I imagine your friends will be joining you shortly, my lord, the tavern keeper continued, so Ill just clear those other lads out.
Dont.
The tavern keeper raised his brows. My lord? It is your table, after all
They wont be joining me.
Ah, well, gentlemen will have their quarrels. The man gave another forced laugh. It will all set itself to rights, my lord. You wait and see. In the meantime, Ive got a lovely place right here for you, all nice by the fire. He waved toward one of the settles nearest the hearth.
Bram felt like the wood burning in the fireplaceblack and blistered on the outside, inside carved away by flame. His familiar haunt only reminded him of privation.
My lord?
The tavern keepers voice followed Bram as he turned and left. Whit and Leo had disappeared from London, but Bram was the one in exile.
How did she come to this place? Valeria Livia Corva could not feel her body, was merely a shade, yet she was dragged through one mans consciousness, as if her foot had caught in the stirrup of a runaway horse. She was jostled, careening, his thoughts as vivid to her as her own memories.
Time held no meaning, nor notions of space. This was the swirling vortex of one history, and she spun through the currents, without means of fixing herself in place.
Even her own memories were fragments. Temples, rites. An ever-present hunger for more and more power. The summoning of a great and terrible evil. A frightful battle, and then . . .
A millennium of darkness, trapped in the nebulous boundary between life and death. Madness. That had been her punishmentshe remembered that much.
But she was suddenly wrenched from her recollection of the shadow realms. Now she drifted in a room full of leather-bound books, with undulating green hills and mist outside the tall windows. Two men were here, one old, one young. The young one resembled the older, same hawkish profile, same piercing blue eyes. The older one wore a wig, powdered and long. The younger had tied his black hair back, and in the smooth lines of his face, the narrowness of his shoulders, she saw he was a youth just emerging into manhood. He looked familiar to her.
The commission is a good one, the older man said. He sat behind a large, heavy desk, its legs carved into the forms of mythical beasts. A lieutenant in the Royal Regiment of Foot.
I wanted a captaincy. The youth crossed his arms over his chest, more a peevish child than a man.
And youll get it, but it must be earned.
The youth snorted.
Two options are open to you. The older man planted his hands upon the desk and stood. He wore the confidence belonging to a man of consequence, the pride that arose from careful, selective breeding. The old, esteemed families of Rome carried themselves in just such a wayin her life, she had been one of their number.
Join the clergy? The youth affected a sneer, yet beneath his aggressive self-importance, he feared and loved the man who stood on the other side of the desk. She was both an observer of the scene, and within the youth, his emotions twined around her own heart. Ill not rot away, trapped in a rural parish and delivering sermons to drunk farmers.
Then you shall take the lieutenancy, and be glad of it. Perhaps you will surprise us all and find yourself suited for a soldier. You brawl well enough at school.
A bolt of hot shame coursed through the boy. If the tutors taught us anything worthwhile, I mightnt resort to fighting. School is so deuced boring.
No one ever thought you a scholar, Bram. Leave the thinking to Arthur.
The one with value. Bram had been conceived as a contingency, but that left him with greater freedom.
I know him , Livia thought. He was one of the five men who had freed the Dark One from his prison, liberating her, as well.
Will I go to war, Father? He might prove himself on the battlefield, show himself to be a great hero.
The older man came around the desk, hale and handsome in a settled, prosperous way, though hed thickened with age. At one time, he had been a sportsman, and a portrait of him hung upstairs, showing him astride a sleek horse with an alert hound quivering at attention nearby. The youth hoped to emulate his father, even though he could never have the significance of his older brother.
Oh, my boy, tis unlikely. But dont look so crestfallen. For you will cut a fine figure in your uniform, and ladies do enjoy the sight of a man in gold braid and scarlet.
The boy brightened. He did like ladies. Greatly. He tried to envision himself in the uniform, striding down a London street with the regard of everyone flung in his path like roses.
Wont Whit be jealous, when he sees me looking so fine?
Yes, she knew Whit. Hed been the first of the five men to turn away from the Dark One. She needed to reach him, and his woman. They were her allies.
Yet when she reached out, trying to pierce the mists between the living and the dead, she was flung back into Brams memories. Time splintered again, scattering images.
She was in a field at the edge of a forest. All around the field were thick-trunked trees, bare limbs stretching up toward a metallic winter sky. Scents of rotting vegetation rose up from the mud. And the sharp smell of blood, which could not be dulled by the cold wind rattling the branches. Bodies lay in the bent, brown grasses, their red jackets garish. Men with dark copper skin advanced, heavy war clubs in their hands.