Chapter 8
Eight
Mark
A bike zips by, and then we’re alone—just us and the lights of the city below. Across the valley, the Vatican rears up in a wall of stone and stone pines, lights glowing from within and the massive dome of St. Peter’s lit up like a jewel.
Dusk loves Tristan, even in a hoodie and jeans, and he is painted against the gloom like a knight from a painting, like a hero already snared by La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
Except it’s me, I’m La Belle Dame tonight, and I think I could gobble up the fading roses on his cheeks, lay him down on the cold hill’s side, and show him such a dream.
“Sir,” he says, shock all over him.
“Oh, come now, baby. You really didn’t think I’d find you?”
He shakes his head wordlessly.
He’s stopped walking, but I haven’t. I move closer and closer until I can see the fading twilight in his eyes.
“Playing house?” I ask, nodding at the bag in his hand.
He flushes. I come even closer.
“I would have let you play house with my wife if you wanted, Tristan. All you had to do was ask.”
His flush deepens, but the words are hard and protective when he speaks. He’s angry, not embarrassed. Or not only embarrassed at least. “She’s only your wife because you lied to her and to everybody else too. Forced her to marry you?—”
That surprises a real laugh out of me. “ Forced ? Do you really think she’s a damsel in distress?
She chose to marry me because she planned on using me.
She chose to marry me knowing that I’d use her right back.
The only thing she didn’t know was the extent of what I knew. What you should know now too.”
He glances away. So he does know.
“That she’s a saint of the Church,” I prod.
“Do you know what that means? It means she kills in the name of God. It means that her uncle gets to decide what in the name of God means. And I’ll never pretend that I haven’t lied or cheated to get what I want, but what Isolde cannot claim is that she wasn’t warned. ”
A breath leaves his lips. He knows this too.
“You didn’t just lie. You lied to her,” he says finally.
“And to you. Or did you not open the third box you stole?”
He straightens his shoulders and looks back to me, like a schoolboy gathering courage to tell his teacher the truth. Oh, Tristan. Honest to a fault.
“I did open the third box,” he says. “I saw…what was inside it.”
“And?”
He swallows. “And yes. It was all about me. Pictures of me. Articles about me.”
“Don’t you want to know why?” I’m curious to know if he’s curious. If he’s put it together yet.
“It’s—” A breath. “It’s about Ys, isn’t it?”
I’m surprised again. I study his face, his beautifully transparent face. “Why do you think that?”
“The only thing you’d marked in the box was an article about Aaron Sims. You circled the name of the prime minister elect he tried to kill.”
A scrim of shame is now drawn over Tristan’s gaze, that guilt about his dead friend that he can never seem to shake. I’d relieve him of it if I could, shake the truth into him until his bones rattled. You saved everyone you could , I want to tell him. That’s better than most people get.
It’s this lie we tell ourselves about heroes, about what heroism is, that heroes are apart from such choices, from triage, from discretion. It’s a fucking cancer.
Tristan goes on. “His sister—I think you might remember that she was trying to get ahold of me—I called her in Belgrade, and she told me that Aaron wasn’t bribed into trying to kill the prime minister elect and her family.
He was blackmailed. Threatened by a group called Ys.
The same group that came up in the security meeting at Lyonesse a while ago, the same group you told Isolde about in the letter you left at Morois House.
” He pauses. “The same group Isolde overheard you talking to your sister about at the engagement party.”
“Oh?”
“Something along the lines of Ys started the game. I’m only finishing it .”
Isolde had overheard that, had she? Interesting.
“So I thought…well, I guess it seems like the only reason you would have picked me. You’re trying to do something with Ys, and I’m tangled up in it because of Sims.”
Oh, Tristan. The only reason I could have picked you?
His eyes are on the ground, lifting to mine only briefly. “I don’t understand exactly why though. I stopped whatever Ys wanted to do that day by stopping Sims. Why do I matter?”
I make a choice not to tell him the real reason the third box is dedicated solely to Tristan Thomas, American hero, and it’s more cowardly than cruel.
I’m not proud of myself, but as I’ve mentioned before, I never planned to care about Tristan.
This is an unforeseen inconvenience, and I can’t be blamed for it.
“Do you know why Ys was in Carpathia?” I ask. “Why they wanted to kill that politician?”
Tristan shakes his head. His hair—dark and thick and longer than I’ve ever seen it—catches against the collar of his hoodie.
It would be cool to the touch at the ends, only warm at the nape of his neck and where your nails could scratch gently at his scalp.
My fingers twitch. In proximity to him, focus is occasionally a runaway thing, something I first noticed at Blanche’s wedding.
“There are two reasons, the first of which is that a destabilized Carpathia is much easier to move weapons and everything else through—a corridor from west to east and then back again.” We are completely alone right now, but I still pitch my voice lower, softer, in the lee of the dome.
“The second is maybe less obvious but maybe even more pernicious. Carpathia has struggled to get to its feet for years, and in the meantime, the Church has stepped in. Food, medical aid, housing, foster care, public education—all the infrastructure that should belong to Carpathia’s government is in fact the Church’s.
The Church would say that it’s holding these services in trust, that it’s there only as a helping hand to Carpathia and nothing more.
But of course, the Church isn’t doing this at a deficit.
Since Carpathia is outsourcing all this assistance, delegating , they are delegating all the funds to the Church as well.
International aid money, UN-pledged money, their fledgling taxes.
The Church is now an essential part of Carpathian governance and is getting paid handsomely to exist as such. ”
Understanding flickers over Tristan’s face. “The prime minister,” he says. “She was a threat to that.”
“She is a threat to that. Because of you, Tristan. You saved her life and, in the process, created a huge challenge for the Church in Carpathia.”
“But what does that have to do with Ys?” he asks, a notch dipping between his brows. “Is Ys exploiting Carpathia’s reliance on the Church somehow? Using gaps between the Church and the government to move things around?”
I find his desire to keep good things good and bad things bad rather sweet. I’ve always been too willing to mix the two together, to search for one inside the other, to stain innocence and exonerate guilt, and look at where it’s gotten me.
“You mentioned my letter to Isolde—you must have read it too. You must remember what I said: Mortimer Cashel is the head of Ys. All this happens at a lift of his fingers.”
He gives me a look. “Yes, I read your letter, but I don’t believe it. It can’t be right.”
“It can’t be? Why not?”
“That’s like—it’s like some kind of nineteenth-century Protestant conspiracy or something. ‘The papists are evil and want to take over the world.’ The pope isn’t trying to influence events through…I don’t know, political puppets or something.”
“I’m not talking about the pope ,” I make clear. “Ys has nothing to do with him. Or had nothing to do with him, rather. I’m sure you’ve heard the sad news about his passing.”
Tristan’s eyebrow lifts the tiniest amount. A drill sergeant would miss it, but a lover wouldn’t. He’s not in the mood for my irreverence today.
So I get back to the point. “A year of declining health, setbacks after surgeries and so on. A year for a cardinal to shore up support ahead of a conclave.” I nod at the dome across the valley, lit against the dimming sky.
“So no, it’s not a papal conspiracy. Yet . Not until Cashel is elected pontiff.”
Tristan is already shaking his head. “No. Isolde told her uncle what she overheard you saying to your sister at the engagement party, and after she told him, he asked her to find out what you knew about Ys. He wouldn’t have done that if he already knew about it.”
“Do you think he was asking her to learn what Ys was? Or do you think he was trying to figure out how much I knew ? There’s a difference.
” The first real surge of worry takes me, that I won’t be able to convince Tristan of this in enough time to keep Isolde safe from her uncle.
“And things have changed since then anyway. Cashel seems to think killing Isolde is the most expedient move right now.”
An instinctive protectiveness ripples through him quickly, handsomely, straightening his shoulders and lifting his chin. Only the grocery bag hanging from his hand disrupts the portrait of the hero at work.
“No one is hurting Isolde,” he says firmly.
“Isolde would slit the throat of anyone who tried,” I reply. “Anyone she was ready for, that is.”
Tristan’s jaw works subtly to the side as he considers this. The implication of whom she wouldn’t be ready for. And then: “I’m not saying I believe you.”
“If I’m right, then it’s the two of you here in Rome or maybe back at Morois, alone against a group that has evaded detection for centuries. If I’m right, then she’s safer at Lyonesse than she would be anywhere else.”
Tristan’s gaze is piercing, righteous. “And why should Isolde believe you? Why should she trust you? After years of lying to her, why should she believe that you’re telling her the truth now?”