Sinner's Heart

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 punishment—she 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 you’ll 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 way—in 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. “I’ll 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 mightn’t 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 he’d 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 don’t 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.

Won’t Whit be jealous, when he sees me looking so fine?

Yes, she knew Whit. He’d 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 Bram’s 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.

“Fall back!”

It was the youth, but not so young now. Bram had become a man, his shoulders filling the bright red coat, his legs sturdy in tall black boots. Mud spattered the uniform he had coveted years earlier, and grime coated his now angular face. He raised a sword and shouted again to the remaining troops.

“Make for the cover of the woods.”

“But, sir, orders are—”

“Major Townsend is dead, Corporal, and if we stand and fight the Indians, we’ll be joining the Major.” Now is not the time for fear. Don’t think of the Major with half his head beaten in, and his brains showing.

“Sir?”

“Now, Corporal.”

The troops obeyed, and they slogged back through the sucking mud, finding shelter in the forest. They were not followed, and he led them over miles, his legs aching, his body weary. Yet he forced himself to walk upright, for he was their leader now, and must get them back to the safety of the fort.

So few of us now. Half the men killed, the other half sick and wounded. I cannot fail them. What if I do? I cannot. I am in command now.

Time fragmented again, jagged as strewn pottery shards, each with images of different moments, different places. She felt herself pulled through them, and they tore at her mind.

Now she saw ornately carved walls and a gleaming wooden floor. The chamber itself stretched out on every side, a vast chasm of a room. Music and heat saturated the air. Women in wide, silken skirts tittered behind fans, and men in equally bright silk postured and paraded before them.

Livia drifted amongst the people. Their powdered faces became the faces of her own past. Mother, father, shaking their heads over her machinations. The head priestess, who saw in Livia an unquenchable demand for greater power—a need that had taken her to the farthest reaches of the Empire. Yet these people did not wear tunicas and togas. They garbed themselves in stiff, glittering fashions, and instead of mosaics, gilded wood and polished mirrors covered the chamber in which they displayed themselves.

Conversation stilled as five men strode into the chamber, all gazes turning toward them like flowers following the sun’s progress across the sky. These men shone with the absence of light, a brilliant darkness, and the possibility that they might do anything, and no one could stop them.

A murmur rose up from somewhere in the crowd. “Hellraisers, the lot of them.” Yet the words were spoken half in fear, half in admiration.

Bram stood at the front of the group, leading the charge. The intervening years had hardened him. He was carved obsidian. Evening clothes had replaced his grimy uniform, and the sword at his side was meant for show, not killing. Shadows haunted his eyes and thoughts. She heard them, felt them.

What shall I take this evening? The dreams won’t leave me, but I can beat them back. Who will it be tonight?

Women swayed nearer. He might choose from any of them. More than a few had already filled his bed, if only for the night, but he sought something new, for his need never left him, nor did the black images that crept forward in quiet moments.

“Rothwell!”

A red-faced man stalked toward him. Collingwood. The guests stepped back to give him room, watching in scandalized fascination as he shoved closer. Then he stood before Bram, glaring up at him.

“You are a rogue and a villain,” spat Collingwood.

The crowd gasped at this insult, thrown so publicly.

“I own to both titles,” Bram answered.

“Have you no respect for the vows between a husband and wife?”

“Your wife does not, clearly. For she abandoned them with an extraordinary enthusiasm.”