Roman (20 page)

Isra all but fell into his arms and he set her on her bare feet in the dirt, the tiny pieces of crushed shell and sand that comprised the soil biting into her softened instep. Roman pulled her into a run as they crossed the fire circle and dashed toward the tall wagon that was lit up by torches now.

Kahn's cage, Zeus and the other strongmen struggling to pull the wooden walls away from the bars, quickly, frantically; Asa van Groen pacing near the rear door.

“What is it?” Isra called out to Roman in the cold, humid air. “Is he ill?”

“No,” Roman said.

And then they were before Asa and he turned to them and reached out to grasp Isra's other hand, clearly intending to pull her away from Roman.

“Come, hurry, hurry,” the dark-haired man urged, and there was something of a sob in his normally suave voice.

“Wait,” Roman said, and pulled Isra back to him. “What do you expect her to do, van Groen? Go in there now? That's madness! Shall we lose them both?”

“He'll kill her!” van Groen gritted between his teeth. “She
wants
him to kill her!”

“What is going on?” Isra demanded.

Then the final wooden wall was lowered from the cage, and as the torchlight fell upon the occupants within the tiger's wagon, Isra understood the urgency.

Fran was standing in the cage staring at Kahn, who lay in his corner with only his head raised, as if he'd been woken from his slumber, which surely he had. His tufted mane, now fuller and whiter as his health improved, swung toward Isra as the edge of the wooden wall bit into the dirt, and she would have sworn before God that the animal was blaming her for this bizarre turn of events in his already confusing existence.

Wasn't
it her fault, though? Wasn't everything?

Asa dropped Isra's hand and stepped toward the cage. “Fran? Franny?” he cajoled. “It's all right; we're all here now. Only back toward the door and Gunar will—”

“We're all here?” Fran interrupted in a disinterested tone, her gaze never leaving the tiger still lying across the wooden floor from her. Too close to her. “Are we now, Asa? I would disagree with you. Max isn't here, is he?”

“Franny, please,” Asa pleaded in a cracking voice. “This is . . . this is
madness
!”

“Oh, and well I know it,” she mused on a breath of laughter. “How I do! It was I who released Kahn the day we were joined by my fellow Norseman and your special new pet. Had you guessed it was I?”

Asa stared at the blond woman through the bars, his face slack.

“Had you?”
Fran demanded in a sudden shout.

“No,” Asa replied. “Fran, why . . . ?”

“Because.” She paused to swallow, and one might be tempted to think she was working up courage for what she was about to say—or do. “Because even though your plan was to move south, I never know when you will suddenly change your mind, Asa. The next big surprise. And I could not risk you deciding to lead the troupe farther east. Not with . . . with winter. The cold. I thought if the tiger escaped and had to be killed . . . that with no grand show, we would find somewhere to winter. We could stay in one place for a bit so that I could . . .” She broke off again and drew a deep, jagged breath. “So that I could
mourn
.”

Isra looked to van Groen's face and was surprised at the silvery threads of wetness glowing against the man's pale cheeks.

“The troupe moved on after Max died, as did you,” Fran said more calmly now. “But I can't move on, Asa. I can't move another step, now that I am without you both.”

“Franny,
I love you
,” van Groen insisted. “I've never stopped loving you. But you pushed me aw—”

“So since
we are all here
!” the blonde cried out and then raised her arms from her sides, and Isra saw Asa's whip in Fran's right hand. “Let's have a show, shall we? Rouse the city! Why do you lie about in slothful slumber when there is still a shilling to be had?
Hie, Kahn! Hie!
” The whip cracked, and the tiger flinched and showed his long fangs to the blonde.

Isra yanked herself free from Roman. She marched toward the cage, clapping her hands over her head. “Kahn! Kahn!” Her heart snapped against her breastbone like the whip in Fran's hand when the tiger swung his head toward her voice.

“And still you challenge me?” Fran asked in a bemused if weary voice. “Is it not enough that you have my man? My people? Go away, troublesome woman, and let me have my bloody end.”

“I do not want Asa, Fran,” Isra said in a stern voice, all the while holding her hands in the air and keeping her eyes fixed on Kahn's as she walked backward toward the rear of the wagon. “And he does not want me. Whatever end you think to be had is a fanciful wish. Kahn is full. He will only maul you should you continue to intrude upon his den.”

“Go away
.
”

“I cannot let you do this to the people you love,” Isra said, glancing at Gunar, who stood with his hand on the door latch. “Come out now or I am coming in to get you.”

“No!” Fran shouted, and Kahn flinched again, this time with a quiet hiss. “I've already told the rest and I will tell you: If the door behind me opens, I will throw myself upon him, I swear it.”

Isra froze. Had they left even one of the walls up, perhaps they would have had time to insert the separating bars. She believed the blonde was speaking the truth; Isra could see the desperation and pain on her face, hear it in her words. There was a time, not so very long ago, when that kind of pain had been Isra's constant companion as well, only she'd had no beast to sacrifice herself to.

“I know what you are feeling,” Isra said.

“You don't know anything,” the woman spat.

“I lost a child, too: Huda. She was my sister, but I raised her as my own. She is dead, too, Fran. Dead at ten years. And not from illness, a weakness of the lungs as with Max; Huda was killed by very bad men. In the worst way a woman could be killed, and that which is unfathomable for a little girl.”

Isra saw Fran pause and swallow again. “What did you do?”

“I killed the man who was their leader,” Isra said, ignoring the tense thickness of the air, keeping her eyes on the tiger and the woman as she walked toward the center of the cage on cold feet. “That is why I am hiding with the troupe. Why I am running. I stabbed a man through the heart with a dagger while he lay in my bed.”

“We are not so very different then, you and I, are we?” Fran mused in a choked whisper. “Did killing him make the pain go away?”

“No,” Isra answered, surprised at the tears that came from her own eyes now, although her voice was steady. “I believe the pain will never go away. It will never get less. But perhaps we will one day become strong enough to bear it.”

“I don't want to bear it any longer,” she gasped. “I can't.”

Isra turned her head only slightly to catch Roman's eye. Then she glanced at the door behind Fran, even as she continued to walk toward the opposite end of the wagon.

“You must,” she insisted to the blonde as Roman sidled around the petrified van Groen toward the door she'd indicated. “You gave your son more years than he would have likely seen had you not pulled him from that gutter in Budapest. You had the honor of being his mother for four years. Will you now discredit the man he called father, the people he knew as his family, by placing them all in jeopardy and forcing an innocent creature to take your life?”

“Please, be still,” Fran mewed on a sob. “I never meant you true harm, I swear it; but please, please, don't speak anymore.”

Roman was in place now. Isra looked at him and he shook his head, as if he had only now realized what she was going to do.

She looked back to Fran as she stepped up on the wheel near Kahn's head. “I am coming in, Fran,” she warned. “If you move any closer to Kahn, it is likely one or both of us will be badly injured. I shall not let you torment him. Or yourself,” she finished. She reached for the latch.

Fran began shaking her head, her eyes once more on the tiger, as if hypnotized. “You'll be killed,” she whispered.

“Kahn,” Isra said in a low voice as she turned the latch. She had to take his attention from Fran, from the door behind which Roman stood at the ready. “Kahn, hie.”

The tiger pulled fully onto his elbows and turned his head to look over his shoulder, the long muscles along his spine bunching. He could reach through the bars and maul her from here if he chose, but her proximity beyond the cage wasn't enough of a distraction from Fran.

“Now!” she cried, throwing open the door while the tiger shot to his feet with a half scream, backing his haunches against the bars, confused about which direction to lash out.

Fran let out a shriek and stumbled forward toward Kahn. She seemed to stop in midair and begin a retreat, but it was not fast enough. The tiger rose up with a scream and swiped his huge paws at the woman, batting her blond head as if it was nothing more than a white bit of seed fluff from one of the dried autumn pods along the early road they'd traveled from Melk. Fran went limp and Isra saw Roman's wide form behind her, dragging the blonde back toward the door.

“Kahn!” Isra screamed and stepped into the cage with her hands over her head. “Kahn, to me!”

The tiger spun around and backed into a crouch as the far door closed, his ears laid back against his skull.

“Easy, Kahn,” she said in a firm, steady voice. “Easy. It is only you and I now; all is well. It is over. Easy.”

The tiger hissed at her, his ears still flat, but he seemed to recognize her even if he didn't completely trust her after the debacle that had taken place in his cage.

“I am sorry to have disturbed you,” she said and began to step back toward the door. “Easy. Rest now. Easy, Kahn.”

His ears came erect again in hitches and starts, swiveling around to catch the commotion of sounds coming from outside his cage, but he kept his eyes trained on Isra and took a step toward her.

Isra froze once more, the words of the pale Brother Wynn so loud he could have been standing at her side, speaking into her ear.

Another step and the tiger was before her, his head chest high to Isra, although, unlike the first tiger she had come into contact with, Kahn did not require the benefit of standing on the wide, raised edge of a fountain. Kahn sniffed her midsection, her arm, up her shoulder to her face.

Isra closed her eyes and closed her mind to everything except how beautiful Kahn was, and how very much she cared for him and wanted to protect him.

Then the tiger's hot breath was gone, and she felt the cage rock and a warmth close to her bare feet. When she opened her eyes, she saw that Kahn had circled around to once more lie in his corner, apparently pleased that his unwanted visitor was gone.

“Good boy,” Isra whispered and stepped backward from the cage onto the tongue of the wagon. She reached for the door, but it was snatched from her hand by Zeus, and Isra herself was pulled from her perch by arms she now recognized.

Roman turned her to him, held her close.

Isra wrapped her arms as far around his wide shoulders as she could reach. She neither shook nor sobbed, but her skin was numb in the face of the stiff night wind and the horrific ordeal she'd just taken part in.

“Is she dead?” she whispered.

“I don't know,” he said into her hair. “But we're leaving Dubrovnik tonight.”

Isra pulled back. “You and I?”

Roman shook his head, and then Isra heard the clattering and crashing of animals being pulled from their slumber against their will; supplies tossed haphazardly inside wagons; Kahn's wooden walls being raised up tight; Lou's panicked cries from some perch he had found nearby. Isra looked over Roman's shoulder as the licking glow of flames rose above the circle of carts and wagons belonging to the troupe, and he answered her. “All of us.”

T
he city gates nearest their camp had been thrown open readily at the troupe's shouts of fire, and Roman led the caravan out of Dubrovnik in the small, black hours before dawn, driving van Groen's wagon as fast as he dared. Behind them, the flames from their abandoned cart had spread to a solitary shed and bells began to ring throughout the cold stillness of the city, alerting others to the danger that crept and crackled and sent up shimmering waves of heat in the frosty air.

The troupe was in chaos. Animals had been seized from their pens, hitched to whatever conveyance was closest or led away by men running on foot. There was no time for sorting, for order in their departure; they took advantage of the pandemonium they'd created in order to escape the city before any officials thought to stop them, question them about the fire that was meant to dispose of the body left behind in the tidy little cart with the clever hidden compartment.

The cart, their clothes, their supplies—all gone. Their plan had been in disarray nearly since they'd left the abbey weeks ago, and now it had been completely destroyed. They had no belongings, no transportation outside the sumptuous and ungainly wagon Roman now drove save the one small gray donkey, whose whereabouts were unknown at that moment. The only things Roman could claim were Isra and Lou and Constantine's letter for Baldwin, tucked—as it had been since their departure—close to his skin. He and Isra should have already sailed the Mediterranean, disembarking at Alexandria in Egypt, should now be refining their plan to attempt to warn the king of Jerusalem about the threat to his life. Instead, they were fleeing a hostile city as members of a traveling faire heading east toward the Balkan Mountains, and Fran might be dead.

Roman was pushing the team as fast as he dared on the rough, dark road; one missed curve and he would not only overturn the wagon but the conveyances behind him would quickly pile atop them, led by the lantern swinging wildly at their rear. He tried not to think of poor Lou, locked away behind the door of van Groen's wagon, but it was the safest place for the falcon until they stopped in the daylight. He guessed the caravan was at least a quarter mile long. They would have to travel for some distance to be far enough away to be out of reach and to find a place large enough to accommodate their camp. And so, while the darkness hid their flight, it also threatened their destruction, and Roman rushed to meet the dawn at the horizon.

Isra was at his side, her thin gown and bare feet hidden by the coverlet she clutched around her with one hand, while her other gripped the edge of the seat. She'd not said anything since they'd fled the city, and Roman wondered if the combined events of the last evening had finally broken her. He could not devote a moment to recalling what had taken place; it had shaken him so to see Isra endanger her life for the troubled Fran, and now that she was safe beside him, it was all he could do to simply drive the wagon, telling himself that he was carrying her farther away from the danger that lay behind them when in truth he knew they were likely only hastening toward danger of a different sort.

He began to slow their pace incrementally after what he guessed to be two hours, but he did not stop. Even when the sky grew gray and even colder than the black of midnight, Roman drove on. They passed through a small village, mostly abandoned by its appearance, and just outside the last ruined shelter he spied a ramshackle barn, half burned some time ago by its dark and crumbled appearance. The building leaned into the dawn, showing the sun's bright rays through its pitched doorway as if it was a mouth singing glorious praises to the morn.

Roman felt like doing the same after such a hellish night. He called back to Zeus, riding on horseback just beyond the rear of van Groen's wagon. As soon as Roman had given the command, the bald man turned his horse to relay the word, and Roman drove the tired team around the bright side of the ruined barn and stopped.

Isra was clambering down from the wagon before it had even rocked to a halt, and although Roman looked after her as she fled, leaving her coverlet to dangle from the floorboard, he did not call out. He knew where she was going.

He stood in the driver's seat and stretched his back for a moment before climbing down stiffly and unhitching the horses, holding them by their bridles while the last of the carts passed before him. Then he joined the group of men setting up a corral on the sound side of the barn. Within moments he was engaged in the work, trying not to think about where Isra was and what she was seeing.

* * *

Asa van Groen was sitting on the side of Fran's cot when Isra pulled herself into the back of the gaily painted wagon. Old Mother shut the door behind her, darkening the interior once more. The single lantern light gave the quarters a moribund, heavy air, combined with the thick stench of life leaking out of a person. Asa's marvelous dark hair stood up in great, thick tufts through his fingers, which gripped his skull. He looked up at her entrance, his face gray, drawn, deep lines having suddenly appeared at the sides of his mouth in the hours since Isra had last seen him. His white shirt was no longer white but instead resembled the blood-soaked queen's costume Isra had discarded. Van Groen was not painted with a criminal's blood, though; it was Fran's blood. The blood of the woman he loved.

Behind him, the coverlets piled high and tucked in taut around her thin body, lay Fran. Isra could not see her face, for Mother had returned straightaway to the stricken woman's side, and was bent over her, seeming to mop at her face with a rag that she dipped periodically into a shallow earthen bowl.

“Where are we?” Asa asked in a gravelly, tired voice.

Isra shook her head. “Outside a village. Almost deserted.”

Van Groen nodded slightly. “Everyone escape from Dubrovnik?”

“I think so,” Isra said, but in truth she didn't know. She steeled her nerves and glanced toward the still figure on the cot. “How is she?”

“Bad.” The word was reedy and crackled. “Mother has stitched her as well as any could. But—” He stopped, pushed the tips of his long fingers deep into the corners of his eyes. “Part of her scalp is . . . I could see her
skull.
”

The hag turned then, dropping the stained rag in the bowl with a little splash and holding it tight to her middle. “I've need of some things from my own cart. I'll carry you back a bite, Asa.”

He waved a hand. “Not hungry.”

Mother waved back with a nod. “All the same . . .” Then she opened the door and ducked out, shutting Isra inside with van Groen and Fran.

He didn't look up again, and Isra hesitantly moved closer to the cot, both dreading and needing to see the condition of the woman lying on it. She caught her gasp before it could escape, but now it sat lodged painfully in her throat.

Fran's beautiful, smooth, Nordic complexion was gone; the left side of her face was no longer symmetrical with the right, hitched up higher on her skull, stretched tight by the ugly black strands of gut running in a jagged, mismatched track from in front of her left ear to the crown of her head. The blond hair—so like silk, Isra had thought at one time—had been hacked away close to the mottled scalp. The wound was puckered, weeping; her thin, pale lips flattened and pulled to the side. Her eyelids were purple, swollen, even as her sockets appeared to have doubled in size. There must have been another wound on the back of her skull, for the embroidered pillow beneath her head showed concentric rings of dried and fresh blood, like a macabre halo in a painting.

Fran now looked like the monster Isra had called her, and in that moment, she was shamed to the core of her soul. Regret seized her heart and squeezed with a mighty fist so that she whimpered.

She went to her knees at the side of the cot and reached out a trembling hand to place it over Fran's chest, heaving unsteadily with each breath.

“She might not awaken,” van Groen said, but his inflection made his words seem a query rather than a statement, and Isra knew he was seeking any shred of reassurance.

“No one can know except God,” Isra managed, and nearly choked on the words. Had God saved Huda or Max? Did God even care to save the dying from this life? She saw the motion of Asa nodding from the corner of her eye and thought she heard a muffled sob.

Was it up to the dying to live?

But Fran didn't so much as twitch.

Isra rose slowly to her feet, letting her palm linger on the still woman. “How can I help you, Asa?”

Asa scrubbed his face with his palms and sighed. “Send Roman to me. I won't leave her, not even for a moment.”

“Of course.” Isra hesitated and then reached out to place her hand on van Groen's stooped shoulder. “I am sorry, Asa. Sorry for Fran and for . . . for Max.”

Van Groen gave a sniffling inhalation and then reached up and grasped Isra's fingers. He turned her hand and pressed his lips to her palm, and she was reminded of the first morning they'd met, when he'd sought to kiss her hand. It had been a flamboyantly courteous gesture, and one Isra had taken as playacting, but now she understood that everything about Asa van Groen was larger than life—his occupation, his hair, his teeth, his personality, his enthusiasm and flair for the dramatic.

His loves. His losses. His grief.

She squeezed his fingers in return. “I shall fetch Roman.”

He nodded and let her go, turning his eyes toward the mangled visage of the woman lying on the cot. And Isra saw love sweep over his face.

She escaped Fran's wagon with a gasp, pressing her back against the closed door. The folk who were busy near the cart stopped what they were doing and looked to her.

“She yet lives,” Isra called out.

The camp gave a collective sigh and then turned back to their work without comment.

Isra did see now. She stood aright from the wagon and looked around for Roman. She didn't spy his tall frame over those gathered, but when she heard the echoing pings of a hammer coming from inside the ruined shelter, she knew where she would find him.

He and several of the other men appeared to be attempting to brace the interior of the falling-down barn with some timbers they'd salvaged. He looked up when she entered the crooked doorway as if he'd been waiting for her, and she thought he looked very strong and capable then, his tool in his hand, his shirt already wet through from his efforts. He walked toward her.

“Asa wants you,” she said in greeting.

Roman nodded and looked out the doorway over the rolling landscape—stark and winter empty, though not frigid in the bright morning sun. “Is she dead?”

“No.” Isra began to turn away. “I must look in on Kahn.”

“Isra, wait,” he said and reached out to take her hand.

She looked down at his fingers gripping hers and then back into his face.

“If he asks us to stay . . . ?”

Isra blinked. “Here?”

“With the band. If he asks
you
to stay,” he clarified. “You needn't go on with me. It would only put you in greater danger. Once I have done what I set out to do, I will return to Melk.”

His meaning hung in the air between them: He would return to his friends at the abbey and Isra would be left alone. In an instant, images flashed through her mind of the moment when she would bid this man farewell. The weeks without him, when she would be wondering where he was on his journey, if he had arrived, succeeded, survived. She might never know if he lived to return to his friends at Melk. If she let him go now, it would surely be forever.

How would she even breathe without him?

“I go where you go,” she said calmly, although the emotions trapped in her chest were anything but calm. “Until the end of it.”

“You're certain?” he pressed, and she couldn't help but recall with a stab of regret that those same words had crossed his lips only last night, when she had thought they would make love.

“I came a very long way to find you,” she replied carefully. “It was I who insisted you return. Even for this moment, I was destined; this barn. The guard who attacked me; Fran and Kahn. It was always intended for me to flee Dubrovnik in the middle of the night.”

“Why?” he asked intently, as if very certain he must know her answer.

“I do not know. But if all of this is not part of something bigger, something better, then my suffering—yours, and that of your friends—was for nothing. Huda's death only a random evil.”

“I would like to know for certain that we are doing the right thing,” he confessed. “If it is for naught . . .”

She squeezed his hand and then slipped away from him.

She could not tell him that she had dreamed of Huda.

* * *

“I should have known better than to grant them entrance, let alone invite them to stay another night,” the mayor said, falling into his chair with a sigh. “Monsters and criminals, the lot of them! It's a miracle they didn't burn down all of Dubrovnik. The woman, though—ah, she was a pleasure. Would that you had had the chance to see her with her beast, my lord. An amazing sight, I must confess.”

“Your courtesy is much appreciated, Lord Mayor,” the guest said, settling into his own chair and taking the chalice from the tray held forth by the servant boy. “Though I am too much enamored with my new bride to have any interest in a random encounter, no matter how exotic the creature. I have seen my fill of strange beasts in the past several months. They hold little appeal for me now.”