The Red Winter

Chapter LVIII

LVIII

Saint-Julien-by-the-Stream

“You’re sending me back to the chateau? Professor, I don’t understand,” said Jacques.

We stood at the crossroads near Saint-Julien, where we had passed the funeral procession for the pig farmer and his family only the previous day.

I had told the story of the Bow and Brace as we descended from Dayane’s pool and out of the mountains.

Now the day was growing late. It was overcast and gusting, and the roadside puddles were crusted with a brownish rime.

“I need to you to deliver a message to your father—and only to him.”

“But—you will not come with me?”

“No, sir. I do not believe Antoine would countenance my presence. You must understand why by now.”

“After what you have told me . . .” Jacques had listened wide-eyed to my confessions of murder and cannibalism over the course of the day.

He was shaken, though he tried his best to hide it.

“Professor, if your story is true, then everything my father has told us about the Red Winter is a lie.” He shook his head.

“And I have dragged you back here, when the source of our troubles was always within the chateau walls. I feel a fool. Worse—a child.”

“I chose to come, young sir. And we have all played our part. I have certainly earned your father’s enmity.”

“No. If my father condemns you, then he must also condemn me,” he said. “After what I have done—the people I have killed in Gévaudan. And Gerard, Henri. Cecile.”

“And there will be more.” I took a deep breath. “Which is why this will be your last night at the chateau.”

“My last . . . ?”

“Yes. Until I have found another way to get rid of what ails you, now that Lady Dayane is gone. Take the opportunity to say goodbye to your family, at least for a time. You said yourself your hunger is getting worse, and there is no telling how soon it might return. Find me here again in the morning; we will be leaving Gévaudan.”

“So I must leave my family. My home. It seems this curse will never end.”

Oh—really? said Sarmodel. Come back in three thousand years and we will discuss never-ending curses.

“It will, and we will find the way. But not here. Not with your father and the bishop pulling the barony apart to find you.”

Jacques seemed to gather himself. “Very well. What is your message? I will take it to him.”

I told him what I wished to say and then I sent him on his way. I laid a hand on his shoulder with a final warning. “Young sir. Say as much or as little as you wish to your wife and mother, but do not speak to Bishop Fontaine of Mende—not of me, nor of leaving.”

“You have my word.”

I watched him for a few minutes as he took his horse slowly along the high road to the chateau. Even in the gray autumn light, the castle was magnificent, glowing like a filigreed pearl at the top of the rise.

Sebastian, you are a fool. He’s going to get home and sing like a nightingale. You’ll have the bishop and his soldiers after you by sundown.

I don’t think so. And we have run out of options, I am afraid.

We have not. There is a very simple solution to all of this, and it’s right inside that brandy flask on your hip.

We can’t just kill them all, Sarmodel.

Why do you always say that? Of course we can!

I waited until Jacques was too far to see clearly, wishing for a moment that I could call him back, if only to have some company on the road. Then I turned my horse down the eastern fork, away from Saint-Julien.

I waited in what had once been the grand salon of the Bow and Brace.

The hunting lodge had never been rebuilt. Jean Chastel had no surviving family, and so the land had returned to the Baron d’Ocerne. Neither the baron nor his son had seen fit to restore the burned wreckage.

The bones of the building still stood, but the majority had either been destroyed in the fire or succumbed to the patient, consuming embrace of the forest. The walls of the ground floor were still upright and mostly intact; there was even a hoard of blackened silver cutlery in the remains of the dining room.

The two great brick fireplaces now faced each other across a nodding carpet of ferns.

I wondered if Jacques had made it safely to the chateau. I wondered if the voice in his head was already returning.

It hardly mattered now. If he delivered my message as I requested, then we would all be on a new course by the end of the night. And if not . . .

If not, then it was probably too late for Jacques anyway.

I took some time to prepare. I went back down the road a short way and took a small bird skull from my pocket.

Using the tip of the beak, I drew a simple Ward in the soil.

Then I returned to the lodge and lit a fire in one of the hearths.

I rolled a pair of fallen stones into place as makeshift seats, facing the flames.

I had no idea how long I would need to wait, so I made myself comfortable, watching the fire as the sun fell through the trees.

As dusk turned into darkness, I roasted a squash in the coals and ate it with a little soft cheese and bread.

I wished uselessly that there were some way for me to check my appearance properly.

It had been necessary to discard some of my clothing after my bloody encounter with Jacques in the mountains, and my remaining attire was shabby and mismatched.

Really, Sebastian? Is this the time for vanity? said Sarmodel.

I know, I know! It’s pathetic, but I can’t help it.

Try to focus, please. We are going to need—

He was interrupted by a distinctive whistling call from the bird skull in my pocket.

Someone had crossed my Ward on the road. I tensed, waiting for the skull to sing again, but it seemed my instructions had been followed; my visitor had come alone.

I rose to my feet in anticipation of his arrival, holding my hands at my sides where I could reach my weapons easily. My heart was a fist thumping the inside of my rib cage and my face was uncomfortably flushed.

The slow rhythm of horseshoes on the road grew louder as he approached. He stopped well outside the light of the fire, another tall shadow among the trees.

“I am here. Speak.”

I could barely make him out, but I knew it was him. The way he leaned back in the saddle. The proud set of his shoulders. Even the slight tilt of his head. It was all the same.

Do you remember the trout in the stream? The day under the bridge, when you were wounded and you looked at me like a wonder, like a miracle?

“Antoine, please come and sit.”

He stiffened. “I’ve done as you asked. I have come to find you here—to this place, of all the evil remnants you might have chosen.

” His voice was shaking with emotion. “Put your weapons away—I am alone, as you requested. Believe me when I say I am here for Jacques’s sake alone. Tell me what you want.”

“Sit with me, Antoine. We have things to discuss and you well know it. I have traveled halfway across the continent at your son’s behest—do you think I mean you harm?”

His breath clouded the air as he stared at me in silence. “Sebastian, what good can come of you being here?” he asked finally. “What can we possibly have to discuss?”

He had said my name. It was a small thing, but it gave me hope.

“I promised Jacques I would help Gévaudan and so I will. But first there are things you must know.” I motioned behind me to the two stones before the fireplace.

I thought he would leave. He said nothing and continued to stare at me from the darkness.

And then he dismounted with a swift, terse movement.

He secured his horse to a tree and walked sti?y toward me.

Every step and gesture was tightly controlled, as though it were costing him some great internal toll.

As he came into the light, a heavy pectoral cross flashed on his breast. It was no doubt on loan from the bishop, though it was not the same bejeweled confection Fontaine had been wearing at Saint-Julien.

He sat on a stone seat and looked directly ahead, into the flames. The shadow of the Lion stretched long on the ground behind him; Michael was making his presence known.

Sarmodel shifted apprehensively in my mind. I hope you know what you are doing, Sebastian.

So do I.

“There—I am sitting.”

“Thank you.” I sat across from him, looking at the face of the man I had loved so many years before.

In the firelight he seemed to be the Antoine I remembered again, his hair burnished to its youthful golden blond, and I saw a shadow of the irreverent, daring thinker I had known.

“Antoine, I understand you must hate me. I don’t blame you for that, and you may be assured that I will soon be gone.

But I wanted to talk to you one more time. ”

He grimaced and swore, screwing his eyes shut in frustration. “Just tell me what you want and begone.”

“Antoine, I am taking Jacques with me.”

He gave a tiny, furious shake of his head, though he still would not look at me. “Never.”

“I mean him no harm—you have seen he is not my prisoner and I would not take him against his will.”

“I would rather see him dead,” he spat, his eyes fixed on the fire.

“Then so you will, I fear. Antoine, Jacques is—”

“The Beast. I know.”

“You know?” I stared at him.

“He is my son, Sebastian, living under my roof. Do you think I did not notice when he began disappearing? When he was sickly and starving for days, and then suddenly hale the next morning, always after the news of a fresh kill in the village?”

“And you have allowed him to go on this way? For a year?”

“Allowed? Allowed?” He turned to look at me for the first time, full of rage. “What should I have done? Killed him? Locked him away?”

“You should have sent for me, as soon as you knew. Can you not see he is getting worse?”

“You? It is your fault he suffers under this curse to begin with! You and Cecile and that demon in the mountains; I would not give him up, so she has taken him from me anyway. Him and his children, and theirs, and theirs. My line, forever blighted.” He gripped the pectoral cross tightly.

“No, Sebastian, I would not have sent for you if the Lord himself had demanded it. I would sooner never have met you.”

“Then why did you keep my letters, Antoine?” I asked sharply. “If you hated me so much, why keep them at all? You certainly never replied.”

He opened his mouth but did not respond. He simply looked at me, his eyes shining and his face golden in the light of the fire.

I heaved a breath and looked away from him.

“It doesn’t matter now.” I tossed an old bough laden with pine cones into the hearth.

They crackled and snapped like gunpowder.

“Antoine, I can still help Jacques. I will take him back to my home in Corvano, where he can do no more harm to the people of Gévaudan or the ones he loves. I will find a way to remove this curse from him, and then I will bring him home. Please trust me.”

“Trust you? This is your fault—all of it!” Again he raised his fists in restrained violence.

“I trusted you to help us twenty years ago, and what happened? I stayed behind to save the innocent and you returned to murder them all. And then you . . . you devoured them, you monster! I would say it was lunacy if I had not seen it with my own eyes. You ate them—the nobles, the hunters, the butler.” He seemed unable to go on.

Uh—if I may, objected Sarmodel lightly. Not the butler. That was Soeur.

“I am not . . . I am not always a monster, Antoine,” I said with di?culty.

Now it was I who struggled to meet his gaze.

“But there are no wonders without horrors; no miracles without sacrifice. No great deeds without payment. And how many more has Jacques killed? How many have you allowed to be murdered and devoured, for the sake of someone you love?”

We looked at each other in the firelight, as we had on so many nights during the Red Winter. Something in Antoine softened. His shoulders slumped and the brittle rod of his spine relaxed.

“Sebastian, you should not have returned to Gévaudan. I do not want your help. Why can’t you see that?”

“Because I want to make amends. You may hate me for the rest of your life, but I must at least try,” I said. “Let me take Jacques, with your blessing.”

“Sebastian, it is too late. I have found another way,” he answered.

“Another way?”

“The Bishop of Mende. When Jacques disappeared, I went to him and confessed my misdeeds during the Red Winter—you, Dayane, the Beast, all of it. He has agreed to come to Gévaudan to remove the curse, that Jacques may be cured and my line restored.”

“What has he promised you—the rite of exorcism?” I shook my head. “This is another devil’s bargain, whether you realize it or not, Antoine. Has the bishop named his price yet?”

He leaned forward suddenly and took my hands, his eyes staring into me. I couldn’t speak, stunned by his sudden intimacy.

Antoine’s eyes brimmed. He leaned closer and closer to me. Close enough that I could smell the lavender scent of his clothing.

Close enough to kiss me.

“He has.”

Sebastian! Sarmodel was suddenly coiled and bristling in my mind. Run!

In the same moment, the bird skull in my pocket shrieked its alarm—once, then twice, then a half dozen times. The sound of rapid hoofbeats came soon after.

I turned to see Bishop Fontaine crest the top of the road on horseback, followed by the guardsmen of Mende. His voice rang out just as Antoine closed steel manacles around my wrists.

Of course.

A trap.

“You are undone, witch! Your crimes have been witnessed and your trial awaits at Chateau d’Ocerne. You will not speak again until your words can be judged before the Lord Almighty.”

Disbelieving, I looked down at the chains now binding me. Their design was unusual but very familiar.

The Choking Braid.

“I’m sorry,” said Antoine, turning away from me. “I cannot trust you and there is no other way. They will not harm you, I promise.”

Antoine spoke to me one more time before the soldiers bound me and tied me to the saddle of my horse. His eyes were full of sorrow, but not regret. He wiped his tears with his fingertips and drew a ragged breath.

“You signed a contract to serve my family in destroying the Beast. You will serve us one last time.”