A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

Adelia said shortly: “You were brave to be there.” She changed the subject. “Have you any news of Sister Aelith?”

“We have sent her into the Pyrenees until she has recovered her courage to come back and resume her mission.”

“I hope she doesn’t.”

“She will. She is her mother’s daughter. She, too, was at Aveyron.”

“Oh, my God, tell me she wasn’t watching.”

“No. She stayed in one of our friends’ houses near the palace gates, but she wished to be in the vicinity, as close to her mother as possible.”

Adelia nodded. She could understand that.

Brother Pierre continued to talk.

“I’m sorry” Adelia roused herself from thoughts of the girl’s agony. “I didn’t catch that.”

“I said there was another one of Princess Joanna’s party there; Aelith saw him when he was going through the palace gates. Another witness to pray for Ermengarde, perhaps.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Someone she had seen with you, when you and the people who were sick arrived at her and Ermengarde’s cottage in the hills. I think that was what she said.”

“No,” Adelia said, “there wouldn’t have been anyone else we knew.”

“Oh, yes,” Brother Pierre said. “Aelith recognized him.”

Adelia felt the blood drain from around her mouth. Somebody they knew had watched Ermengarde burn. Somebody had seen them in chains-and had not reported back, had done nothing about it.

“What…?” She couldn’t get the words out. She tried again: “What did he look like?”

“Who?” The perfect had reverted to other matters.

“The man Aelith saw. What did he look like?”

Brother Pierre shrugged. “She did not say”

But she’d recognized him as one of their own.

Clutching her head, Adelia tried to reconstruct the events of the day when the dysentery had struck. Ulf had been taken ill on the road, others had started to fall, Locusta had gone looking for somewhere to take them…

He’d come back with Sister Aelith, yes, that’s right; she remembered him and the little Cathar coming down the hill, the offer of the cowshed as a hospital. And then… what happened then? There’d been a discussion, Dr. Arnulf saying it was the plague… who else had been there in the road that Aelith had seen?

The perfect was becoming concerned for her: “Are you unwell, my child?”

Adelia got up and ran to where Ulf was sleeping. She shook him. “Who else was there?”

“Eh?”

“On the road, that day… the dysentery… when we first met Aelith… who else was there?”

“What’re you talking about?”

Adelia told him.

Ulf took in a deep breath of satisfaction. “What did I say? Didn’t I say there’s been a snake in the grass all along?”

“But who is it?” She shook him. “Who was there that morning?”

The others were awake now.

“She wouldn’t have seen Joanna or the other ladies, they were ahead,” Mansur said.

“No, this was a man.”

Boggart chimed in. “There was Bishop Rowley…”

“We can discount him.”

“… Captain Bolt.”

“It wasn’t him. Who else? Bishop of Winchester, of course, but he’s unlikely…”

“Admiral O’Donnell.”

“Yes.”

“That pesky doctor…”

“Arnulf yes. Go on.”

“Them two chaplains, the silly one and the other. Never liked either of ’em.”

“Might it have been one of our patients?” Mansur suggested. “There were plenty of them.”

“God help us,” Adelia said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“It was Scarry,” Ulf said. “Been him all along. Ain’t he clever? Murderin’ and poisoning everybody’s mind against you so that they was glad to abandon you to Aveyron, and us, too.”

She gave a moan and stumbled away from them. She felt ill.

She knew that she’d been afraid, and had been all along, to believe that a malignant being was after her; it put her at the center of everything, a protagonist in a Greek tragedy pursued by a revenging Fury.

It’s not me, it’s not me.

But it was her, she could see it now; she, and only she, had been the reason why so many had died in the pursuit. Blundering, stupid, deliberately blind, she might as well have been a Medea leaving the bodies of slaughtered children behind her.

Somebody had wanted to destroy her, had inflicted the persona of “witch” upon her so that the people she’d traveled with had been prepared to let her and four beloved people suffer at Aveyron.

Facing it now was like being slammed against a wall. I can’t think about it.

But this was where avoidance stopped. You have to think about it.

After a while she sat down and began to consider in the only way she was capable of-as a doctor diagnosing a sickness by its symptoms and history

When had it begun? The horse, oh yes, the horse. It had been poisoned.

What next? Brune, poor Brune. No, first there had been Sir Nicholas, whom she’d cursed and who’d been killed because of it.

The death of a horse, the theft of her cross, the murder of two innocent people, betrayal to the Cathar- hunting Aveyron and its result-not that, not that, but of course that-another murder, a woman dying in flames. Oh, God, she had led him to Ermengarde.

All this engineered by a mind so careful, so skilled in its cunning, so disordered that Adelia’s reasoning brain couldn’t encompass all that it had done, let alone why it had done it. Only that it was insane.

And then she thought: But it didn’t begin in Normandy…

It had started in England, in that faraway happiness on Emma’s estate with Allie, with sane men and women and a football match. The poison had been there.

And then she thought again: But it didn’t begin there, either…

Its beginning, for her, was in a Somerset forest, where two outlaws had pranced out from the trees; green- and-black, fantastical pagan bodies that had rustled with the leaves they wore, and she had killed one to save her own life and that of the men she was with, and earned the lasting hatred of the other.

The dimness of this cave with its filtered light was not unlike that of the glade where Wolf had skewered himself and Scarry had keened for him in Latin.

And this is where he has brought me; all the wayfrom there to here.

She heard a light snoring; the perfect had gone to sleep. The three men were talking quietly…

“It was Scarry, I tell you. Been him all along. Only enemy she’s ever made.”

“What about the black-avised buzzard who stole the cross off us in the cowshed, was that Scarry?”

“Don’t bloody know what Scarry looks like, do I. Never saw the bugger.”

Excalibur. Another theft, not of a life this time, but of something Henry had entrusted to her, as he’d entrusted his daughter. Scarry had taken both so that she had failed in the one thing she prided herself on-her duty.

Mansur was kneeling in front of her. “I know you,” he said. “It has not been your fault.”