Like Fire Through Bone (19 page)

Markos had moved closer to him on the bed, and he tugged Vasilios slowly and carefully until Vasilios’s head and shoulders rested in Markos’s lap. Markos carded his fingers through Vasilios’s short hair, smoothing it way from his face. Markos’s hands were warm, and this close he smelled of soap and freshly washed linen, and Vasilios gave up and wept.

“You are not useless,” Markos said, voice quiet when Vasilios had calmed a little. “In fact you have been of far more use than I have during this entire investigation. It has been your
seeings
which have led us down the right path, time and again, I would still be at a standstill, unsure of what I was even looking for, if not for you. As for the rest….” Markos’s voice grew hard with anger. “You are not the one to blame. You have been badly treated for a long time, and you have done what you needed to do to survive, and there is nothing about that to be ashamed of.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Vasilios felt awful. His eyes stung and his mouth was dry, his throat sore, and he had tear tracks drying on his face. He cleared his throat, and Markos shifted on the bed so he could reach across to the table and pick up the cup of water. He held it as Vasilios drank.

“One of the things that attracted me to you first, back when I saw you from a distance when I had dealings with Panagiotis, was your strength and your grace,” Markos said after another long minute. He shook his head, his hand going to cover Vasilios’s again, entwining their fingers. “I have unfortunately met too many men taken in battle to be eunuchs or slaves, and usually if they survive, it is with the will crushed out of them. Not you, though. You have held your own. Even while kneeling, even while following every rule and order, you are still your own person. And that is amazing.”

Vasilios tried to laugh, but it came out sounding watery and weak. “I just did what I thought I needed to do to survive, to not get beaten, to be the best.” He took a long deep breath. “I wanted to be the best. I wanted to have it all mean something, anything really. But now I’m tired.”

“I wish…,” Markos started, pain evident in his voice, and then he stopped and shook his head.

“I can’t go back,” Vasilios said, even though he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. “If I go back to him, he will crush the soul out of me. I’m not that strong.”

“I wish I could have helped,” Markos said. His fingers squeezed Vasilios’s tight. “I went and spoke with Damianos, made him an offer—but he all but laughed in my face. He refused to tell me what he’d done with you or where you were.”

The pang of what could have been washed over Vasilios. He had known that Markos’s ultimate failure to buy him would hurt, but knowing did not lessen the pain. He pulled his hand away from Markos’s and tried to push himself upright again, gasping and hissing with pain as the movement pulled at his torn back. Markos reached out to stop him, but Vasilios grabbed his hands, panting hard, and managed to get into a sitting position. He had to lean against Markos for support or he would have fallen back over again.

Someone knocked on the door, and they both turned to see Nereida push it open. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, smiling. “But I brought more medicine for Vasilios. The dose you had before should be wearing off soon, and I don’t want you to be in too much pain.”

She came over to the bed, set the tray down on the table, picked up the cup, and helped him drink the wine and bitter herbs. The light-headedness swamped Vasilios’s senses as he lay back, but the pain receded as well.

“I should let you rest and pay a visit to Theofilos and Ilkay,” Markos said, making to stand, and Vasilios reached out to stop him. His fingers skimmed across Markos’s cheek to end up lightly touching his lips, he let them linger there. It was as he had thought. Markos’s lips were soft.

“You need to sleep,” Markos said, breath ghosting over Vasilios’s fingertips and a faint smile curving the corners of his mouth. Vasilios made a protesting noise, but Markos reached down, fingers warm against the side of Vasilios’s face. His thumb stroked across Vasilios’s lips before he pulled away. “I’ll be back soon,” Markos said and then stood and moved toward the door and out of Vasilios’s line of vision. Nereida stood too, throwing Vasilios a quick smile before following after Markos.

Right before the door closed, he heard her ask, “Do you really know Theofilos Yalim?”

V
ASILIOS
lay in bed, letting himself drift, thinking about nothing in particular until sleep took him.

He woke lying beneath the same pomegranate tree in the desert. He was once more fully clothed, although this time his back burned with a hot stabbing pain, and he could feel the wounds pull as he tried to move. They didn’t seem to be bandaged anymore either. He gritted his teeth and struggled into a sitting position and looked around. He was alone. No voice spoke, and he could see no one, not even the snake that had been there before. At least, he thought, the tree provided him with shade from the sun.

He looked up at the branches above him. He could see fruit hanging there, but reaching it would involve standing, and he was not sure he could manage that. Instead, he looked out across the desert again and then frowned. There was something coming toward him across the sand. Vasilios’s heart started beating hard. The only person he’d actually ever met inside one of these dreams was the demon. He was not sure what he would do if it was the creature coming toward him. He had no way to fight or defend himself, weakened as he was now.

As the figure drew closer, though, Vasilios saw with relief that it was not the demon who had devoured the babies in his previous visions. This figure was tall, with striking, strong features and wide shoulders. The figure was dressed in dark-blue silk, of a shade Vasilios had never seen before, with a scarf pulled over his head and tucked around his shoulders in the way eunuchs wore them. His skin was the color of fire-darkened copper. As he drew closer, Vasilios saw under the thin, filmy silk of his head scarf that his scalp was smooth and shaved bald, and he wore gold earrings in each ear. He was carrying the snake from Vasilios’s previous dream, or one like it, its dark-red scales twined around the eunuch’s hands and arms.

The figure stopped in front of Vasilios and looked down at him.

“Why are you sitting there?” he asked, voice surprisingly light and sweet, like that of a court jewel despite his large size and muscular build. “You must get up and go forth. The enemy of Michael will not wait forever.”

“I cannot,” Vasilios said. He was still in pain, so much so that he was afraid if he moved again, his back might start to bleed once more.

The man knelt beside him, letting the snake slither from his hands to the ground, and Vasilios eyed it warily, hoping it would not come anywhere near him. The stranger stared at him for a long minute, and Vasilios shifted nervously. The other eunuch’s eyes were dark, but flecked through with gold.

“I do not know your name,” he said, and the stranger frowned and tilted his head to the side.

“Call me Malachi,” he said.

Vasilios frowned a little at that, trying to figure out why the name sounded familiar to him. “Is that not the name of a prophet?”

“It was once,” the stranger who was called Malachi confirmed.

“Is it your real name?” Vasilios asked, although it did not matter really. This was a dream, after all.

Malachi smiled at that, causing small wrinkles to appear around his eyes and Vasilios to have a view of white teeth. “No.”

Vasilios shook his head. “All right, then. If it is what you wish, I will call you Malachi. They call me Vasilios. That was not the name I was born with, although you probably know both those things.” He winced and tried to shift a little in the sand.

“Take off your tunic,” Malachi said, and Vasilios jerked around to stare at him, then let out a pained wheeze at the sudden movement.

“What?”

“Let me see your back,” Malachi said. “So I can tell how badly you are injured.”

Vasilios didn’t know what to do or say. He had no idea who Malachi was or what he could want.
It’s a dream
,
just a dream
, he thought, but considering his other dreams, this didn’t reassure him at all. He moved his hands down to the hem of his tunic, and struggled to remove it. Lifting his arms sent jagged shocks of pain down his back and shoulders, and he gritted his teeth and then gasped when Malachi reached out to him.

Malachi’s hands were warm and large and felt far too real to belong in a dream. Vasilios froze as Malachi helped ease the tunic up over his head and then off.

Once the tunic was gone, Malachi sat back and stared at him for so long that Vasilios began to feel rather self-conscious about his chest, with his small but firm muscles and complete lack of hair, except for the soft down that started below his navel. He wanted to cross his arms over his chest, but moving them that much would be painful, and his back was already screaming at him for moving at all anyway.

“Turn around,” Malachi said. “Let me see your back.”

Hoping this would be over soon and he could put his tunic back on, Vasilios did as he was told. He could almost feel Malachi’s gaze on him, and then warm fingers lightly skimmed across his shoulders and along his sides where the skin was welted but had not been broken. Vasilios heard Malachi let a breath out through his nose, making a huffing noise.

“Ordinarily there would be no need to do anything,” Malachi said finally. “These wounds are not life threatening, and they will heal in time, but our enemy grows restless, and time is something we do not have.”

Without warning, Malachi pressed his hand flat against Vasilios’s back. There was a sensation of intense burning. Vasilios thought he might have screamed, but he wasn’t sure through the pain. Blackness rushed at him with frightening suddenness, and Vasilios thought he heard Malachi say, “There,” sounding pleased, but he was not sure.

W
HEN
he woke next, he was lying in his bed in Panagiotis’s house once more, and Nereida was kneeling by his side, head bent and hands clasped in prayer. He could hear her murmuring softly to herself as he stirred, and she looked up quickly when he cleared his throat.

“Are you all right?” she asked, and he nodded, feeling groggy. Nereida stood to pour water into a cup for him.

“My back,” he said, after taking several sips of water. “I had a dream that a man healed my back, and it doesn’t hurt as much now as it did.” He tried lifting his arms experimentally to test that statement, and found in fact it didn’t. It still hurt, there was no doubt. It felt like he’d taken quite a beating, and he could feel the welts and bruises all across his back and over his shoulders and sides. There was no longer the pull of half-healed wounds, though, no longer the sharp stabbing pain that felt like someone cutting into him.

Nereida unwound the bandages from around his chest and then examined his back. “It does look better,” she said after a minute. “Much, much better in fact. Thank God. Do you still need something for the pain?”

Vasilios tested out lifting his arms a little higher this time, and there was definitely pain, but it was not unbearable. “I think I’ll be all right without it,” he said, a little surprised to find it was true. “Help me up please? I need to go see Markos.”

“Are you sure you’re healed enough for this?” Nereida watched with a frown as Vasilios pushed himself up and carefully climbed out of the bed. Walking was painful, he found once he was standing up, but not impossible, and he limped toward the chest where his clothes used to be.

“I think I should be fine.” Vasilios opened the clothes chest and found a few pairs of clothes remaining. He began trying to struggle out of the pair of lamb’s-wool trousers he’d been wearing, so he could put clean ones on. “Thank you for taking care of me, and for getting us away from Anthimos.” He turned back to her after pulling on a pair of light-green trousers, to find that Nereida had turned her back to him to give him privacy while he changed. He was grateful for this little gesture. “It was very brave.”

“I needed to do something.” Nereida shrugged. “He would have killed you if we’d stayed there. I managed to stop him from beating you to death. He might have just continued to do the same the next day.”

Vasilios frowned as he pulled on a matching tunic, sorry now that he hadn’t asked for more details about how they’d come to be at Panagiotis’s house—no, Eudoxia’s house now—in the first place. “Did he hurt you?”

“No.” Nereida shook her head. “Not really. I managed to stop him from continuing to lash you after you’d fallen unconscious, and then I waited until he was asleep and came here to beg Lady Eudoxia for help. She sent a servant back with me to help carry you here all under the utmost secrecy.”

Vasilios swallowed hard. He could not imagine how hard it must have been for her to come back for him after she had already gotten away. He owed her a great debt. He reached for a scarf, pulled it around his shoulders, and then tried to bend over to pull on his slippers. He hissed in pain at the sudden movement, unbalanced, and would have fallen over, if Nereida hadn’t moved to grab him at the last minute.

“Thank you,” he said to her, gripping her shoulder for balance has he toed on first one and then the other slipper.

“You shouldn’t go out.” Nereida put her arm around his waist for better balance, and Vasilios took a breath.

“I have to. Have you heard about the babies that have gone missing? There is something out there taking them, and General Markos is trying to find and stop it, and for whatever reason, I have been useful in this.” He looked up at her. “And if I can continue to be useful, then I need to do that.”

Nereida gave him a long, searching look and then slowly nodded. “All right,” she said. “But be careful. You’re not completely healed yet, and if Anthimos were to find you, he would take you back. We are both protected from him as long as we stay in the house but not beyond that.”

“I know.” Vasilios pushed away from her grasp and took a few tentative practice steps on his own before pulling his scarf up over his head.