Midnight Bites (3 page)

“I—” He was utterly at a loss for words, and stared at her until her fiery eyebrows rose. She looked more imperious than any bathing attendant he could imagine. “It's not fitting that you . . . a queen . . .”

“A dead queen, well buried, and I never liked her. I've discovered quickly enough that this life gives me a freedom I never tasted before. I like it, I think.” She flashed him a full, charming smile this time, and quirked one eyebrow higher. “I'll turn my back if you give me your oath not to fall and dash your head open on the stones.”

“I'll try,” he promised. She politely turned, and he stripped quickly, shocked at the sight of his own skin after so long but glad, so very glad, to have those stiff, evil rags off his body. Getting into the tub was a daunting challenge that he only just managed, and he raised quite a splash at the last as his feet slipped from under him to spill him into the water. It raised a gasp from him, and then a groan.

“Is your modesty protected, sir?” Lady Grey asked. She sounded as if she had difficulty keeping her laughter in check. Myrnin looked around, grabbed a small washing cloth, and draped it carefully over pertinent areas before he leaned back against the living-skin-warm copper back of the tub.

“It's not modesty,” he told her as she turned. “It's politeness. I shouldn't like to shock a lady such as yourself.”

“I am never shocked. Not anymore.” She picked up his rags from the floor, frowned at them, and threw them into a heap in the corner.
“Those we'll burn. Clean clothing will be waiting when you are done. Shall I help you scrub?”

“No!” He sat up, almost drowning the floor in a wave of water, and pulled the pail of soap closer to scoop a handful out. “No, I will manage. Thank you.”

“You'll need assistance with that mange of hair,” she said. “I can help with that, if nothing else.”

So it was that, despite his worry and discomfort, he found himself soaking his filthy hair beneath the water, then coming up to allow her to slather lavender soap into the tangled mess and scrub with merciless strength. It took a great deal longer than cleaning the rest of him. He no longer worried about his modesty; the bubbles that formed in the water, not to mention the filth clouding the bath, protected him well enough. Lady Grey had an impressive volume of curse words for a wellborn woman, but he thought she enjoyed the challenge more than he enjoyed the sometimes painful scrubbing.

When she judged him finally fit, she rubbed his hair from wet to damp, helped him stand, and wrapped the bathing sheet around him twice to sop up the water before she helped him out. Everything felt . . . different. His skin felt surprisingly soft, like a newborn's. His hair was settling into clean waves; he'd forgotten it had that habit.

Most of all, what felt different was his own mind. Amazing that a little kindness, a little care, had settled his chaos so well.

Lady Grey was watching him with those striking, lovely eyes. He had no notion of what to say to her, except the obvious. “Thank you, my lady.”

“My pleasure, my lord,” she said, and curtsied just a bit. He responded with as much of a bow as he could manage in a bathing sheet. “She's spoken of you often, you know.”

“She?” Myrnin paused in reaching for the black woolen breeches that she'd set out for him, and blinked at her.

“Amelie,” Lady Grey said.

“Amelie?”

“Our queen. She was concerned for you, and bid me find you. It took a good slice of time, but I am pleased you're not as daft as I was told.”

“Daft?”

“However, you do repeat things quite a bit.”

“I will bear it in mind.”

“Please do.” She gave him a look he could not even begin to interpret. “Shall I help you to dress?”

“No!” He must have sounded as scandalized as she hoped, for she gave him a saucy wink and left the room, closing the heavy oaken door behind her. He almost regretted her departure. She was . . . startling. Beautiful as an angel, tempting as something a great deal farther from heaven. Had Amelie intended for him to . . . No. No, of course not.

He felt vulnerable in the empty room. It was a hard thing to struggle into the clean clothes, but once he'd fastened them up, he felt far better. She'd even given him red felt shoes, lined with fur and festively embroidered. Amelie must have mentioned his fondness for the exotic.

Lady Grey was waiting in the hallway. She took him in at a long, sweeping glance, and he bowed again. “Do I meet your approval?”

“Sirrah, you met my approval when I found you stinking and ill in a dungeon. You are bidding fair to be a heartbreaker now, though I must credit myself for the beauty of your locks.” She winked at him and pulled the maid's scarf from her head as she walked down the hallway. “Come. Your mistress will want to greet you, now that you're half yourself again.”

“Only half?” he murmured.

“I'll have a meal waiting when you're done. I expect that will
restore you the rest of the way.” She walked a few steps ahead, then turned toward him, still striding backward in an entirely unladylike manner. “Of course, restore you to
what
will be the question. Are you really a madman?”

“It depends on the day of the week,” he said. “And the direction of the wind.”

“Clever little madman.” She turned to finish her walk with absolute precision at the doors at the end of the hallway, which she thrust open with the confidence only a queen could possibly have. “My lady Amelie, I bring your errant wizard.”

“Not a wizard,” Myrnin whispered as he edged past her.

“How disappointing,” she whispered back, then bowed to Amelie and closed the doors, leaving him facing his old friend.

She was swathed in a dazzling white robe trimmed with ermine, intertwined most tellingly with strands of silver wire. . . . She wanted her subjects to know that she was old enough and tough enough to defeat the burning metal, and therefore them. She looked the same as always: young, beautiful, imperious. She was reading a volume, and she placed a feather in it as a marker and set it aside as he bowed to her. He assayed a full curtsy, and almost fell in rising.

She was up and at his side instantly to assist him to a nearby chair. “Sit,” Amelie said. “No ceremony between us.”

“As you wish, my lady.”

“I am not your lady,” she said. “At the least, I do not raise the color in your face the way our good Lady Grey seems to do. I'm pleased you enjoy her company. I hoped she might give you some . . . diversion.”

“Amelie!”

She gave him a quelling look. “I meant that only in the most innocent sense. I am no panderer. You will find Lady Grey to be an
intelligent and well-read woman. The English have no sense of value, to have condemned her so easily to the chop.”

“Ah,” he said, as she took her seat again. “How did she escape it?”

“I found a girl of similar age and coloring willing to take her place, in exchange for rich compensation to her family.” Amelie was cold, but never unfeeling. Myrnin knew she could have simply forced a hapless double for Lady Grey to go to her death, but she was kind enough to bargain for it. Not kind enough, of course, to spare a life, but then, they were all killers, every one of them.

Even him. The trail of bodies stretched behind him through the years was something he tried hard not to consider.

“Why rescue me now, Amelie?” he asked, and fiddled with the ties on his shirtsleeves. The cloth felt soft on his skin, but he was unaccustomed to it, after so many years of wearing threadbare rags. “I've spent an eternity in that place, unremarked by you, and don't tell me you didn't know. You must need me for something.”

“Am I so cruel as that?”

“Not cruel,” he said. “Practical, I would say. And as a practical ruler, you would leave me where you knew you could find me. I have a terrible habit of getting lost, as you well know. Since you chose to fetch me from that storehouse, you must have a job for me.” It was hard to hold Amelie's stare; she had ice-blue eyes that could freeze a man's soul at the best of times, and when she exerted her power, even by a light whisper, it could cow anyone. Somehow, he kept the eye contact. “Do me the courtesy next time of storing me somewhere with a bed and a library, Your Majesty.”

“Do you really think I was the one who imprisoned you? I was not. Yes, I knew you were there, but I had no one I could trust to go to you . . . and I could not go myself. It was not until the arrival of
Lady Grey I felt I had an ally who would be up to the task should you prove . . . reluctant.”

“You thought I'd gone completely mad.” She said nothing, but she looked away.
Amelie
looked away. He swallowed and stared hard at his clasped hands. “Perhaps you weren't so wrong. I was . . . not myself.”

“I doubt that, since you are so much better already,” Amelie said. Her tone was warm, and very gentle. “Tomorrow we will leave this place behind. I have a castle far in the mountains where you can work in peace to recapture all that you have lost. I am in need of a fine alchemist, and there is none better in this world. We have much to do, you and I. Much to plan.”

There was a certain synchronicity to it, he found; he had been in Amelie's company for many years, and when he left it, disaster always struck. She was, in some ways, his lucky star. Best to follow her now, he supposed. “All right,” he said. “I will go.”

“Then you'd best say farewell to Lady Grey and find yourself some rest,” she told him. “She will not come with us.”

“No? Why not?”

“Two queens cannot ever stay comfortably together. Lady Grey has her own path; we have ours. Say your good-byes. At nightfall, we depart.”

She dismissed him simply by picking up her book. He bowed—an unnecessary courtesy—and saw himself out of the room. It was only as he shut the doors that he saw her guards standing motionless in the darker corners of her apartments; she was never unwatched, never unprotected. He'd forgotten that.

Lady Grey was waiting for him, hands calmly folded in a maidenly sort of posture that did not match her mischievous smile. “Dinner,” she said. “Follow me to the larder.”

The larder was stocked with fresh-drawn blood; he did not ask where it came from, and she did not volunteer. She sipped her own
cup as he emptied his, drinking until all the screaming hunger inside was fully drowned. “Do you ever imagine you can hear them?” he asked her, looking at the last red drops clinging to the metal goblet's sides.

“You mean, hear their screams in the blood?” Lady Grey seemed calm enough, but she nodded. “I think I might, sometimes, when I drink it so warm. Odd, how I never hear it when they're dying before me in real life. Only when I drink apart from the hunt. Is that normal, do you think?”

“Whatever is normal in this world, we have no part in it,” he said. “How long was I in the dark, my lady?”

“Ten months.”

“It seemed longer.”

“No doubt because it was so congenial.”

“You should have stayed for the formal procession of the rats. Very entertaining; there were court dances. Although perhaps I imagined it in one of my hallucinations. I did have several vivid ones.”

She reached across the table and wrapped her long, slender fingers around his hand. “You are safe now,” she told him. “And I will keep my eye on you, Lord Myrnin. The world cannot lose such a lovely head of hair.”

“I will try to keep my hair, and my head, intact for you.” She'd kept her hand on his, and he turned his fingers to lightly grip hers. “I am surprised to find that you accept Amelie's orders.”

Lady Grey laughed. It was a peal of genuine amusement, too free for a well-bred young woman, but as she'd said, she'd buried that girl behind her. “Amelie asks favors of me. She doesn't order me. I stay with you because I like you, Lord Myrnin. If you wish, I'll stay with you today, as you rest. It might be a day of nightmares for you. I could comfort you.”

The thought made him dizzy, and he struggled to contain it,
control it. His brain was chattering again, running too fast and in too many wild directions. Perhaps he'd overindulged in the blood. He felt hot with it. “I think,” he said finally, “that you are too kind, and I am too mad, for that to end well, my lady. As much as I . . . desire comfort, I am not ready for it. Let me learn myself again before I am asked to learn someone else.”

He expected her to be insulted; what woman would not have been, to have such a thing thrown in her face? But she only sat back, still holding his hand, and regarded him for a long moment before she said, “I think you are a very wise man, Myrnin of Conwy. I think one day we will find ourselves together again, and perhaps things will be different. But for now, you are right. You should be yourself, wholly, before you can begin to think beyond your skin again. I remember my first days of waking after death. I know how fragile and frightening it was, to be so strong and yet so weak.”

She understood. Truly understood. He felt a surge of affection for her, and tender connection, and raised her hand to his lips to kiss the soft skin of her knuckles. He said nothing else, and neither did she. Then he bowed, rose, and walked to his own chambers.

He bolted the door from within, and crawled still clothed between the soft linen sheets, drowning in feathers and fears, and slept as if the devil himself chased the world away.

As he rode away that night in Amelie's train of followers, he looked back to see Lady Grey standing like a beacon on the roof of the stone keep. He raised a hand to her as the trees closed around their party.

He never saw her return the salute . . . but he felt it.

Someday,
he heard her say.
Someday.

•   •   •

He didn't see her for another three hundred years. Wars had raged; he'd seen kingdoms rise and fall, and tens of thousands bleed to death in needless pain over politics and faith. He'd followed Amelie from one haven to the next, until they'd quarreled over something foolish, and he'd run away from her at last to strike out on his own. It was a mistake.