Korvel nodded, not wasting his breath on words, and hobbled forward.
His wounded leg barely functioned, she saw as they made their way out of the greenhouse, something she would have to deal with as soon as they reached safety. He would also require more blood by nightfall—if he lived that long—which presented another problem: Garbia had only a small clinic; anyone with serious injuries had to be transported to the hospital in the city. She couldn’t call down to the village to order blood; nor could she ask the sisters to provide for him.
He will have to take what he needs from me.
The horse shied nervously as they approached, but went still as the Englishman’s scent reached his broad nostrils.
“Agenouillé-toi,” Simone said, shifting to keep the man braced against her. After the gray slowly lowered himself to the ground, she brought the Englishman beside him. “Reste.” To the man, she said, “Lay yourself across his back.”
When she tried to ease Korvel down, he resisted.
“I am a warrior,” he muttered. “I will mount and ride.”
His stubbornness reminded her of her brother Vingt, who had received twice as many beatings for defiance as any of them. In the end Vingt had not gone quietly, either. The handlers had been forced to drag him away.
“You are hurt, and you will fall on your face.” She wriggled out from under him, steadying him as he sagged to his knees. She swung around him, latching onto his shoulders and digging her heels into the soil as she eased him front-first onto the gray’s back. Once he was in place she bound his wrists with the rope, threading it under the gray’s belly and looping the other end around his knees. She tightened the rope as much as she dared before she told the horse, “Lève-toi.”
The gray’s muscles bunched as he lifted up and stood, snorting as she adjusted the man to better center his weight.
Simone rested her forehead against the gray’s strong neck, closing her eyes in relief. The distant sound of a clanging bell forced her to straighten and take hold of the bridle.
“Doucement,” she told the gray as she led him around the château toward the front gates, the only exit large enough to accommodate them. As she passed the corpses littering the drive she paused here and there to retrieve more weapons. Although she doubted anyone would be waiting on the trail back to the convent, she could assume nothing.
As soon as they spotted her, some of the men Flavia had hired to ready the fields for winter came hurrying from their plows. She untied the rope and directed four of them to carry the Englishman inside.
“Should we call down to the village for the doctor, sister?” one of them asked.
“No, it looks worse than it is,” she lied. “Carry him upstairs to my room, and put him in my bed.” She looked over as she heard Flavia’s cane sweeping from side to side along the path from the house. “I will be there in a minute.”
The old abbess said nothing as she joined Simone, until the men had gone into the convent. Then she reached out and touched her face as unerringly as if she could see it. “We must talk, my child.”
Simone guided her to the little rose garden where Flavia had conducted many of her lessons, and there told her what had happened. “He came for my father. He’s taken the scroll in order to draw him out.” She looked down at the ground. “I offered him my life. He left me to his men.”
Flavia took hold of her hand. “I spoke with our superiors while you were gone. They will be sending someone to relocate us. They also gave me new instructions for you.”
Simone glanced at the top floor of the convent. “What do they wish me to do?”
Flavia’s lips formed a tight, bitter smile. “You are to use the Englishman sent by Tremayne to secure the treasure.”
“His name is Korvel, and I rescued him,” Simone told her. “He is wounded, and too weak to be of any use to us.”
“Then you must revive him, child. You are to use his gifts so that you may track the thieves and retrieve the scroll.”
“So he can take it to his master in England?” Simone shook her head. “They have gone mad.”
“He will not be taking it anywhere.” The old woman’s voice went flat. “Once you have recovered the scroll, you are to destroy it…and kill the Englishman.”
“They command me to kill him?” Simone stared at her. “But he has done nothing wrong. He has no more knowledge of this than that courier you clouted.”
“You know that does not matter,” Flavia said.
“To them, no. To me?” She got to her feet. “Mother, Korvel killed for me. He saved my life.” When Flavia said nothing, Simone crossed her arms over her churning stomach. “I can’t murder an innocent man. I won’t do it.”
“You made your oath to the council, child, as we all did,” the old woman reminded her. “You are tresori. Your first obligation is complete obedience to your masters.”
“Who are sworn to protect the dark Kyn,” Simone countered. “How does killing one of them serve that oath?”
“Such things are not explained to me,” the old woman admitted, “but I can guess. If the high lord possesses the scroll, he will find out the rest. And he will have the means with which to create a new army to move against the Brethren. If Tremayne learns the council has destroyed the scroll—which his warrior would tell him as soon as he returned to England—then our other purpose will be revealed.”
For seven hundred years the tresoran council had walked the impossibly narrow line of faithfully serving the Darkyn while ensuring that the immortals did not inflict irreversible harm on the mortal world. Their Darkyn lords depended heavily on the former but had no knowledge of the latter. Every generation of tresori took not only an oath of loyalty to the Kyn, but swore to protect the future of mankind by any means necessary.
All the fight went out of Simone, who sat down beside the abbess. “So the Englishman must never leave France.”
“Not alive,” Flavia agreed, and turned her head toward the convent. “His wound and the daylight will have him at his most vulnerable now. The council need never know that he survived the confrontation at the château.” She groped for Simone’s hand. “If you will guide me, I will do it.”
“No.” The thought of them going upstairs to kill the man while he was helpless made Simone sick. “I do need him. Pájaro is telling his men that he is Helada.”
Flavia made a disgusted sound. “Why didn’t your father kill him like all the others?”
“The night before he was to be tested, Pájaro stole Piers’s wallet and car and ran away.” Simone remembered how angry her father had been when he had opened the door to the empty cell. “A month after that the police in Marseilles called. They had found Pájaro drowned. He had been in the water for weeks, but they found Piers’s identification as well as his keys. Everyone knew that Pájaro could not swim; water was the only thing he ever feared. Father told them to burn the body and never spoke of him again.”
“He must have killed a boy who resembled him, and planted the evidence on his body.” Flavia made the sign of the cross over herself.
“He knew if Father thought he was still alive, he would never stop searching for him.” Simone looked at one gnarled, dead-looking rosebush. It seldom had more than a dozen leaves on its spindly canes, but still steadily produced the largest and most exquisite flowers at the convent. The reason for that made her get to her feet. “I must tend to the Englishman and then rest while I can.”
“He will want blood when he wakes tonight,” Flavia warned. “I will provide it.”
“You can’t risk—”
“Nor can you.” She reached out and touched the strip of cloth Simone had bound around her forearm. “I may be blind, child, but I am not stupid. Nor have I forgotten how much I may safely take from my own veins to mix in some wine. Now go to him.”
Simone retrieved some tools from the garden shed before she went upstairs and sent the field hands back to their work. Once inside, she bolted her door and laid out the tools on the end of her pallet.
Her bed was too small for a man Korvel’s size, and provided no room in which to turn him. She tore her sheets by using them to drag him half over the edge before she rolled him onto his front.
Time was running out for him, so she discarded the idea of cutting off his bloodstained garments, and instead tore the rent in the back of his trousers wider to give her easier access to his wound. Pájaro’s man had buried his blade deep, and only a tiny piece protruded from the still-bleeding gash.
Simone picked up the slimmest pair of pliers and clamped them around the protrusion. She tugged carefully on the thin metal, wriggling and easing it at a slight angle rather than pulling it straight out. Fresh blood streaked with black grease welled up the broken blade.
She knew the risk she took. If the metal snapped and even the tiniest sliver of copper entered his veins, it would lodge in his heart and spread poison from there into every other vessel in his body. He would die in minutes.
The metal remained intact, although she could feel the serrations tearing anew through Korvel’s flesh. As soon as she saw the tip of the broken blade, she pulled it free and tossed it to the floor. She inserted her fingertips into the wound, holding it open as she used her teeth to pull the cloth wound around her forearm away from the cut.
It hurt to bite around the cut, but she applied only enough pressure to make herself bleed again before holding her forearm over the open wound. As soon as her blood dripped into the gash, Korvel’s bleeding stopped, and the tear slowly began to shrink inside.
Korvel’s hair began to rapidly darken, turning from flaxen gold to a dark red. Like all tresori, Simone knew that Kyn with copper poisoning often shed the metal through their scalp, which caused the color of their hair to change. Because the copper now staining Korvel’s hair would also cause irritation to his skin, she used her sewing shears to cut off most of the length.