Perfect Shadows (13 page)

I withdrew my lips from her scented skin, my hunger assuaged,
content to hold her until she stirred, which she soon did. She smiled at me
again, and reached for the wine. I gave her the full glass and fetched the
tray, conscious as I walked that her eyes never left me. The dish held slices
of rare beef and several oysters, similar to many of the meals Rózsa had fed
me, in return, I suddenly realized, for my feeding her.

Sylvie took a slice of the meat and neatly ate it, not spilling
a drop of the juice onto the sheets, while I sampled the wine, which I found
refreshing but, as she said, not intoxicating. “These foods are good for
rebuilding the blood, you see,” she told me, and tipped an oyster into her
mouth. When she finished her meal she set the dishes on the floor and curled up
against me.

“You were distressed earlier,” she murmured, resting her head on
my chest. “Why?”

“Because I can no longer read, and writing is—was, my life. The
man who did this,” I touched the patch covering my right eye-socket, “took more
than my vision, and my life. He took my reasons for living,” I growled
caustically.” And someday, someday I will meet with him again, and when I do—”

“I will rip his throat out, if you like,” Sylvie offered
casually, and I glanced at her to see if she was serious. She was. I shook my
head.

“No. No, I’d not want you to soil your teeth on him,” I said,
but somehow that matter-of-fact proposition had restored my humor.

“My lord? My lord Prince Geoffrey said you would heal, did he
not? And you have healed so much already, you have no reason to disbelieve
him.” With a lurching in my stomach, I understood that Sylvie had seen me when
I was—it could as easily have been her that I had raped and almost murdered. A
shudder racked me, threatening to become a convulsion. She sat up and slapped
me smartly on the cheek, replacing the horror that threatened to overwhelm me
with pure astonishment. “My lord, Kit, listen to me. It was not your fault. We
had no experience to guide us, and anyway, Annette could have changed her shape
to escape you! She accepted that it was an accident, as much as the one that
later killed her. She was born under an unlucky star,” Sylvie added sadly. “It
was always so, from the time she was a child. If a tree limb was going to break
it would wait until she climbed that tree, or if a horse was planning to bolt,
it would always wait until she was near. It wasn’t her fault, any more than it
was yours. It just happened.” I stared at her for a few seconds.

“I thank you for that,” I said.

I irritably pushed my dripping hair out of my face, glaring at
the two men who had me backed against the wall, the tips of their swords
dancing before my throat, my hand stinging from the forceful blow that had
disarmed me. For the last two weeks I had spent as much time as possible in the
salle, both in solitary drill, and in practice with Geoffrey and Nicolas, the
latter being startlingly agile and deft in his movements for a man of his
build. Laughing at my vexation, the two turned away. Geoffrey scooped my
dropped weapon off the floor and tossed it over his shoulder to me in a single
elegant movement. I caught the sword by the hilt and lowered it slowly to my
side. Last week, in a similar situation, I had lost my temper and rushed
Geoffrey’s back, only to have the blade knocked out of my grasp for the second
time in as many minutes, and it had seemed like hours before my hand had
stopped tingling. A few paces distant, Geoffrey spun on his heel. “Excellent!
It took us almost twice as long to disarm you, you did not lose your composure,
and you did not let our switching hands startle you!”

“I didn’t have the time to be startled!” I replied, trying to
keep the annoyance out of my voice. I mopped at the sweat on my forehead with a
sleeve that was itself soaked, and looked forward to the bath that I knew Jehan
would have waiting for me, but as I started to leave the salle Geoffrey called
me back.

“Rózsa will be here sometime tonight, Christopher, or tomorrow
at the latest. She knows about—”

“My illiteracy?” I interjected bitterly.

“Your difficulty,” Geoffrey continued smoothly, ignoring the
resentment in my voice. “I took the liberty of informing her. Go now, and have
your bath. You are progressing quite well. Give yourself some time.” I just
shook my head and left for my room, where I found Jehan curled up in my bed,
waiting for me. It never ceased to amaze me that a man so tall could wind
himself into such a small space. The bath water had cooled just enough to be
tolerable, and Jehan watched me with bright feral eyes as I undressed. I eased
into the hot water, closed my eyes with a sigh, and heard Jehan stirring on the
bed.

“Master Kit? Shall I wash your back? I’d like that,” he added
when I failed to answer right away. The complex interdependencies between the
vampires and the wolf-folk troubled me. On the one hand they were perfect
servants, well cared for and never fed from against their will, but the
carnality inherent in the feeding itself led to a familiarity in relationships
that I felt entirely too comfortable with, and given their sensual natures,
they were ever eager for the union and the erotic pleasure. I shook my head
impatiently suddenly recalling my father’s wise words of years ago: “What’s not
broken needs no mending.”

“Yes, Jehan, I would like that, and a shave as well, an it
please you,” I answered, and relaxed beneath the big man’s hands. In only a
fortnight I had learned not only to be comfortable with the ministrations of
servants, but had come to depend upon them. Later, resting against Jehan in the
opulent bed, I fed.

I woke alone and dressed quickly in the clothing Jehan had left
for me, garnet velvet the color of blood for the trousers and doublet, silk
white as the sun on snow for the shirt, and a deep falling band of Italian
needle-lace. I paused before pulling on my boots to stroke the fine silks, with
an abrupt memory of the shabby clothing and coarse scholar’s gown of my
Cambridge days, the unfashionable cropped hair and detestable caps. My family
had sent me clothing of good woolen and linen stuff, hardly worn, some of it,
but I’d pawned most of it. Some of the money went to buy books of my own, and a
pang of loss went through me for those forfeited volumes, and the maps I had
painstakingly hand copied when the atlas edition had proved too dear for my
means. Relentlessly I followed the thread of the memory—some of the coin had
gone for less honorable purposes. What was that little puff-adder’s name? John?
No. James? Well, no matter. He was the son of some country knight, come to
Cambridge the term after I had taken my Bachelor’s degree. He was so worshipful
and full of admiration for the new Dominus, and so lonely and lost. He had
played me like a trout, and landed himself in my bed one night when the room’s
other occupants were absent.

It had been a heavenly night, but a hellish morning, for the boy
demanded money from me to keep quiet about the affair, and I had paid him,
fearing at best to be stripped of my degree and turned out of college, and at
the worst to be imprisoned, tortured, and executed, the punishment meted out
for sodomy, as a crime against both church and state. I had been much relieved
when the young man’s elder brother had subsequently died, and the family
demanded the youth’s immediate return, but the incident had left me with a
violent antipathy for extortionists and cozeners. With a blistering clarity, I
recalled seeing the boy a year or so later, leaving Sir Francis Walsingham’s
via the back door, the day of my fateful interview with the secretary—the
reason that Tommy had been waiting for me, to seduce me into Walsingham’s
circle of spies. That man had had a mind as twisted as a tightrope. I shook
myself out of my reverie and went downstairs to the study, where a strange
young man lounged before the fire, his gold and flame-colored brocaded tunic
and venetians almost eclipsing the firelight as he turned to face me.

“Good evening, Kit,” Rózsa said.

Not long after, in the curtained recesses of my bed, I raised
myself on my elbow and looked at my companion. Her hair lay over the pillows in
a pool of jet and coppery bronze, a fine contrast to her milk white skin. She
reached a lazy hand out, trailing her fingers over my chest and down. “I was
afraid that you would be angry with me,” she said softly, not looking at me.

“Angry because you saved my life, when I was too reckless and
forward to even see the risks I ran?”

“It is—customary—to give a choice, and not to thrust this gift
on one who may be unwilling or unable to accept it. A breach of ethics, you see,
and Geoffrey was less than pleased with me, although he did admit that your
survival indeed implied a sort of belated consent.” She smiled briefly. “He has
read your works, such as were available, the manuscript copies you gave to us,
and was himself unwilling that you should be cut off so early and so
unfulfilled.” As she finished I stirred uncomfortably.

“I don’t remember,” I said shortly, and then elaborated at her
questioning look. “I remember very little of my life before I met you.
Sometimes a memory will come out of nowhere, but I cannot make them sequential;
they remain scattered events. Grievous events, mostly, things that hurt or
frightened me, a few moments of rage, less of joy. I do not remember writing
the poems and plays at all, though I have glimpses of the audiences at some of
the performances. But my day-to-day life is gone. I came from a large family,
but I cannot remember my mother’s face or my sisters’ names. Mary? Alice?
Eliza? I know not. I can remember some of the lengths to which I felt driven,
but not the why or the how. I know that I was angry and scoffing, but cannot
feel what I was, but that I was somehow someone else, a stranger,” I broke off
with a crooked smile, and a sidelong look. She looked abstracted, and did not
smile.

“That is at least partly because you are someone else,” she said
carefully.” These changes are not just of the physical. We, all of us, except
perhaps Geoffrey, change somewhat, and even he has, by all accounts, mellowed.
Dying gives one a different perspective on life, you might say. The injuries
that you suffered have taken more from you than is common, ’tis true, but what
cause have you to be angry, what cause have you to fear? You have no need for
patronage, no need to earn your way, because your survival has earned it for
you. We are responsible for you in ways that the world could never understand,
and you are responsible to us,” she paused, and frowned slightly before
continuing. “You need not remember your family because we are your family now.

“I took the responsibility of your new life when I chose to make
the exchange with you, and you will do the same when you face that decision.
You have set about a new schooling, learning to be a prince, for such you are,”
she said, and her voice was bitter. The day trance claimed me before I could
ask her what was wrong.

The next evening, I woke to find her watching me, tears beading
her lashes like tiny brilliant diamonds. When I reached a tentative hand to
touch her cheek she drew away from me and turned her head.

“You were so very like him,” she sighed.

“Like whom?” I asked gently, and she rose upon her elbow to gaze
at me before replying.

“My love, my first love, George Boleyn,” she whispered the name,
then smiled as if at her own foolishness and said it aloud. “I was at the court
of Her Majesty’s father, Henry. Good King Hal! Bluff King Hal! He was a monster
of appetites and self-righteous self-love. Oh, he wasn’t the gross and bloated
beast then that he later swelled into, but the cruelty and the selfishness were
there. I had not been long a vampire when I came to the court, where Nicolas
had business, and I had never been in love.

“Anne was Queen in fact, if not in name, and the most dazzling
members of the court, the poets and musicians, swarmed around her. Wyatt, and
Norris, and George her brother, but none of more wit and ability than Anne
herself. The King still doted on her then, and the future seemed so bright.

“George was clever, with a vicious tongue and a slashing wit,
but as quick to laugh as to quarrel, and much taken with the foreign lady so
suddenly in their midst. They were not long out of the merchant class, the
Boleyns, and Nicolas, under various names, had been doing business with them
for years. As a favor to him I was presented to Anne, and, in her mercurial
way, she took a fancy to me though as a rule she much preferred the company of
men. George would ever love where his sister did, and soon he and I were
lovers. He was my first love, and the thought that he would age and die while I
would live on unchanged was unendurable. We made the exchange, and I foolishly
thought that our future was secure.

“Nicolas and I left England soon after, intending to return in
the fullness of time, but—” her voice broke, and she choked back a sob before
continuing. “Anne did not produce the expected son, and Henry was not a man to
be thwarted, but rather one to turn upon any whom he felt had misled or
betrayed him, however much he may have pretended to care for them. He hated
George, as did others: the aging Henry for his youth and beauty, the others for
his pride and superior intellect. That was not enough to condemn him, though,
so George was accused by his wife, a sour and insanely jealous bitch, of
incest, of adultery with his own sister!

“When we returned to England they were dead. Anne, George,
Norris, Brereton, all the brilliant youth of Henry’s court, so that he might
wed a placid jade with a face like cream and all the wit and sparkle of a
farm-house cheese. He had them beheaded, you see. And so I lost my love
forever.