Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
Tristan
Our rescuers are polite to the point of sadism, treating Isolde and me with such deferential concern that I think Isolde is ready to fling herself from the back of the delivery van that’s currently taking us to parts unknown.
“It’s fine, truly,” she says, her jaw tight as a rescuer probes a blooming bruise at the corner of her mouth.
She’s already been checked for a concussion, force-fed a sports drink and a protein bar, and given a handful of anti-inflammatories.
The bullet wound streaking the outside of her arm has been cleaned, glued, and wrapped.
And if she had things her way, she’d still be back in the dank Italian warehouse we’d been brought to, personally murdering every single saint who’d attacked us in the church.
Which would have been mostly unnecessary, as many of them who’d accompanied us here to Rome were dead now, thanks to the painfully courteous people in this van and the three other vans following it.
“Thank you,” I say again to the leader of the rescuers, a man with deep olive skin, thick black hair, and wire-rimmed glasses named Valter. He looks familiar to me, but the itch of memory gets worse the longer I look at him.
“Det var s? lite,” he says lightly, waving a hand.
I squint, unable to place the language.
“It’s Swedish,” says Isolde. And then: “He was at my wedding.”
Shit. Right. That’s where I know him from.
He sat in the back row with the quiet demeanor of a distant cousin or an acquaintance from work, nothing noteworthy about him.
That said, there was no one I watched more closely that day than Mark and Isolde, nothing I noted more than how easily they spoke their vows or how fiercely they kissed.
It hadn’t been my best day of work, observationally speaking.
“I was at your wedding,” Valter says. “Mark and I are old friends. We came of age together, you could say, back when he was new at his agency and I was new at mine.”
Ah. So he is an acquaintance from work. Just the kind of work that comes with several degrees of security clearance.
“Anyway, it was no problem,” he says. “I owed Mark a small favor—there was some nasty business near Malmo last autumn, and I needed to take care of things…informally. It took us all the way to ?stersund. Mark was happy to lend his expertise in exchange for a promise to stage an extraction later.”
The remembered words drift across my thoughts:
Did you know it snows in October in Sweden?
So as far back as last year, he’d planned on having Valter rescue us. But?—
“Mark was taken before us,” I say, trying to understand. “How could you have known we’d need rescued? And where we’d need rescued from? And who we’d need rescued from?”
Valter lifts a hand, like oh it was all so easy . “As for whom, he’d told us about Cashel and the saints last year. As for where, he put us on alert two days ago, sometime in the afternoon, and we’ve been tracking you ever since. Once we saw you were in Rome…”
Two days ago, the afternoon … That would have been morning in America.
Mark asked for help before he ever drove to Albany.
I rub my hand down my battered face, considering what the world must look like from inside Mark’s mind.
Months ago, he earned this favor, knowing the circumstances he’d need it in, and two days ago, he’d decided those circumstances were looming near enough to send a message to Valter.
The layers of his plans, the steps he’s taken to weave himself a path to the middle of Cashel’s web…
I can’t keep up.
“I’m so sorry,” Isolde says, her voice hard. “Did you say you’ve been tracking us?”
“Yes.” Valter looks puzzled. “You’re wearing trackers. Well, you are,” he says to Isolde. “And Mark is wearing one as well.”
Isolde is shaking her head as she palpates her black pants and close-fitting sweater, as she runs quick fingers along the hems and seams. She checks her boots—and it’s as the van turns slowly onto a narrow street and a lonely streetlight winks across the length of her honeysuckle ring that we realize.
She stops unlacing her boots and sits up, holding her hand in front of her face. The ruby sparkles darkly.
And then I remember how he found us at Morois and again in Rome.
I remember how strange and beautiful I found his gift of the black and silver ring before I left for Ireland.
A cruel reminder that I’d never wear any other kind of ring from him, a constant source of obsession, an unyielding reminder of his attention. A gift I treasured and never took off.
I remember him switching our rings in a closet at Lyonesse, his fingers warm on mine as he gave me his wedding ring to wear, and he carefully slid his own gift onto his finger.
My eyes meet Isolde’s.
“I’m going to kill him,” she says.
Valter is greatly amused by all this. “This is a very Mark thing to do,” he observes amiably. “But it did save your lives tonight, if that sparks any forgiveness. We wouldn’t have been able to find you otherwise.”
“He’s not wrong,” I tell Isolde.
Hot fury tightens her bruised mouth. “He told us there’d be no more secrets. No more lies.”
But what would we have done if we’d known this particular secret?
Taken off the rings? And then where would we be?
Because there’d been no fighting off the heavy wave of saints that swarmed us and Jago as we tried to make it to the car.
There’d been no resisting whatever they’d injected us with to make us abeyant for the journey to Rome.
And we’d woken up tied to two steel pipes in a building with bloodstains on the concrete, so the options for helping ourselves then had been rather limited too.
“Sometimes Daddy does really know best,” Valter says with a laugh. “And speaking of Daddy…”
The van has stopped in front of a house with a terra-cotta roof and flaking stucco. Graffiti covers the rusting gate. In the sweep of the headlights from the vans behind us, I see someone standing near the front door…someone with hair the color of beaten gold.
We get out, and Isolde makes it to him first. Whatever she was going to do, he’s stopped her, catching her hand and then spinning her around. He puts his mouth near her ear, whispering.
“I don’t care. You lied,” I hear her seethe.
“I’m happy to see you too, sweetheart,” he murmurs, kissing her temple. “And surely, you’d guessed? You didn’t guess? It’s okay, you’ll know better than to trust a pretty gift next time.”
“Two saints escaped,” says Valter to Mark, clearly enjoying this glimpse into Mark’s love life. From the cage of Mark’s arms, Isolde struggles in vain. “We were careful, but they’ll be after you. I’d move quickly.”
“As quickly as we can,” says Mark. “Thank you, old friend, for coming on such short notice. I know you’re far from home.”
“I don’t know that any favor is enough to repay what you did in ?stersund,” Valter says.
“But you understand that it’ll be hard for us to get away again, at least anytime soon.
I’m already in enough trouble as it is.” He’s smiling but there’s a serious note in his voice.
I can only imagine the implications of Swedish intelligence operatives on Italian soil, doing something unsanctioned by either government to satisfy what seems to be a private debt.
Valter comes to clasp Mark’s shoulder, Isolde temporarily going still between them. I can see by the way her hands shake that she’s dogged by exhaustion and crashing adrenaline. I am too, although I’m standing in the dark, so I can hide it better.
Mark grips Valter’s elbow in return. A short nod, the kind that comes from a well of shared history, and then Valter lets go and walks back toward the van.
“You’re in good hands,” Valter says to me as he passes by. “Even if it doesn’t feel like it.”
“Will it ever feel like it?” I mutter, and the spy laughs.
“Oh!” he adds, reaching into a long pocket on the side of his pants and pulling a bundle of burlap free. “We found this when we were doing our final sweep. I thought you might like to have it back.”
I unwrap the burlap as Valter slips back into his van.
His people leave with the same brisk efficiency they rescued us with, rolling smoothly away and disappearing at the turn of the road, headlights sweeping and then vanishing with machinelike precision.
I look down at the knife in my hands, its hilt inlaid with rubies and gold.
I turn back to Mark and Isolde to see that Mark is smiling, a real, happy smile.
As I come closer, I can see the swollen eye and the trails of dried blood framing the side of his face, which streak down his neck and disappear into the collar of his shirt.
He’s still wearing the white button-down he had on under his suit jacket, but the rolled sleeves look irremediably stained, and a long tear in the side exposes freshly purpled ribs.
One of his forearms looks like it’s been dipped in dark paint and left to drip dry.
He looks like he’s just climbed his way out of hell, and he has the nerve to smile down at Isolde like he’s earned himself an angel.
He bends to kiss her forehead, her nose, her stubborn mouth. She refuses to kiss him back, but she doesn’t resist him kissing her , settling for a glare when he pulls back to meet her eyes.
“Will you behave now?” he asks, affection plain in his tone. He finds her ferocity as endearing as he finds my obedience, I think.
“This isn’t over,” she sniffs, looking away. An offended cat who will sit by its owner but ignore them the entire time.
He kisses her temple, like he can’t help but kiss her, and jealousy leaps through me.
“Scourge me all you’d like,” he purrs. “I look forward to it. But be good for now so that I can kiss Tristan without fear of being executed for my little crime, hmm?”
The jealousy is still there, but when Isolde relents and Mark reaches for me, it transmutes from a baser metal into gold, shimmering and molten. I let Mark take my hand, my arm, yanking me into him so he can cup the back of my neck and kiss me.
He tastes like blood.
We breathe together a moment, Isolde tucked between us.
“Why didn’t you tell us about the rings?” I ask as we break apart.
There’s not enough light to track the subtleties of his expression, but I do see something wary and resigned there. Perhaps even guilty, though I’m not sure what guilt would look like on Mark’s face.
“Some things aren’t meant to be atoned for,” he says finally. “They simply are as they are meant to be. And any devil worth his salt is happy to take the blame for them.” And before we can interject, he says, “But there will be time to put me on trial later. For now, we need to move.”
He takes my hand and then puts his other at the small of Isolde’s back, guiding us toward a small car in front of the house. It’s old but not too old, worn but not battered, forgettable in every way.
“Where are we going?” I ask. “Home?”
“We are going to the end,” says Mark. “To Nemi.”