting mercy, but really drank his fill of blood and dying memories.
What Idir found was nothing short of alarming. Benjamin had sired a number of others like this fledgling here. Scattered them across the lands stewarded by Fernando and Hugh. They were barely contained, untrained, and roaming the mountainside freely.
He pulled back, dropped the corpse and cleaned his blade. He nodded to the tavern owner who had emerged at some point during the chaos and passed him another pint of ale. Idir accepted for the sake of niceties.
Then he turned for the door, recovered his steed, and rode hard back up toward the pass where Fernando stalked larger prey.
Things were far worse than any of them had imagined. None had taken seriously Hugh's quiet consideration of a blood rage colony in Roncesvalles, but now—Idir shook his head and rode faster. If Benjamin were to succeed in anything this winter, it would be to sow chaos among the small mountain communities in the west of the Pyrenees.
And they could only pray they contained it before word reached Philippe in the spring.
"You know the best thing about living wild," Fernando said quietly, as he allowed the young fledgling to lure him out into the open. "Is that you develop a very distinct scent."
The younger manjasang stared at him with a coal like glint in her eyes. She had a sparse little dress on, raggedy around the legs and her feet were bare. He imagined even one such as she must have felt cold, but the fire in her eyes suggested her throat was still burning with a thirst that warmed her eternally. Blood rage was a fever that required constant feeding.
"Some think," Fernando continued as she attempted to lure him with her comely figure, and a more traditional male vampire's thrill of the chase. Fernando offered her a wry grin. She was not his favored prey. "That you cannot smell a manjasang who has lived too long in the wild. That they become like any other beast in any other forest."
She nodded at him, and he stripped himself of his cloak, disarming her into a more genuine smile. She thought she had him. She thought she had done well. He wondered how Benjamin rewarded his feral children for a job well done.
"But those people are wrong," he said. "I can smell you there beyond the boulders," he called out to the man who he knew who lied in wait. "And you there," he did not look as he pointed to a tree at his back. "In the diseased elm, I'd be wary of the branch below you—" he glanced back casually. "It's rotted in the middle. I'd hate for you to fall."
He took another slow step, internally satisfied as the two men he'd called out to began to move and adjust their positions, slow to overcome now that they'd lost the element of surprise.
Two more approached from over the ridge. He'd known they were there. Hadn't anticipated their size, and quietly adjusted his approach. Studying the one who held a long sword with the most proficiency.
These were not warriors, bar the one who carried the most formidable blade. He carried himself like a man who had some training at the very least. Fernando regarded him with a neutral expression that was returned in equal measure.
This was their leader.
Perhaps the eldest of Benjamin's brood.
At the very least, this one was the most prepared.
He was not like the rest of them either, Fernando noted as he stopped in the center of the clearing. The soldier with a longsword was like Ysabeau.
Unafflicted.
His siblings, on the other hand, were gaunt in their hunger, bright eyed and feral. The eldest had them on a tight leash.
Fernando quietly wondered if Benjamin knew he had a usurper in his ranks.
He arched an intrigued eyebrow.
One of the less experienced ones. The one who had followed the unafflicted man over the ridge, rushed at him with an axe in a clumsy attack that Fernando evaded.
The Gonçalves ripped the weapon from the boy's grip and stared down into the black eyes of his attacker. The boy snarled and gnashed his teeth. Fernando frowned and shoved him back a step.
He had the remnants of a vein stuck between two of his teeth and the smell his mouth emitted was positively foul.
Benjamin had not taught them basic hygiene either.
The boy made to rush him again, but Fernando grabbed him and wrapped his arms around the boy in a death grip.
"Calm yourself, child, you rush toward death as though you welcome it."
A wail. The boy panicked in Fernando's grip. Thrashed against him and tried to break free. There was no skill. No technique.
Fernando felt something twist inside of him.
This was no soldier.
The fledgling in his arms was wholly unprepared to complete the task his sire sent him so carelessly to do. The eldest of the fledglings looked on the exchange with apathy. He had stabbed his blade into the frozen ground beneath him, waiting and resting his weight on the hilt as he observed his inept brother take on the seasoned warrior in the center of the clearing.
He held Fernando's gaze calmly as the Gonçalves snapped his brothers' neck.
The boy fell limp and Fernando resisted the urge to murmur a prayer for the sickly boy's soul. He wondered what religion the boy had once served. Fernando put little stock in these things, but he could still pray in many languages. Perhaps it would give the boy's soul a fighting chance in whatever afterlife he wandered into.
Even as he wondered, he studied the group for their next move. This would not be the first death this evening. The boy at his feet would have to wait for parting prayers and courtesies.
Every vampire at its very core was a half feral beast. Barely contained, thinly veiled. You could see it in their eyes if you were lucky enough to look closely without meeting your end soon thereafter.
Hugh had told Fernando that he reminded him of a great black cat he had seen fighting in the pits against the gladiators. A panther stalking the grounds of the colosseum in the glory days of Rome.
Fernando hadn't known then what to make of his mate's observations. Of the tales he told him about the great beasts that clashed with the world of civilized men. The beasts whose coats had gleamed in the high heat of the midday sun. He hadn't known how to respond. He knew of the beasts. He had seen such creatures in the arenas in the outer territories of the empire in those days. He knew what they were capable of. Knew of their beauty and their terror.
But he had never thought to see himself as any other beast than the one that he was. Had never thought to compare his kind of savagery with the savagery of others.
But caught there in the ring of trees, eyes tracing the movement of these fledgling manjasang – creatures who had not yet shed the weaknesses they carried into this life from their lives as human men – Fernando felt the beast pacing quietly inside him now. Edging closer and closer to surface. Daring these feral creatures to make their move. Luring them more closely to the real threat who waited for them at the center of their makeshift colosseum.
It mattered little how he pitied them. It mattered little the sickly effect of the blood rage.
They rushed for him now. Surged forward as one.
And he felt his chest expand with the thrill of battle as the beast unleashed itself from its cage.
Four came down on him, fast and strong. Chaotic in their approach. Fernando met their unpredictability with practiced ease.
He watched the placid eldest. The eldest watched him.
Another young male fell with a snarl and a gasp.
Two males, one female, remained. One trained. The other two novice and underfed.
The female in her fear had begun a halfhearted retreat. Not eager to die as her brothers had done, unsure what awaited her with her father should she flee – facing the inevitable loss of an unwinnable game.
Fernando felt sick as he circled the clearing.
He had killed far more than this.
In his life, he had killed for far less.
He too had once been the victim of a negligent sire.
But to lay these fledglings down now, to litter the snow with their blood—something cracked inside of him. Something long forgotten that he could not name.
For the first time in a very long time, Fernando could say with absolute certainty that this experience was entirely new. For he had not yet killed someone in this new life he had as a parent to a vulnerable daughter. He looked into these unpredictable, sick, fledgling eyes and it mattered little whether they were nine or a hundred and nine, for Fernando knew that either way they were still in the thick of their youth. He felt their blood coating his hands. Felt their lives leave them with the cut of his blade, and in each one he felt Fernanda. In each one he saw Fernanda.
And it cut him to his core.
He felled one and felled another.
Fernando heard the whistle of an arrow sailing toward his head. Bent back out of the way just in time to miss it. Hissing as the metal arrowhead dragged through the skin of his brow. He snatched the arrow out of the air. Circled around to shove it into the eye of the girl who had changed course. Killing her as she crept up on him from behind.
An archer.
He caught the eldest by the back of the neck and forced him down. Knocked the blade from his hand, reaching for one of his own.
He hadn't sensed the archer.
Fernando snarled.
Aggravated as the eldest fledgling began to thrash and struggle. There was the snap, he thought, satisfied and grim. There was the panic. The eldest fledgling finally gave way to fear.
Fernando gritted his teeth.
Finished the job.
He allowed him the most merciful end he could manage, while under his skin the unsatisfied beast let out an aggravated sigh.
He didn't know when it happened, but at some point, he'd gone soft in his old age.
Fernando growled, staying still where he stood, his ears quietly trained on the trees. Listening for the tell-tale sound of a bow string being pulled. Trying with all his senses to mark the archer who lingered somewhere in the trees.
He caught the slight shift of a figure in the opposite direction of where the shot had come from. And his eyes flickered only briefly in that direction until he caught sight of a familiar frame, camouflaged amongst the brush and rocks, unrecognizable to all who did not know him well.
Fernando dipped his chin in silent greeting, as he turned his attention back to the archer and settled himself in for a long wait.
Darkness had long since fallen before the archer decided it was safe to move away. Fernando turned on the spot, picked up a discarded axe and threw it with force to the place where the archer fled.
He listened as the blade met its target and waited for the tell-tale thump of a body hitting the snow packed forest floor.
Now that all around him had fallen, Fernando snatched his own discarded blade from its place on the ground. He wiped it clean and returned it to its sheath.
He turned and caught the eye of Idir who lingered, half crouched in the same perch Fernando had seen him in before. The great Berber warrior stood from his vantage point and nodded his head in acknowledgement. Fernando's lips pressed a little more firmly into a frown.
"Thought for a moment there that you'd lost your touch, old friend," Idir said.
His voice was low, barely a murmur over the sweeping winter winds.
Fernando didn't grace this comment with a response. No, he had not lost his touch, but he rankled at the idea that he had been caught unawares. Even if only for a moment.
"Did you find it?" Fernando asked Idir in response.
"Of course," his friend said blithely.
"And did you—"
"I did," Idir nodded before Fernando could finish his question.
Fernando eyed the bleak landscape around them, waiting for the young pretender to show his face, but there were only snow drifts and grey skies left to find on that side of the mountain. Those and the bodies of the fallen dead.
He nodded, shot a look at Idir, and grasped his forearm in temporary farewell. The Gonçalves cut a path back the way he came, where his horse remained dutifully waiting. And his old friend disappeared back into the falling snow.
On the wind, a parting, "good hunting, my friend," was the only thing that broke the silence before the mountain took back its landscape from the world of men.
The next day, Fernando's return to La Ithuriana was heralded by the hushed whispers of the stablemaster and Balder, and a nod from an unusually grim Eric. He too had met a contingent of Benjamin's feral children in his time away from the manor.
He received an absent kiss from Hugh in the drawing room, and a mention that the young maid Jacqueline had given Eric news regarding Benjamin. She recognized his scent though she could not yet place when and where she had encountered it.
Jean Luc who stood faithfully at his husband's side, gave a small bow in his direction, before informing him that the young Lady Fernanda was with Mistress Prudhomme in the great hall. That she had skipped several meals and that the cook was concerned. Then, without a word, he left the de Clermont and his Gonçalves to their own devices, making himself busy elsewhere in the manor and allowing them a rare moment of privacy while time allowed.
When Hugh fell silent and focused in again on the task before him, Fernando shared the news of the five younglings he had killed on the mountain. Benjamin's feral children. Most of them underfed and untrained, with black eyes, and poor function.
Hugh had finally looked up at that.
Truly seeing his mate for the first time since he entered the warmth of their home.
Hugh was fast – if Philippe moved like a thunderclap, then Hugh was like lightning – one minute he was across the room pouring over a map and the next he was stood in front of his mate. A gentle hand tracing over the wound Fernando had received from an arrow he'd not seen coming.
Hugh wiped at the scab and the drying blood, and Fernando smiled at him tiredly, as though to tell him not to waste his energy worrying over a tiny flesh wound such as this.
"—the true cause for concern is the matter of—"
"His blood raged children—" Hugh nodded, finishing his mate's thought and turning away from him again. He went to the window, looking out on the bleak landscape below.
Fernando nodded, and crossed his arms, leaning against the side of Hugh's desk.
"It's more than blood rage..." he trailed off. "Hugh, my love, they're not..."
Fernando sighed and shook his head, mind flickering back to the memory of the girl.
"They're not...well."
"Yes," Hugh said. "I can imagine."
"Can you?"
Hugh arched an eyebrow and nodded his head.
"I was there when Philippe found Ysabeau. I witnessed every moment, every atrocity... there are some things, my love, that one can never truly forget."
Fernando felt his lips tug down into a frown. His mind drifting very briefly to the formidable Madame de Clermont and her horrible past. Of course, Hugh knew what Fernando had witnessed today. Fernando, himself, had seen Ysabeau's early years from time to time when he took his mate's blood.
He supposed Hugh really would understand what the children had been like today.
His head throbbed and his stomach roiled at the memory of their faces, at how they blurred with his thoughts of Fernanda, and how he had – for the first time in a long time – found it difficult to do what must be done.
He was a vampire. A warrior. He had been a fighter by trade for centuries. Death was not foreign to one such as he, for those of his kind often thought themselves its masters.
He knew what it meant to kill. He knew how to kill and do it well. He'd done it a million times before, and would inevitably do it again.
But...
Fernando grimaced.
He had not expected to see his own child's face in the faces of those he'd taken from the world on this day.
It mattered little whether he was defending himself. Of defending her. Or their family.
He saw her in every single one of them.
And it shook him to his core.
He pressed a parting kiss to Hugh, murmuring that he was going to take some time to rest.
Fernando suddenly and inexplicably felt very, very old.
And it didn't sit well with him.
It didn't sit well with him at all.
Instead of going to their chambers, as he had intended to, Fernando found himself sitting in his study, at his desk. Staring down at the new version of the map Fernanda had ruined weeks ago with a rancid goblet of blood. He sighed, dragged a hand down his tired face, and unfurled a scroll Jean Luc had left for him. One that detailed a preliminary dowry for Fernanda, and the lengths of her future inheritance. Beneath that was a new draft of his will.
He had just made it through the preliminary numbers, and a rough outline of her future custody should he fall in battle before she married or consented to be turned, when he heard the rapid flutter of his child's heart. His ear turned to the heavy tread of her footsteps as she rushed toward his office from across the manor – the harsh drag of her breath through her body as she pushed herself to hurry faster still.
Fernando resisted the urge to rise and go to her. Resisted the urge to investigate further. His vampire's instincts told him nothing within their home was out of place, and yet Fernanda was running.
She didn't knock before she burst through the door, pitching herself into his study in a manner wholly unbecoming of a lady of the House Gonçalves de Clermont.
Fernando glanced at her and blanched when his mind supplied for him the image of her unseeing eyes. He looked away, down at his hands which held his last will and testament, only for his mind to cover them once again in blood. Fernanda's blood.
He blinked. Gritted his teeth and shook himself of his waking dreams.
Fernanda was alive and well across the room.
He had not killed her today.
He focused in on the sound of her rapid heartbeat, the rush of her breath and the nervous shuffle of her feet on his immaculate floors.
He opened his mouth to greet her when she cut him off.
"I want Jacqueline to be my lady's maid."
Fernando sighed.
This was not how he had imagined the end of his day would go.
The morning after her argument with Fernando, Addison woke up to the bright face and twinkling eyes of the maid Jacqueline.
Prudhomme was gone.
She hadn't been able to contain her relief as she allowed the maid to slide silk slippers gently onto her feet. Addison had stood of her own volition and allowed Jacqueline to strip her of her night shift and wrap her in a robe until her bath was drawn.
Jacqueline gasped and snatched up Addison's arm.
"Who has done this to you?" She asked in rapid Occitan.
Addison tried to tug her arm away, but the maid held fast.
"My lady, you must tell me. They must be punished."
Addison grimaced and gently pried Jacqueline's fingers away. The older girl let her do it, though her eyes remained as sharp as they were scandalized.
"Miss Prudhomme was of the opinion that pain is an appropriate motivator."
"What a vile thing," Jacqueline hissed. "She had no right to harm you."
"I don't wish to talk about it any further. She is gone, Jacqueline. You are my lady's maid now. It's done."
"Oui, my lady. You are right. Of course."
Jacqueline stepped back, collected herself, and set about pouring lavender oil into her lady's bath, and tying Addison's hair back to keep it from getting wet.
When Addison was fully settled in her tub, with a cloth in ease of reach and a towel laid out on a stool, Jacqueline informed her that she would return momentarily to help her dress.
Addison had thanked her and sighed into the water, relishing in the way the steam came up and curled around her face and neck. Warm for the first time in days.
"Don Fernando," Jacqueline murmured from the open doorway to Fernando's study. He looked up and waved her in.
"Jacqueline," Fernando said, voice rising a bit in surprise at the unexpected visit.
"I'm sorry to bother you, sir," she murmured as she pushed into his space. "But I have made a distressing discovery, and..."
She trailed off and he waited patiently for her to continue.
"Well, I'm very conflicted sir. I promised Lady Fernanda that I'd not breathe a word of it, but it's not right and I—"
"Tell me," he said, trying to suppress yet another wave of concern for his odd little charge.
"I've found... bruises, sir," Jacqueline said, unable to look him in the eye. "On her arms. Pinch marks... from Bourgine de Prudhomme."
The door to Eric's study was open.
Addison stared at it in disbelief. She hadn't even known he'd returned. And yet here he was. All the way on the other side of the manor. So close and yet so far away.
She wondered if he'd received her note. She'd slipped it onto his desk only yesterday. God, but if that didn't seem like a whole lifetime ago.
It was hard to believe it had only been a day since she'd begged Fernando to let Bourgine de Prudhomme go. It felt like it had been a lifetime since she'd woken up to the kindness of Jacqueline, but that had only been this morning.
She had dressed and ate breakfast for the first time in too long without knots in her stomach or any lingering dread.
She did not recite her devotionals as she usually would have done, but instead she and Jacqueline had sat together on the bench beneath her window. They looked out on the trees and discussed the coming spring like they were old friends.
Then Jacqueline had left her to her own devices, suggesting helpfully that she take up her needlepoint to pass a bit time for the morning, and then later if the weather and circumstances allowed, they could take a stroll around the courtyard and perhaps even venture deeper into the grounds.
Addison had been a bit nervous at that. She hadn't left he house all that much since winter began and was only now realizing that she did feel rather cagey. Now that Jacqueline had reminded her of how she'd been sequestered away from the world beyond La Ithuriana's fortress-like walls all winter long, Addison couldn't shake the way her skin itched. Her mind had become fixated on the idea of fresh air once again.
Light filtered softly through her window, and the room breathed freely around her for the first time since winter began. Addison tried to pick up her patterns and lose herself in the satisfying tug of needle and thread, but her spine itched for her to move, and her foot tapped an anxious beat on the floor. When she pricked her finger, Addison blew out an aggravated sigh and stood. Enough was enough.
Prudhomme was gone.
She no longer needed to wait for anyone to come find her. She hadn't been this complacent in the fall.
Addison left her room to find something to do or someone to talk to, whichever came first.
La Ithuriana was alive for Addison again.
Light and air flooded every room and every corridor. She felt like smiling for the first time in far too long.
It wasn't until she'd entered his corridor, that she realized she'd been following the tug of an old invisible spool.
His door was open, and she hesitated, lingering just outside.
Wanting desperately to push in, Addison frowned down at her shoes.
Why was she suddenly nervous?
He was home. That was a good thing. He was home...and she'd left him a note.
I wish you had said goodbye before you went, Addison cringed. What kind of simpering—honestly, what on earth had she been thinking saying that to him?
She shouldn't have left him that note.
Oh god, she'd asked him to find a tree with her. The man was richer than a Medici, and built like motherloving Hercules, and Addison asked him to find a tree?
A motherfucking tree?
Her palm met her face, and she bit hard on her tongue to suppress a mortified groan.
What in the hell had she been thinking?
Her belly twisted.
No—Addison shook her head, turned on her heel, facing away from his door.
No, she'd just go.
She didn't want to see him all that badly anyway. She'd wait until dinner, and she just wouldn't look at him while she ate.
She cringed again.
Their seats were across from each other.
She'd have to build a fort around her plate if she wanted to avoid his gaze with that seating arrangement.
Addison sucked in another sharp, mortified breath. Resigned to her fate, she made the sign of the cross as Prudhomme had taught her and moved back the way she came. She'd just have to pitch herself down the stairs—
"You may enter, mo chridhe." Eric's voice called out to her from inside his study. She'd only made it two steps in her retreat, and he had somehow heard—
Everything.
He had heard...everything. Had sat there, just paces away, while she had a spazz attack outside his door.
Addison flushed, frozen on the spot. Unable to move. Wondering what he would do if she ran.
"Mo chridhe?"
He called out again, and Addison felt her body move without her permission until she was standing just inside his door.
He sat behind his desk with a pile of maps and documents in front of him. She froze again just inside the doorway, taking in the foreign yet familiar scene. This life suited him, she thought to herself, before her mortification came back and urged her once again to flee.
After an extended silence, he glanced up at her, eyes twinkling with mirth.
Addison shook herself and cleared her throat, offering him a shy smile.
"Hello," she squeaked.
He leaned back in his seat to look at her, setting down his quill.
"Hello," he returned, his voice decidedly steadier than hers had been.
Fighting the urge to scowl at the vampire and his stupid, perfect voice, Addison took a breath and stepped fully into the room. His eyes followed her as she did.
This space was—it was—well— despite her embarrassment in the corridor, Addison felt herself relax into the familiarity of the room.
It was nothing like his chambers had been back at the Castle Sween, but she was undeniably surrounded by Sorley. The study itself breathed life once again into the man she had known once before – confirming, in its own way, that he and Eric were one and the same.
She wandered around the room, exploring. He sat behind his desk and let her. Both quietly delighting in a very rare moment alone, after a past life of having nothing but privacy in each other's company.
Sanctuary.
She smiled and turned back to him. Making her way over to a chest in the corner. The chest that held their handfasting cords and the letter he had written once to his human father, Ragnall.
It had never been sent. Ragnall never had the opportunity to read it. Sorley and Malvina had died before he could.
"Sanctuary," she said after a moment, her mouth twisting awkwardly as she attempted the word in Gaelic.
Eric's smile grew softer somehow, and he tilted his head as he studied her. Curious. She breathed out a soft laugh and shook her head. Perpetually curious. She never could understand how he always seemed so fascinated by everything.
"You were..." She spoke in slow poorly formed Gaelic, though her diction had greatly improved. "My sanctuary."
His smile twitched, and nearly fell from his face. His eyes flooded with an emotion she couldn't name, and pain.
He was in pain.
She turned away from it. Addison didn't know what to do with Eric's pain. She hardly knew what to do with her own.
Instead, she ran her fingers over their chest of shared memories. Two small keepsakes from a life lived long ago. All that was left of him and her as they had been once before.
She flipped the lid of the chest open and startled a bit to realize that he had saved the note she had slipped onto his desk. The one she'd left him just yesterday while he'd been away. The one she wished she hadn't written. The one she wished he hadn't read.
He had... saved it. Like it was as important as those cords or that letter. Addison stared down at the small little note and didn't quite know what to think. It had been so mortifying. She had sounded so—
He appeared by her side.
"I believe I owe you an apology—" he started but she was already shaking her head.
"That wasn't my intention—"
"Nevertheless—"
"I just missed you, and Prudhomme was so..." Addison trailed off and hugged her arms tightly around her torso.
"Fernanda," he murmured. "Things have been..." he trailed off, searching for the word. "I fear that I have neglected you, mo chridhe."
She smiled at him and shook her head again.
"No," she said. "I heard about—well about the murders. I can't say that I understand everything that's happening, but my need for attention can hardly compete with having a killer on the loose."
She gave a soft laugh before bumping him with her arm.
"I think you're off the hook, Sorley Maclean."
He started at the use of his old name. At how easily it rolled off her tongue. And shook his head at her in wonder.
Eric gestured to the chest.
"It wasn't a need for attention—"
She opened her mouth to disagree, but he smiled down at her, silencing her with a look.
"You are entitled to my time," he said. "I fear I have not been very good at giving it."
She frowned and looked back at the chest with their handfasting cords, his letter and her note.
"I wanted to keep them safe," he said softly, "the memories. It is a long life, and I'll not live it how I did before – thinking that I have not a single trace of you left to hold onto."
Addison bit down on the inside of her cheek as her eyes flickered back up to meet his, considering his words.
"Every moment with you is precious to me," he said. "I know it must not have seemed like it these past weeks, but you are always on my mind. I feel you here in my chest, whenever I am away," He touched the place over his heart where an invisible tether resided.
A tether that had anchored itself indefinitely to her.
Addison frowned but nodded her understanding.
To be honest, she did understand. Where he had a tether he never spoke of, Addison had a spool no one could see.
She understood his need for a piece of her. A physical reminder of a person he had loved and lost, and somehow miraculously found again.
She could tell you, even now, where Sorley's plaid was carefully folded in her dresser drawer back in her house in the twenty first century. She could tell you exactly how the soft wool was the only thing to warm her most nights even in the heat of summer. She could tell you how she would only be able to sleep when she was wrapped up in it, drowning in her memories of Sorley. Drifting in and out of consciousness, her bedroom blending seamlessly with the woods that once surrounded the territory owned by Lord Suibhne. Her bed, blending with base of their tree. Mind caught somewhere between her childhood home and the edge of a river, near a village, that lived on the very brink of security.
She could tell you about the necklace he had gifted her once when she lived in that village under a different name, with no money or family and only a desire to stay with Sorley forever. Only a desire to survive with him for as long as she could.
He had sent it to her by way of Bróccin's little girl, Beatie. The one she had saved from a boar. Fashioned from black leather, the cord had been strong in her hand, an extension of the man who had gifted it to her. And hanging at the end was a small coin. It was crude, ancient looking even on the day it was new, but Addison distinctly remembered the fuzzy feeling in her belly as she clutched it in her hands. Her skin still warmed under the gentle weight of his gaze, recalling the way he had looked at her so intently from across the village while she worked, and he kept the men of the village at bay. She remembered the oddly liberating flutter in her chest when she realized the item at the end of the cord was a coin. Her first glimpse of medieval money in all the time she had been there.
Yes, Addison understood intimately the need for memories. The need to know that what had happened was real. That the love she felt for the person in front of her was not some figment of her imagination.
He had been a pillar of strength in a moment of fleeting terror. Six months caught up in the twisting tides of time and Addison had clung to Sorley as her only way forward. And then the universe had come along and spit her back out again in her own home, in her own time, with no way to reconcile the things she had seen and done. With no way to know what had happened to the man who had seen her through it all.
And her heart cracked into pieces at the thought of living that loss for fifty years, with no resolution. His eyes were haunted as he looked down at the chest. He stared down at the meager items within as though those few things were the sum of him. As though the world saw only a mirage of the man. The world would never see the part of him so quick reduce himself to an aged set of marriage cords, a letter to a father who would never read it, and a note from a lost love asking him for the time he could not give.
He looked down at the chest as though those things alone were enough to contain him, but Addison knew he was worth so much more.
She couldn't help but scowl, thinking for the millionth time since meeting him that he needed to stop making himself smaller for her sake alone. She eyed the chest and felt its pull. And eyed her Gallowglass and fought the urge to smooth out the curve of his shoulders, the wrinkle in his brow. She itched to take those things that weighed down on him and carry them in his stead.
She saw once in a movie, a man turning a lock of hair over and over in his fingers. Bringing it up to his face and holding it to his nose. It was the only thing he had left of the woman he loved in all the world. She hated the movie, couldn't even remember the name. At the time, it had grossed her out, the idea of some guy sniffing a dead woman's hair. In love or not, it made her skin crawl just thinking about it, but she watched Eric now and understood with new clarity what a token like that would mean. If all she had left in the world to remember him by was a lock of his untamable hair, she would find her own sick sense of comfort in it too, she supposed.
Addison had lived and loved long enough in the past, now, to know how valuable and cherished a thing like that could be – to forever have a piece of the person you loved all the most in the world.
She reached up to one of the smaller braids Jacqueline had woven into her hair that morning, choosing one that was slightly hidden from view, closest to her neck. The action drew him from his memories. Gallowglass tracked the movement of her hand, his eyes flickering with curiosity and something more.
Then she reached out and grabbed the hilt of the small blade he kept tucked into his belt, not bothering to ask for his permission.
He let her take it, quirking an amused brow.
Then she cut the braid and freed it, holding it out to him with a hesitant smile and a shrug.
"I saw someone do this once," she said, uncertainly. "I'm not sure if—"
But before she could finish her halfhearted explanation, Gallowglass accepted the lock of her hair. He held it reverently in the palm of his hand before laying it gently aside. Tucking it safely into the chest of small keepsakes.
He turned back to her then. Warm and kind and impossibly steady, he pulled her close, wrapping her up in his arms and pressing a kiss to her temple. Murmuring his quiet thanks.
She wrapped her arms around him, far more tightly than he held her, and pressed her face into his chest. Closing her eyes and feeling some of the tension in her shoulders leave her.
As quickly as he had embraced her, he let her go, stepping back and away.
He cleared his throat, as though to cut the thread that had been pulled taut between them, but it didn't work. Addison cocked her head as he moved over to his desk.
"I thought of you once," he said as he searched his drawers and the shelves behind them. "In a market in Frankokratia."
He shuffled through another drawer before smiling and pulling out a green velvet pouch, with golden drawstrings.
"Frankokratia?" she asked, unfamiliar with the word.
His eyes lit up as he moved back over to her.
"Frankish Greece, mo chridhe."
Addison's mouth formed a silent 'oh,' as she moved over to accept the item.
"I—I don't know why really," he said. "It was the oddest thing. I was traveling with my uncle, Matthew, at the time—"
Addison nodded, she knew Matthew by his portrait and Prudhomme's terrible lessons. Not too long after that she had stitched an ouroboros into a bit of thin fabric along with the message 'you're fucked.' It hadn't gone over well with Prudhomme.
Addison opened the pouch and peered inside.
"The glass had caught in the sunlight and when I discovered it among the traders' wares, well—" he shrugged. "I could only think that I would have liked very much to have given it to you."
It was a pocket mirror. Small and ornate. Addison turned it over in the palm of her hand. The outer shell of it was black, with a swallow in the middle perched on a set of perfectly balanced golden scales.
When she opened it, Addison startled at the clarity of the glass within.
Honestly. She shook her head, bewildered. These people had an inane ability to find glass far purer than the Middle Ages should have allowed.
The person that stared back at Addison from the mirror startled her a bit. Her face was still thinner than it had been in the twenty first century, before all of this began, but her skin had a healthy glow. Her eyes no longer held the same haunted expression she used to turn away from when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her cheeks were still squished together annoyingly from the fillet and the wimple.
Addison frowned.
This wouldn't do.
Stifled by the horrible piece of clothing and bolstered by her recent success with Jacqueline, as well as her alone time with Eric, Addison decided she was going to look in the mirror and like her whole self.
For some reason, unlike the vanity she sat before every morning in a bedroom that had been built for a queen, this mirror filled her with the urge to see herself as she wanted to be. This tiny little thing that could fit in a pocket or the palm of her hand – Addison drew her lip between her teeth and worried it – it made her want to be herself in a way that the rules and customs of this world would not allow.
Her eyes flickered from the mirror to Eric who was regarding her curiously. This man... she quirked her lips. Whether it was listening to her spill her guts in a foreign tongue when he was Sorley, or gifting her this mirror now as Eric, she couldn't help but think Gallowglass always found a way to bring her back to herself when she most needed to be reminded of who she was.
She looked into the clean, crystalline, glass and decided once and for all that she would be the Fernanda Gonçalves she wanted to be, not the one she had been trained to be by the terrible Prudhomme. She didn't just want to pick at the bits and pieces of herself that she liked and ignore all the rest of herself that was out of her control.
Clicking her tongue in contemplation, Addison held the mirror out to Eric who accepted it back from her, looking rather startled. He moved to close it, and put it away, interpreting her actions as a form of rejection, but Addison's hand snapped out and reopened the mirror.
Once again, she held it out for him to take.
"Hold this please," she said and offered him the barest of a smile.
Eric's eyes narrowed in curiosity, but he did as she asked.
"Thank you," she said before reaching up to tug at the knot under her chin, unwinding the wimple from around her head, and ripping the fillet out from under her chin.
She tossed the wimple on the desk behind Eric, and strode over to the hearth, casting the fillet into the fire. Before marching up to the mirror and fixing her hair.
When she was done, Addison let out a relieved sigh. She held out her hand for her mirror and Eric obediently snapped it shut and relinquished her gift back to her.
"I love it," she said to him, a small laugh escaping her when she caught his disbelieving grin.
"I love you," he replied.
He had gone back to whatever it was that kept him busy before she'd arrived. Sitting behind his desk, Eric dipped his quill a few times in an inkwell, before inviting her to make herself comfortable.
She accepted without hesitation – meandering around the room, peaking into drawers, flipping open books. Addison relished this rare glimpse she was getting into the world of Eric Sorley de Clermont.
There was a harpsichord on the far side of his study. She sat down at the small wooden bench, glancing over her shoulder just in time to see his eyes drifting her way.
She brushed over the keys with light fingertips before pressing down. She only knew one song. And it was meant for the piano, not the harpsichord, but she did her best anyway.
It was a rather dissonant, tinny version of Heart and Soul, but she smiled as the song came together beneath her fingertips, nonetheless.
This felt good. This felt right. Jittery with pleasure at the sound of an old familiar tune, Addison delighted in the thought that her worlds were finally colliding in the best possible way.
And she had missed music. Missed it terribly.
When she finished, she was breathing fast. Heart stuttering in her chest, hands shaking. She brought a hand up to rest on her chest, fingers pulsing in tandem with the rhythm of her heart. Her smile was wide when she turned back to Gallowglass, and it widened still when she found him watching her.
He had leaned back in his chair while she played, and now he graced her with a look of pleasant surprise.
His grin was easy – impressed.
"I did not know you had such talents," he said.
"Well," she shrugged, looking back at the instrument. "I only know the one song. It's hardly a talent."
"I disagree," he smiled.
Eric stood and made his way over to her, "I've never heard such a tune."
Again, Addison could only shrug and avoid his gaze.
"Show me," he said and pulled up a stool to sit beside her.
She flushed. When he wasn't making himself smaller for her sake, Eric was larger than life itself. Even sitting down, he seemed to surround her in the best possible way. Curious eyes flickered over her face before turning to look pointedly at her hands and the keys. He nudged her in a teasing manner, but she ignored him, preferring instead to continue studying his features. It felt like ages since she'd had him so close. Ages since she'd had him all to herself. She catalogued the strong set of his jaw, his neatly trimmed beard. The light from the window caught in his eyes and shined back at her the most magnificent shade of blue.
Addison itched to reach up and curl her fingers into his thick mane of tawny hair where it curled around the base of his neck and shoulders, but she resisted.
He knew she was studying him, and casually relaxed into his seat, letting her drink her fill. They had not been so close since the night he had appeared in her doorway, when life at La Ithuriana was still strange and new. But now, she could catch the faintest hint of mint and fallen leaves that clung to him and taunted her into leaning closer. He smelled like fresh air. He smelled like that brief inhale that existed somewhere between the beginning of winter and the end of fall. His eyes dipped down lazily to her lips. Lingering there for a beat, and then snapping them back up to the wall behind her head, collecting himself. He cleared his throat and turned once again to face the harpsichord.
He reached out and rested his own hand over hers. Thumb rubbing a soft pattern into her skin, before he pressed in a little closer, gently unwinding her fingers and placed them over the keys.
This time when he spoke it was little more than a murmur that tickled her ears.
"Show me, please."
Addison swallowed around the breathless feeling in her chest and nodded. Clearing her throat, she began to play. All too aware of the curious eyes on her hands as they moved over the keys, and the pleasant weight of his presence at her back while she played.
When the piece ended, she turned around to face him. Everything about him made perfect sense to her. She shook her head at the ridiculousness of all they had been through. Shook her head at all the waiting. This thing that lingered between them made perfect sense to her still. Sorley and Malvina. Eric and Fernanda.
It didn't matter what people called them.
He was hers and she was his.
She'd had it with patience.
Without stopping to think - afraid she'd bow out if she hesitated - Addison caught Eric by the forearms. Holding onto him tightly with nervous hands. Blue eyes tracked her as she moved. Flickering down to her lips, and then back to her hands as she traced her way up his arms and fell still when she reached his shoulders. Then she curled her fingers in the collar of his tunic, and like she had done once when she was Malvina, Addison gave him a gentle tug. Yanking him down to meet her, she captured his lips with her own.
If Eric was surprised, it didn't show. He smiled softly and followed her lead, letting her tug him down to where she wanted him to go.
He kissed her back, indulgent and gentle.
Holding himself back even now.
Addison laughed and nipped at his bottom lip, drawing a sound from him that was decidedly less than human. Smirking when his muscles flexed beneath her hands. Eric grabbed her by the waist, dragged his teeth against her bottom lip, and pressed her back against the harpsichord.
She wound her arms around his neck. Dragged her nails through his hair, sighing into him. Addison squeaked when he moved her to rest more firmly against the harpsichord, she reached her hand back for balance and yelped. Breaking away from him in surprise when her hand hit the keys of the cursed instrument and split the silence with a harsh, dissonant note.
Eric pulled back with laughter in his eyes, still fixated intently on her lips, but holding himself back. His fingers flexed a few times around her waist where he held her. And Addison stared up at him, shocked for a moment by their sudden kiss and their equally sudden parting, before breaking into peals of laughter.
Leaning forward, she pressed her face into his broad chest and closed her eyes against the sensation of his own laughter vibrating through his body. She wrapped her arms around him, squeezing him a little tighter when he leaned down to press a kiss into her hair.
Further down the mountain, beyond the village of Roncesvalles, was a humble convent named after the Saint Mary Magdalene. They were not expecting Fernando when he arrived outside their wrought iron gates - not so soon after he'd left them in the dark hours of the morning - but circumstances had changed.
He dismounted Malachi and tossed the reins to a lone stableboy, pushing his way through the gate that the groundskeeper unlocked without hesitation. Don Fernando's was familiar face. Nodding his thanks to the silent man, he made his way across the grounds.
First, he stopped in to murmur a quiet greeting to the mother superior, who was a very old and very dear friend. He past by the room where they kept Christ's altar and crossed himself, ducking his head out of respect for the nuns that lived there and the customs of the world he currently resided in.
Then he pushed into the garden where Bourgine de Prudhomme sat with a bible and a rosary.
He'd dropped her off only that morning.
Having dismissed her suddenly from their household, the convent had been the most convenient place to send her until it was safe to garner her passage home.
Fernando frowned at the sight of her now.
Frowned at how willingly she had accepted his kindness and generosity when she had been so cruel. He strode down the path that led to her little bench, sequestered off from the company of others.
Prudhomme startled at his approach. Pale, she rose and ducked into a curtsy though it was not one so long or as groveling as it would have been in the presence of Hugh.
"Don Fernando," she said.
Her voice was a mix of uncertainty and hope. She did not understand why she had been dismissed. And she hoped that a mistake had been made. She hoped he came to remedy a perceived slight of an important servant.
She was very wrong.
Fernando himself had not known with certainty why he had dismissed her when he did. Oh, he'd had his suspicions – his guesses – but none confirmed.
Now though, with the burden of Jacqueline's discovery, and a heavy weight in his chest, he knew. He knew the truth young Fernanda would have kept quietly to herself. He understood, now, with startling clarity his daughter's desperate plea to be released from Prudhomme's terrible care. Now he understood the damage that had been done, the damage he had been too blind to see while it was happening.
"I will only say this once, so hear me now," he said.
Her eyes snapped up to his, wide and searching.
"You have lost the favor of the de Clermont," he said. "You will leave this place without a recommendation or a penny more from any member of this family."
Prudhomme gaped, her face twisting into one of shocked indignation. He held up a hand when she began to stutter, but Prudhomme pushed on through.
"You have no right—" she hissed.
Fernando's grin was dark.
"Oh, I do," he said and though he smiled his voice was as cutting as the blade that rested at his hip. "There will not be a home in all of the civilized world that will accept you into their service."
"I am one of the best lady's maids in all of—"
"And yet you overstepped your mark. You disrespected the house in which you were employed and deliberately caused harm to your mistress—"
"The de Clermont is my master, not that foolish heathen girl!"
"She is the future of the de Clermont!" Fernando snapped. "She was your future and you squandered that with your abuse. You are lucky – truly lucky – that I am merciful. Take your life and your ruined reputation and be content that I am not Philippe."
He left her shell shocked in the garden.
As he journeyed back the way he came, eyes fixed on the horizon and the lines and lines of trees that surrounded him on all sides, Fernando was once again left to contemplate the situation they'd found themselves in this winter.
Prudhomme, a servant, had caused harm to his daughter. And God knows what else. He shook his head. He'd have to speak to Fernanda about it. And then he sighed when he realized there never seemed to be any time to speak to her. To see her. He was a manjasang – he'd spent centuries with nothing but time – and suddenly with this human child in his care and the ghosts of the de Clermont's past rising up to haunt them, Fernando had no time to spare.
It was deeply unsettling to feel as though you were running to keep up with something that would always be ahead of you. It had been far too long since he had experienced such a thing. This mortal perception of time. As though the fates required Fernando to experience things through his child's eyes instead of his own, he had a mortal fear that there was an hourglass somewhere keeping time on him and his family. And his heart sunk a little lower every day with dread. Wherever that hourglass was, he had the oddest sensation that the sand inside of it was soon to run out. If this was how Fernanda felt all the time – he scoffed and urged Malachi into a canter – no wonder the child always seemed so exhausted.
Unwilling to let his mind linger on the unpleasantness of lost time, Fernando's mind drifted back to Benjamin and his feral children— the matter that seemed to preoccupy him most these days. His thoughts had just turned to Idir and whatever news he had found, when he caught a familiar scent on the path that led through the village.
He slowed, clicking his tongue and rubbing Malachi's neck to soothe the warhorse into a trot. Sharp eyes taking in all there was to see in the covered windows, and dark corners of the village around him. His ears pricked at the slightest of sounds. His nose searched for a trail to follow. Searching, always searching, to put an end to Benjamin and his feral brood.
The stench was undeniable, now it was only a matter of where...
Instinctively, he followed the trail to the church. Passing it by to avoid raising suspicion, Fernando circled back and left Malachi in the trees. Journeying back the way he came on foot, he stumbled on Idir as he did.
The other man was still as a stone – watching and waiting like a wolf watched and waited for its prey.
Fernando crouched down next to his oldest friend, a pit of dread and disbelief opening up inside of him. After all this time— No— He shook his head. Not after all this time.
Not here.
"You don't think—" Fernando murmured.
"Oh, I do, old friend," Idir returned. "I really do."
Fernando scowled.
Idir spared him a grim smile that did not reach his eyes.
They stared up at the church that loomed above all of Roncesvalles and resigned themselves to the truth that had been staring them dead in the eye all along.
Benjamin was in the church.
He claimed sanctuary with God.
Jacqueline was in the servants' quarters, mending one of Lady Fernanda's torn veils when she smelled it.
Startled, her head snapped up to glance around the room she was in, but Jacqueline was just as alone as she had been moments before.
There were a couple humans about, she could hear them in the other rooms. Two girls in the laundry, drying items on a rack. One kitchen maid was sweeping, but she was too far away and hidden from view.
None of their scents were intermingled with this one though.
Frowning, Jacqueline stood. She gently laid the veil on the seat she vacated as she did.
With the quickness and grace of a lynx she moved into the corridor, eyes bright even in the darkness, as she followed her nose to her sharply scented prey.
This was the scent of a killer, but Jacqueline was not afraid.
She was a killer too, in her own way.
And the scent she tracked now had played a role in hunting her mistress. Something the young manjasang maid simply could not abide.
She crept in shadow, through the length of the corridor, checking doors and peering into rooms. There was no corner in which her prey could hide now.
When she reached the door where the scent lingered the strongest, she moved before the person inside could sense her hovering in the corridor.
Her body was a blur as she cut her way into the room with a burst of carefully conserved speed. She knew this room. She knew it well. Just as well as the scent that mixed in with the killer's stench. She knew who it belonged to. Heart in her throat at the implication of what could have possibly occurred here right under everyone else's noses, Jacqueline circled around.
Empty.
The room was empty.
The bed was empty too despite the late hour, even though the girl Jacqueline searched for was notorious for rising very early every day.
The floor was cold, which told Jacqueline it had been too long since a fire had been lit in the hearth. When was the last time the little human had slept in here?
The window was open, curtains billowing, mocking her in the breeze. Jacqueline moved to the window, looking down on a pair of petite footsteps that tracked their way through the snow. Her eyes narrowed with the urge to follow. The caged beast inside her chest, pacing back and forth with the instinct to pursue. There was no human in the world who could outrun Jacqueline when she saw fit to make them her prey. It would be easy enough to do. To put an end to this madness and be done with it.
She let out a small, catlike growl. One that her father always teased her for, but still somehow struck fear into the hearts of those who were made of lesser things than she. The maid curled her nails into the window frame, aggravated beyond belief by what she had discovered here today.
No, she could not pursue her. Jacqueline knew not what awaited her on the other side of wherever the foolish girl had gone. And though a vampire she may be, Jacqueline was not a warrior.
She was a maid.
She turned on her heel and flew up the steps, appearing suddenly in the entrance hall. The air around her crackled in shock from her speed, but still she had not been fast enough to catch the people she most desperately needed to see. She made it to the doors just in time to watch Don Fernando departing for the village with Sirs Guillaume, Balder and Idir.
The maid frowned, and turned away, hoping quite desperately to find Lord Hugh. Startling instead at the quiet, and quite sudden arrival of Jean Luc. Her shoulders drooped in relief at the sight of the Lord Hugh's most faithful manservant.
"Jacqueline," he said, and she knew that behind her name was a thinly veiled question.
He was a very perceptive man, Jean Luc. And Jacqueline was more than relieved to see him, despite his growing frown.
"I know who has been stealing Lady Fernanda's belongings. It may be worse than we believed—" she said and shook her head at him, unable to find the words now that someone was present to hear them.
"Show me," he said.
So, she did.