Mystic Rider (2 page)

“She is a revolutionary,” Ian murmured, keeping his
horror — and his secret longing — to himself as he pondered the fate he had been
assigned.

“She has the chalice.” Since he hadn’t been struck dead by
the gods, Kiernan dared lift his head. He had no fear of Ian’s wrath. The
Oracle’s son had been raised to be as dispassionate as the rock upon which
Kiernan sat.

Aware of his duty and the expectations of his peers, Ian
spun his staff. His path became more clear with each rush of air. “I’ll
retrieve the chalice,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument.

Kiernan’s jaw dropped. “France is a country at war. You could
die there.”

Ian had already pondered that possibility. If he died, it
would mean more than just his death, for he carried the souls of his ancestors.
Should he die in the Other World, those souls would be lost in a place that did
not recognize them, rather than on the island where his blood was revered. His
gifts would also be lost forever — unless he left behind an heir to carry them
on. Yet the woman destined to be his mate lived in the maelstrom that could
kill him. The challenge intrigued him.

“Nonetheless, I will go.”

“The Council will never allow it,” Kiernan argued.

Ian grunted acknowledgment of the Council’s inevitable
opposition. Its members stubbornly resisted any break with tradition. Although
they were extremely gifted people, many were elderly and accustomed to his
father’s rule. Luther had had fewer psychic gifts than Ian did and would never
have used them to coerce the entire Council.

Ian had no such compunction. He had obeyed his elders’
decrees all his life, but the time had arrived to assume leadership. He had
been given his abilities for a reason, not to let them molder unused.

And if his choice led to his death, then he alone was
responsible.

Ian did not make his decision lightly. He had given the
problem careful consideration since he’d seen the unthinkable in the skies
these last months. “What is the point of my living if the chalice is lost in
the Other World?” he asked. “And if I do not have a mate to pass on my
abilities, of what use am I to Aelynn?”

Without waiting for a response that he knew Kiernan was
unprepared to give, Ian strode down the hill toward his home, leaving his
friend alone in the starlight to contemplate a future without a Leader.

The Council unanimously agreed upon that future several days
later, after Aelynn expressed her disapproval of the chalice’s loss by spewing
steam and hot ash from the volcano’s peak for the first time in the memory of
even the eldest citizen. At Ian’s suggestion that the gods wished him to
retrieve the chalice, the mountain grew silent in approval.

All hastily concurred that only Ian could ensure their
future, that only he could appease the angry gods by returning the chalice to
the island. They left the fate of the renegade Murdoch in his hands.

Ian very carefully did not mention the revolutionary mate he
had foreseen in the stars. The Council had little use for rebels.

Paris, June 1791

Chantal Orateur Deveau gasped with horror as she read the
note the messenger had delivered. “This is not supposed to happen!” she cried,
then abruptly stifled any further protest.

The walls had ears these days, even in a humble printer’s
shop. She had learned to keep her thoughts to herself, but she was having
difficulty staunching her hysteria. With ink-stained fingers, she scrubbed at a
tear that portended an imminent deluge. Valiantly, she hummed to keep her rage
and fears at bay while rereading the note.

The ragged urchin on the other side of the counter shrugged
and waited for the coin he had earned. “Things change,” he said carelessly.

“They’re supposed to change for the better,” she argued,
suppressing her resentment that she had so little control over those changes.
The arrest of her beloved Pauline — and the children! — was just one small example
of how petty greed and hypocrisy were muddling the glory of a perfect
revolution.

She rummaged in her pocket and produced a piece of silver.
The urchin bit into it. Satisfied it was real, he smiled, bowed, and ran out
the door of the pressroom, back into the streets where he lived.

Behind her, the printing presses clattered, producing the
pamphlet her father had written last evening. It was a spectacular essay,
deriding the radicals in the Assembly for trading church property for political
influence, instead of distributing the church’s wealth to the poor. He was to
deliver the speech today, and the pamphlet would be all over Paris by evening.

She was proud of her father, but his brilliant oratory would
not save Pauline.

Emile emerged from beneath the press, wiping his hands on an
oily rag. “Bad news?” he asked sympathetically, noting the message in her hand.

“Pauline’s been arrested for harboring a defrocked priest.”
She held out the note to her father’s friend. “She’s not just my sister by
marriage, but my best friend since childhood. Do you think someone heard of
Papa’s upcoming speech and planned this to distract him?”

The burly pressman scowled. “Pauline is just another
aristocrat who thinks herself above the law. Maybe this will teach her a
lesson.”

Emile
could have
been the source of the gossip that had sent the militia charging into Pauline’s
attic, Chantal realized. “The priest is her brother!” she exclaimed in
frustration at this reminder that even friends could no longer be trusted.

At her cry, the printer grimaced as if in pain and slid back
beneath the press to escape her protest. She let him go. It wasn’t as if she
could change his prejudice with her tears.

She’d spent these past two years since her husband’s death
establishing a safe, stable world that shielded her from grief and anger. Even
while Paris rioted around her, and her father stood on street corners shouting
for revolution, she calmly taught her music students, obediently wrote out her
father’s speeches, visited the ill, and had tea with her friends while they
politely discussed how the Assembly would make life better.

She didn’t doubt the worthiness of her father’s cause. She
loved him and aided him as best she could, fully believing the nobility had no
right to deny others a chance to better their lives. Unfortunately, the only
area of her life she’d ever controlled was her music. Were she to allow her
emotions free rein, she’d no doubt shoot the toes off anyone standing in her
way. Better that she pacify her unruly sentiments by staying behind the scenes,
writing music for the Revolution.

Pauline’s arrest destroyed her fragile serenity.

Helplessly, she tapped her nails against the silver bell a
student had given her in lieu of payment for his music lessons. She had taken
to carrying the bell with her in her errand basket, in hopes of finding someone
to replace the missing clapper. But all the decent silversmiths had deserted
Paris for more peaceful, profitable markets. Mostly, she carried the bell
because the charming chime of her nails against the silver helped her believe
that all would be well. The bell had become her comfort when nothing else
succeeded.

As always, the melodic notes cleared her emotional stress
sufficiently to light a rational path.
Bribery
might rescue her sister-in-law and her two adorable children from the horror of
prison. Paris ran on bribery — mainly because coins were scarce and the
Assembly’s paper notes were almost worthless. She didn’t think she could find enough
coin to free a priest charged with treason, but innocent women and children…

While Chantal tried to imagine where she might acquire
enough coins to bribe a guard, she smoothed her palm over the polished curve of
the peculiar bell, and her ring caught on one of the gemstones embedded in the
ornate handle. She would have thought the stones would reduce the bell’s
harmony, but they somehow enhanced it. A very skilled musician must have
crafted it.

She set her basket on the counter and lifted out the bell by
its broad handle. Frowning, she looked under it, trying to determine why it no
longer possessed a clapper, or how one had been affixed to the interior, but
she was no silversmith.

Her eyes widened at a wild thought. Would the guards take a
broken silver bell as a bribe? The gems alone must be worth a fortune, and
silver was always valuable. The possibility that someone might melt down the harmonious
object horrified her, but…

She cringed. She hated to destroy such a treasure, or give
it up at all, but she had to be practical. The silver and gems gave the bell a
monetary value far higher than even her piano, and the bell was easier to
carry. Since it was broken, its musical value was small.

For Pauline, the sister she’d never had, she would sell her
soul.

Verifying with the printer that the pamphlet would be ready
when her father came for it, Chantal wrapped the bell in the wool she used to
disguise its gleam. Then, lifting the skirt of the sturdy twill gown she wore
when she worked, she hurried into the bustling streets of Paris. Once upon a
time she would have had a grand carriage to take her the mile to her family’s
home, but in these days of the glorious Revolution, her father’s position in
the Assembly required that they suppress any conspicuous show of wealth. They
kept the carriage and horses out of town, where her father could use them to
travel long distances.

Chantal did not mind the walk home or the necessity of
wearing old dresses. As long as she had her music, she was content.

But Pauline’s incarceration had thrown her off her safe path
onto an unknown side road. She wished she had someone wise to talk to, but she
couldn’t bear to think of Pauline and the children locked behind bars while she
scoured the streets for sage advice. Even if her father arrived this evening as
planned, it would take time to negotiate a release. Travel in France was
erratic, based on politics as much as weather and the condition of the roads.
Anything could happen to Pauline before Papa returned. Chantal shuddered in
horror and walked faster.

The massive wrought-iron gates enclosing the carriage drive
to her father’s home did not swing wide at her approach. Instead, a small door
in the block wall opened to let her in. Chantal nodded a worried greeting to
the guard, then hurried up the marble stairs. The town house was not so grand
as their country home near Le Havre, but she preferred the coziness of the
smaller rooms, and the acoustics of the music chamber were ideal.

A maid met her at the door, and Chantal handed her the bell.
“Shine it until it gleams, if you please. Then ask Girard to join me in the
music room as soon as he arrives. Madame Pauline and her children have been
imprisoned for helping her brother.”

The maid gasped, curtsied, and hurried away.

Pauline had her own small townhome, but she and the children
ran in and out of Chantal’s suite as often as they did their own.

Chantal lifted her skirts with both hands and raced up the
stairway to the family wing where she kept her rooms these days. After Jean had
died — almost two years ago today — she’d sold their flat and moved home to share
her grief with her recently widowed father. So many deaths in so short a time…

The mansion had been built for a large family, but the
Orateurs were not fortunate in that way. She was an only child, and Jean had
never given her an infant of her own.

She did not regret that she had no child to worry about now.
Her work with her father on France’s revolutionary course and her music lessons
kept her well occupied. All in all, her new life would be almost perfect — if not
for the hotheadedness of these new radicals who condemned all aristocracy and
believed the poor and uneducated should rule the kingdom.

If it hadn’t been for the protests of members of the middle
class like her father, the Assembly would never have been created, so she
couldn’t argue with the need for change. She simply wished the radicals weren’t
so… extreme in their demands. Compromise was essential. The alternative was
civil war. She hummed to shut out that unpleasant idea and turned her thoughts
to her immediate concerns.

To imprison a young mother because she loved her brother… It
was barbaric, even if Pierre had refused to take the oath of loyalty. He was a
priest. He owed his loyalty to the church. One could not ask a priest to forswear
God.

Hastily washing, Chantal discarded her drab twill and
replaced it with a flowered muslin dress wrapped with a bold satin sash. Her
father’s
chargé d’affaires
,
Girard, was elderly. As a concession to
his preference for the stiff elegance of an earlier time, she chose the
delicate gown instead of the practical twill in hopes of persuading him to do
her will.

Bribery, however, was illegal, and considering such an
action disturbed Chantal on many levels. Her father, Alain Orateur, was a
lawyer sworn to uphold the law, as had been Chantal’s husband and her maternal
grandfather. But the latter were gone now, Jean to consumption, her
grandparents not long after, in the same typhoid epidemic that had weakened her
mother and led to her death not long after. Their losses, one right after
another, had deadened her soul.

Papa and Pauline’s family were all she had left. She would
fight to the death for them.

Girard appeared in the music room as requested. He still
wore an old-fashioned gray wig over his balding head, and the gold braided
frogs and silk coat of the previous era. But his stature and the sword at his
side protected him in a way that Chantal couldn’t command. Her petite size was
a hindrance in a city tense with violence.

“They caught Pierre in Pauline’s attic,” she said without
preamble. “She’s been harboring him despite the Assembly’s edict.”

Girard’s stoic features revealed no opinion. “Where was he
taken?”