Devil at Midnight (29 page)

Christian’s father wore an outfit she had not seen him in before, more merchant than soldier. The loose, tabard-like outer garment was dark blue velvet with black cuffs and broad lapels. Striped black-and-white sleeves puffed through the tabard’s slashes, with sober black hose to encase his legs. His round cap was red, the single burst of bright color. Naturally, his sword was strapped at his hip. Beneath his shirt, his chain mail hauberk peeked.

All steel began as iron, created by the heat and pressure of working that metal over charcoal. Since mail armor was processed less than plate, its iron content was high. Coupled with Gregori’s resistance to her will, the hauberk would probably preclude her from thralling him at all tonight.

Resigned to relying on her wits, Nim Wei waited until Vincenzo’s servant set down his wine tray and left.

Gregori refused her offer to fill his goblet. Because it required a considerable amount of alcohol to impair her, Nim Wei poured a cup for herself.

“Now,” she said, once she had wet her palate with the soft red wine. “Care to tell me what this is about?”

Gregori looked surprised that she remained standing. Prevented by custom from sitting himself, he straightened the cuffs of his full blue sleeves. “I believe we can be useful to each other.”

“Are we not already?”

Gregori’s brows lowered at her refusal to provide him an opening, but Nim Wei was not about to kiss his hindquarters. She pursed her lips at him—a subtle, teasing gesture that had his mouth narrowing.

Now
, she thought,
the gloves will come off.

“I do not know what sort of enchantress you are,” he said more bluntly, “and I do not care. What matters is that I have seen the marvels you can perform: the way you charm all who meet you and your uncanny effect on the soldiers who share your bed.”

“Pleasing soldiers in bed is hardly an uncanny talent.”

“You please them so well they stagger. And then you fortify them unnaturally.”

Nim Wei’s normally lazy heart rate picked up slightly. She was not frightened, merely interested and alert. Mystic that she was, she sensed an opportunity approaching.

“Do tell,” she said, sipping casually at her wine.

Gregori’s face tightened with the anger he was fighting. He did not relish his pronouncements being treated dismissively. His enunciation turned very crisp. “After you bedded them, Charles excelled in battle as he never had before, Hans stopped complaining about his aching joints, and William outdid any previous demonstrations of muscular power. Anyone who watched closely could have observed these changes.”

Gregori, of course, was the closest watcher of all.

“I noticed no difference in William,” she said. “Did not your man Lavaux pink him in that knife fight?”

Gregori’s fist smashed down on the surface of Vincenzo’s desk, causing the ink-stained quills that lay there to roll away.

“That is only because whatever you did to William wore off! And do not insult me by denying it. I promise you do not want me as an enemy.”

Nim Wei knew her smile would infuriate him. She made it small but obvious. “My only possible interest is your value as my friend, and as yet you have made no arguments for that.”

Gregori opened his mouth to snap at her, then drew a calming breath. He had a temper, but he did not like losing it. “I want you to bed my men. I want you to revitalize them as you did Christian’s.”

This was an interesting request, though apart from a slight widening of her eyes, Nim Wei did not let her reaction show. “Even if I could
revitalize
them, as you put it, I fail to see how that would serve me—unless you are suggesting they cannot defend me otherwise?”

Gregori’s jaw worked for a moment before he spoke. “My men are more than capable, Mistress Wei. The problem lies with my son. As you may have noticed, he is stubborn. He has been trying to slip his leash. Use your”—he waved his hand vaguely—“use your magic to strengthen my men, and I will pit them against his in a test of arms. When my son is suitably humbled by his defeat, I will deliver him to you, to do with as you please for an entire night.”

Nim Wei did not need a great deal of breath, but this proposition stole what she had. She saw she had underestimated Gregori’s determination to hold on to his dominance.

“You would risk your son’s life?” she asked.

“He risks it with his defiance. I would simply be returning him to his proper place.”

Beneath your thumb, you mean
, she thought with an inner snort.

“I am aware that you desire him,” Gregori went on, smooth as olive oil. He slid a sly glance at her. “If he were injured, he would be that much easier to control.”

The depth of the insult shocked. Nim Wei felt as if her insides were frosting over. Yes, she was a law unto herself, but this went beyond the bounds even for her. If all she wanted was to bed Christian, she could have accomplished it long ago. She wanted to make the boy her next blood companion, wanted to offer him the priceless gift of immortality. Her personal code demanded that she treat him with more respect than ordinary humans. He had to choose her, had to
want
the change for his own. And here Gregori, his father, was offering to deliver Christian to her with all the care of a pig trussed up for slaughter.

Fortunately, none of her thoughts leaked onto her face. She stared into Gregori’s eyes without blinking.

“I shall consider your proposal carefully,” she said.

Gregori held her gaze, undaunted by her coolness. “He is threatening to take his men and leave once we reach Florence.”

For one slow heartbeat, temptation beckoned. Her conversations with Philippe had perhaps been too much on target. That which seemed unattainable did indeed whet the appetite. Christian was a prize, more than he himself realized. Proud, fiery, but with a personal discipline that kept his sharp mind ascendant over his passions. He was a match for her. More ambitious than Vincenzo. Harder than Edmund Fitz Clare. In truth, Christian was a man she could come to love. The future would taste sweet with him at her side.

Then the frost inside her thickened. She was better than this. Neither love nor lust ruled her. If she had to lose her chance to change Christian, better that than to lose herself. Offended by her twinge of weakness as much as by Gregori’s belief that she was so small, Nim Wei inclined her head regally.

“You may leave,” she said. “You have given me much to think about.”

“Do not think too long,” he countered. “Florence is not that far away.”

A
second traveler’s road, its origins as Roman as the Via Aemilia, led from Bologna to Florence through the Futa Pass. Every stride they took down it intensified Christian’s dread. His time to find a solution was running out. If none came to him, he and his father would have to clash.

The gloom of their surroundings did not lighten his mood. They were in the Apennines, both dwarfed and hemmed in on either side by a forest of firs that rose a hundred feet in the air. Rain had been falling since before sunset, never pleasant for a troop of men in armor. With the wetness, everything they wore chafed them. Christian’s boots clung to the mud each time he lifted them, and he did not envy the men guiding the wagons. Forced to labor harder than usual, the aroma of the group was pungent. The smell of slowly rusting mail did not allay it, nor the ever-present clouds of pine. For the past hour, Nim Wei—who had once again requested his attendance on her second horse—had been pressing a scented pomander to her button of a nose. Though she sat as straight as ever in the saddle, she seemed weary—not a look Christian had seen on her before.

He rubbed her second horse’s damp black withers, far more comfortable offering the animal his sympathy.

“Your men have stopped joking,” Nim Wei observed, breaking a long silence. “Tonight they only grunt at each other.”

Christian glanced at her, but her attention was directed forward where Charles and William led the way with lanterns. It occurred to him that she was lonely, that she truly minded him refusing her. Disconcerted by the idea, he ran his hand down the horse’s nose.

“It is the weather,” he said, hearing his own stiffness. “It lowers everyone’s spirits.”

The stallion tossed his head, tack jingling with annoyance that Christian had stopped petting him. When Christian resumed, he felt rather than saw Nim Wei look at him.

“You are always kind to Balthazar,” she said.

It was a comment he did not know how to answer. Was she wishing he would be kind to her, or perhaps complaining that he was not? It cost Christian nothing to be kind to a beast. Being kind to her might spill out a different kettle of fish.

She is a witch
, he reminded himself.
A dangerous., uncanny being
. The seeming vulnerability she was displaying could be her version of a crocodile weeping.

He slid another glance at her, long enough to notice that the rain had not dampened her waist-length hair. Instead, the droplets beaded up and then rolled down her straight black tresses like dew on a spider’s web. Her clothes and her saddle were dry as well. For that matter, so was her mount’s ebony mane. One wave of gooseflesh chased another across his skin. The minstrel was not wet. Nature itself avoided her.

Perhaps he made a sound of horror. Perhaps she stole his thoughts from his mind with her witch’s power. All he knew was that her head rotated toward him with an odd smoothness. The reflection of the bobbing lanterns glinted like sparks of hellfire in her pupils. Some force seemed to push at a spot between and just above his brows. If Grace had been near him, he would have said the pressure was a ghost’s fingertips.

“You will come to my tent tonight,” she said in a smoky purr. She raised her pale, small palm to forestall the protest he drew breath for. “I wish to speak to you on a matter of importance. You have my oath that I shall not”—here, her rosebud of a mouth twisted—“impose on you.”

Christian was not certain what her oath was worth. The horses’ hooves sucked at the muddy road, reminding him he needed to answer. He may have waited too long. The minstrel looked away, the spectral nudge fading from his forehead as she shifted her slender fingers on bone-dry reins.

“As you wish,” he acceded ... but not because he wanted to.

 

 

T
hey nailed their blankets to the trees, creating makeshift lean-tos against the wet weather. Christian waited until Grace slept beneath his before picking his way between the rain-blackened tree trunks to Nim Wei’s tent. He wondered if he were wrong to keep the minstrel’s summons to himself, but there were simply too many reasons not to involve Grace.

His heart pounded in his chest as he reached the entrance to her shelter. Dozens of candles burned inside, the red black glow no balm to his nerves. The foreign characters on her door flap stood out sharply. He assumed the invisible writing Grace had mentioned remained. If he touched it, would it bespell him again? Was he already spelled to come here alone? Unsure of anything, he cleared his throat and waited to be let in.

She came to the door quickly, lifting the silken flap and standing aside to admit him. Christian ducked inside. Entering her bower was like being transported to a distant land. The color and the pattern and the luxury of her appointments were so different from what he was used to. A chess table and two low chairs with tasseled cushions had been set in the center of her floor pillows.

He wondered if she would burrow into the ground beneath that table at break of day.

“Do you play?” she asked politely.

He shook his head, fighting a shudder at the idea of sitting above her resting place. “Chess is more Hans’s game than mine.”

“Well, no matter,” she said, though he sensed she was disappointed. She stepped around to where he could see her.

His mouth went dry.

She had changed out of her habitual black velvet tunic and matching hose. Silk enfolded her instead: sheer, complicated, wrapped layers of green and yellow and blue, embroidered with gleaming thread he knew had to be real gold. In some places, the thread formed dragons; in others, giant chrysanthemums, but it was the fit of the semitransparent cloth that had his blood heating helplessly. The exotic material robed her from neck to ankle, clinging to every gentle curve she had. She was feminine and mysterious, as much shadow as she was flesh, her delicacy calling to instincts he doubted any male could have ignored.

For a heartbeat, he could only gape at her naked toes. They were tiny, with perfect, clipped nails that twinkled like clear crystal.

He felt disloyal to Grace for reacting, which startled him. He could not remember being ashamed on a woman’s behalf before. Though he did not speak, Nim Wei seemed to divine his thoughts.

“Thank you for appreciating my effort,” she said dryly.