Right now, there was another matter still on their minds...
“What about Haakon?” Raphael asked.
Feronantus stared at him, his gaze hard and unflinching, as if he was disappointed that it was Raphael who had finally voiced the question.
And yet, at the same time, Cnán knew Raphael was the only one who would have voiced the question on everyone’s mind. It wasn’t insolence that led Raphael to question Feronantus’s orders, it was a different quality entirely.
“Our mission is to kill the Khagan,” Feronantus said softly. “How does risking ourselves and exposing our presence aid our mission?”
“What happens after?” Cnán asked, surprised that it was her voice that broke the somber silence.
“After?” Feronantus asked her in return.
“Aye,” Raphael said. “After we kill the Khagan.”
Yasper groaned. “Do we really have to talk about this now?”
“We should never talk about it,” Vera said, her face hard. “It only creates fear. We all know what happens.”
Yasper stroked his beard. “Well, if you’re going to put it that way, now is the right time to talk about it.” He peered at Feronantus. “What does happen after we kill the Khagan?”
“Does it matter?” Feronantus asked.
“Look, you Shield-Brethren are an exceptional lot. Stoic. Iron-willed. Ready to die every time you draw your swords. Suicide missions like this are the sort of thing that brings everlasting glory to your name. But me?” Yasper tapped his chest. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the cities of the West again. Paris, I hear, is spectacular in the spring.”
Istvan snorted and spat. “Buda,” he said. “Paris is a shithole in comparison.”
Yasper pointed at Istvan. “This is the sort of impassioned discourse that makes this company so charming. Paris or Buda? Don’t you want to be able to see both and decide for yourself?”
“I have seen both,” Feronantus said quietly. His face was impassive, carved from stone.
“As have I,” Eleázar said. “And I would not mind seeing them again.”
Something in Eleázar’s tone touched Feronantus and his eyes flickered toward the Spaniard. “We have to find the bear first,” he said. “It is our only opportunity to lay a trap for the Khagan.”
“None of us are disagreeing with you on that point, Feronantus,” Raphael pointed out. “We joined with you on this desperate mission because we believed it was the right choice. We trusted you to lead us, to see us to victory. But we are not young initiates—wet behind the ears—who know little about soldiering. Our goal—as much as Yasper thinks otherwise—is not to die gloriously, but to live. A successful mission means going home again. All of us.”
“They’re going to kill Haakon,” Cnán said. “You know they will. After the Khagan dies, they’re going to kill every Westerner they can find.” When Feronantus did not speak, she grew angry. “You’re leaving him to die!” she shouted at him.
Feronantus whirled on her, his eyes blazing, and with a thick hand, he grabbed the front of her jacket and pulled her close to his face. “I have sent many—many—men under my command to their deaths. I have watched a good number of them die. Do not presume to lecture me on the morality of my actions, little Binder. I, alone, carry the weight of my decisions, and you have no idea how heavy that burden is.” He squeezed his hand, gathering the fabric of her shirt in his fist. “Yes,” he growled, “I am leaving the boy to die, because I must in order to save thousands of other lives. Lives of men, women, and children who I will never meet. These people will never know my name; they will never even know what I have done for them. What others have sacrificed for them. But in order to save them, I must let the boy die.”
He shoved her away and turned toward the remainder of the company. “If the success of our mission depended upon it, I would let all of you die,” he snarled. “You knew this risk when you agreed to follow me east. You have had months to face this truth and prepare yourselves. We have traveled thousands of miles together. We are deep in the heart of the empire of our enemies. We are hopelessly outnumbered. Yes, it is highly likely that we are all going to die.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “We all took the oath,” he said, his voice gentler. “We all gave ourselves to the Virgin, knowing that few—very few—who so swear are allowed the luxury of dying in their beds. And those of you”—he opened his eyes and looked directly at Yasper—“who have not sworn the same vow are braver by far.”
Yasper looked away, his mouth twisting. Cnán was glad Feronantus did not look at her. She wasn’t sure she could withstand the force of his gaze. She didn’t want to acknowledge what he had just said.
“I would be honored to die beside any one of you,” Feronantus said. “I have seen Paris, Buda, London, the Levant. I have spent decades in the North, watching generation after generation of boys leave Týrshammar to take their oaths and become men at Petraathen. Few of them ever return. And now I have seen the other half of the world. It has been a good life, and if I were to die in the course of our mission, it would be a good death. But”—and he looked at each of them in turn—“dying in the next few days is not my plan.”
Raphael made a noise in his throat. “So, you do have a plan,” he said. He cocked his head to the side. “Or is it a vision?”
Feronantus gave Raphael a hard stare, and out of the corner of her eye, Cnán saw Percival glaring at Raphael too.
“Get on your horses,” Feronantus said, the tone of his voice signaling an end to the discussion. “We have one last hard ride ahead of us.”
“No,” Cnán said quietly.
Feronantus walked to his horse as if he hadn’t heard her, put his foot in the stirrup, and rose into his saddle. Gathering his reins, he raised his craggy head and gazed at her. She met his stare, and didn’t blink. She didn’t look away.
“I’m not going,” she said. “You don’t need me. I’m not a fighter. I will only be in the way when you prepare your ambush.”
She expected more of an argument, and she even steeled herself for a cold dismissal from Feronantus, which made his reaction all the more confusing. “May the Virgin protect you, little leaf,” Feronantus said with unexpected tenderness. His face changed, loosing some of its ferocity, and she was startled to read a deep longing in his gaze. “We have been enriched by your company, and you are always welcome at any fire or hearth that we call home. I speak for myself—and I hope I speak for the others as well—when I say that what is mine is yours, Cnán.”
Cnán opened her mouth to speak, and found her throat wouldn’t work. She nodded dumbly, fighting back the tears that were threatening to run down her cheeks. She raised her hand awkwardly. After all they had been through together, to be bereft of each other’s company so suddenly was more painful than she had imagined it would be. Judging by the expression on more than a few of the faces of the company, she was not alone in her despair.
“I do ask one favor,” Feronantus said.
Cnán nodded. “Yes,” she managed.
“Do nothing to rescue the boy until after the Khagan has departed for his hunt.”
She laughed, the sound hiccupping out of her body. She wiped at her face. “Of course,” she said.
Feronantus smiled at her, and she wanted to run to him and leap into his arms. “Good luck,” he said. “We’ll see you again.” He said it simply, but there was a stark finality to his words, as if there was no question in his mind.
“You will,” she said, trying to match his resolve.
He snapped his reins against his horse and left the glade without looking back. The others lingered, each one offering her a farewell, and she managed to hold her tears in check until they were all gone.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The Exodus
Ferenc was confident that, given time, he could find his own route to the city walls. But Father Rodrigo had sagely suggested they trust Ocyrhoe’s map instead. She knew the bolt holes, the unmarked alleys, the routes taken by th
e city watch. The map’s route was easy to follow, more so because the city streets were mostly deserted and, sooner than he expected, they were outside the city walls.
So much easier when the city guard wasn’t chasing them.
Father Rodrigo walked as if he had been hitched to a wagon; each step seemed incredibly laborious, and only after his foot came down did the rest of his body follow.
Ferenc was exhausted as well. The excitement of his reunion with Father Rodrigo and their subsequent escape had worn off. They had little in the way of supplies—one blanket he had grabbed from the room before they had left, a water skin, and his flint, all shoved into a ragged satchel the priest was carrying. In the morning, they would have to find sustenance. In the morning...
Ferenc wondered again why the priest had been so intent on escaping. There was food, a roof over his head, and—if he understood correctly what had transpired—the entirety of the Vatican was at Father Rodrigo’s disposal. Why then the urgent need to slip out of the city? Had they just spent months traveling to the city?
He did not entirely understand Father Rodrigo’s thinking, and since the priest had been in the Septizodium, he had found the man’s attitude and awareness disturbing. It was as if a different man had come out from the one that had gone in. This one—the haggard priest staggering along the moonlit track ahead of him—was almost like a stranger to him.
“We should rest, Father Rodrigo,” he said gently, “though we must not light a fire. We do not want to attract anyone’s attention. But if we bundle ourselves together in the blanket, we may keep warm through the night.”
Father Rodrigo’s response had been a wordless grunt, a reminder of the way they had communicated in the first months after Mohi, when the priest had been terribly sick. But, unlike then, he came willingly when Ferenc led him to the shelter of a tall tree, and he fell asleep almost immediately upon lying down on the ground. Ferenc arranged the blanket as best he could to cover both of them, and he stared up at the night sky, listening to the priest’s breathing.
The weight is gone, Ferenc thought as his eyelids grew heavy. Whatever he carried from Mohi to Rome is no longer with him. There was something else—a lighter burden, but one no less valuable than the message he had carried previously.
With that thought Ferenc fell into a fitful sleep of his own. He dreamed about cavernous tunnels whose openings were covered by red curtains, and of the women who kept disappearing into these tunnels—women who wore long coats of maille. They wore no helms, and their long, unbound hair flowed down their backs, like the manes of horses.
In the morning, there was dew clinging to everything, and even with a flint Ferenc doubted he could have started a fire. They were, as he feared, cold, hungry, and damp. It would be easier to find an outlying village and offer his labor in exchange for breakfast.
“Why did we run away from Rome, Father?” he asked as he stretched, letting his gaze wander about the countryside.
“We did not run away, my son,” said Father Rodrigo simply, as if this was all the answer that Ferenc could possibly need. “We have a task to perform. One that we could not have accomplished inside the city walls.”
“What task is that, Father?”
Father Rodrigo offered him a puzzled expression. “To release the power of the Grail, of course.” He patted the tattered satchel he had brought with them.
Ferenc stuck a finger in his ear and worked it back and forth, as if he could dislodge the words he had just heard. The Grail? He remembered a cup Father Rodrigo had been holding on the ledge above the crowd. It had fallen from his hand when the soldiers had grabbed him. Was that the Grail? But how had that cup found its way back to Rodrigo?
“What... what does it do?” Ferenc asked. He recalled the crowd’s reaction to the cup: astonishment and awe. But he hadn’t seen what had been so remarkable about the cup. It had looked like an old drinking mug, tarnished with age.
“That is not the right question, my son. Instead, consider what it is that the Grail wants us to do,” Father Rodrigo replied with a small smile. “We are but vessels through which it operates. I must show it to the people of Italy, of Germany and France. I must show it to everyone, and the Grail will tell them what it wants from us.”
That was not a promising, or elucidating, answer, and Ferenc eyed Father Rodrigo’s satchel with suspicion. He had packed it himself. He didn’t recall putting a cup in there, nor any opportunity when the priest might have done so. “What did it want yesterday in the marketplace?”
“It wanted me to rouse up the people of Christendom and urge them to shake off the danger of the Mongols. It wanted me to prevent the arrival of a prophecy—to prevent the world from coming to an end.”
Ferenc’s stomach tightened into a knot. His voice leaping up almost an octave as he demanded, “Mongols? The ones from Mohi? Father, you were there. You know what they did, what they can do. We cannot fight them. Even with everyone from the market yesterday. We will be killed!”
“Calm yourself, my son,” Father Rodrigo said. “I am not talking about a marketplace of people descending on an army. I mean we must gather all of Christendom, every man, woman, and child, and all together, as a united front, we will confront them and drive their evil from our land.”
“Everyone?” Ferenc repeated, saying the word with exaggerated care. “Everyone?”
“Everyone.”
Ferenc considered this. “How?” he asked, unable to comprehend such a mass of people.
“God will provide,” Father Rodrigo, a serene calm descending upon his face. The priest stared into the distance, a wry smile on his face.
Ferenc sighed, faced with the entirely reasonable conclusion: however calm and rational Father Rodrigo seemed, he had taken leave of all of his senses. The fever may have finally left him, but it had burned away too much of the priest.
“Excuse me, Father, I need to relieve myself,” Ferenc said. He picked up the blanket and carefully draped it around Father Rodrigo’s shoulders. The priest patted Ferenc’s hand and continued to smile at nothing in particular. Unwilling to look upon the priest’s face any more, Ferenc turned his attention to the nondescript countryside of grass and occasional copses of trees. Then he purposefully began to walk to the east, looking for something in particular.
A hundred paces off, he found it: a view out over a shallow valley, filled with the tent city of Emperor Frederick. Ferenc had suspected they were near it, and his intention the previous night had been to skirt the camp. Now, he decided, the best thing to do was march right into it.
The English Cardinal Somercotes had sent them to the Emperor. Father Rodrigo had liked Somercotes. By association, then, Frederick was probably not a villain, peculiar as he was. Another thing to consider: Ocyrhoe had told him that Frederick cursed a lot. That meant Frederick was not pious. And that meant he was less likely to be seduced by Father Rodrigo’s story. Even if the Grail really did have special powers—which Ferenc doubted—it was probably safer in the hands of an Emperor than those of a raving churchman. It saddened him to think this, for Father Rodrigo was still by far the most beloved living human to him... but he could not ignore the obvious.
With a sigh, he turned back to fetch the priest.
“You’re a woman, can’t you make her speak?” Orsini demanded irritably. Léna turned her calm, subtle gaze from the Senator to the girl.
Ocyrhoe imagined a hand pressed over a mouth, and tried to project this image to Léna. She had had so little training before her other sisters had vanished that she doubted she knew how to communicate properly in this fashion.
“She is not going to say more,” Léna said confidently. She had not even made eye contact with Ocyrhoe. “I believe she is under an oath to somebody and part of that oath requires secrecy. If that is the case, she will never speak. She will die sooner than speak.”
Ocyrhoe tried to keep alarm off her face. She was not under an oath, and she was not willing to die to help Father Rodrigo and Ferenc escape
. Had Léna gotten her message, and was she now bluffing on her behalf? If so, it was a clever ploy; if not, then Ocyrhoe feared she was in more danger than she had originally thought.
“Your Eminences,” Léna offered. “I understand your distress over the discovery of this girl in His Holiness’s chambers.” She glared at Fieschi as she said this, and Ocyrhoe wondered how much she had seen of the manner in which Fieschi had dragged her out of the room.
At first she had thought the Cardinal had meant to harm her, but he had simply been trying to snare her—much like the manner in which a cat pounces on a mouse. Fieschi had been angry, ready to strike her, but the sudden appearance of Léna had given him pause.
“Leave her with me,” Léna said. “I will find a way to give you the information you require in a manner that does not break her oath.”
Fieschi grimaced. “I don’t care what sort of ethical justification you want to give it, just as long as we get what we need.” Ocyrhoe noticed that his distaste did not extend to his eyes. He was watching them carefully. Too carefully.
“Fine. Leave. Now.”
Orsini was the more startled of the two by her command, and as he huffed with indignity, she fixed him with a withering stare. Wanting to make himself larger before feeling diminished by letting a woman order him around, but when he noticed Fieschi’s lack of outrage he deflated—slowly—as he departed.
“Speak,” Léna said sharply as soon as they were alone.
Ocyrhoe shrugged. “The priest asked me to help him escape, and Ferenc wanted to go with him. I drew a map for them to get out of the city, and I distracted the guard at the door so they could get out. But once they were out, I was stuck inside, and Fieschi found me.”
Léna made an aggrieved noise. “Why did he want to escape? Why did you help him? Where was he going? How could you possibly consider this appropriate behavior for a Binder?”
Ocyrhoe held her hands up in weak protest. “I was not behaving as a Binder; I was behaving as a friend.”