“I thought as much. Please take a seat, my dear. You're hurting my neck. Maurice?”
“Yes, Your Eminence?”
“Please pretend that I've given you some practical-sounding errand to run, in order to assuage your wounded pride at being excluded from this conversation, and leave the room.”
Widdershins feigned a coughing fit. She liked the young monk, and was afraid she'd hurt his feelings if she laughed openly.
“But…Your Eminence, I don't think it's a good idea. That is, I'm not entirely sure it's…well-forgive me, mademoiselle-safe. For you to be here. Alone, that is.”
“I'm not alone, Maurice. The gods are with me.”
The monk opened his mouth to protest, but nothing emerged save a strangled squeak.
“Maurice,” de Laurent said more kindly, “go. If the young lady truly wanted to kill me, I'd not have survived her first visit to my boudoir, let alone a second. More to the point, she could kill the both of us as easily as she could one, and still be through the window before the guards could open the door.” He smiled at her. “If half the stories I hear are true, of course.”
“But-”
“Thank you, Maurice. That will be all.”
His face forlorn, and with many a backward glance, Maurice went.
“He's such a good boy,” de Laurent commented. “Another decade or three under his belt, and he'll be going places. He'd make a pretty good bishop himself one day, if I could talk him into changing orders.”
“Your Eminence,” Widdershins began, unsure how to proceed, “I'm really not here to hurt you.” She wasn't consciously aware of her fingers pulling at the hem of her sleeve, nor of the fact that she was chewing idly on a lock of her blonde wig. “I-”
“I know that, Adrienne. That is what Delacroix just called you, yes?” De Laurent's smile held no mischief this time, merely the comforting expression of a gentle old man who knew more about the world-and probably about you-than you did. “It's such a pretty name. May I ask why you changed it?”
Widdershins, who'd expected to be the one asking questions, found herself caught off guard. “Adrienne is…wanted for some pretty awful crimes, Your Eminence. Widdershins is just a thief. Though I suppose you think stealing is bad enough.”
“I'm not here to judge you. And as long as it's just the two of us, you might as well call me William. ‘Your Eminence' gets so unwieldy. ‘Excuse me, Your Eminence.' ‘If you say so, Your Eminence.' ‘Hey, Your Eminence, can you pass the mustard?'”
Widdershins laughed. It was a clean sound, pure, washing away at least a tiny portion of the past weeks. De Laurent smiled gently.
When her laughter faded, he spoke again. “Aren't you going to introduce me to your other friend?” he asked softly.
Every muscle in Widdershins's body locked up. “Excuse me?”
“My dear, I'm an archbishop of the High Church. I've been known, on occasion, to ask a favor of the gods, something the common man might think of as magic. A nudge of good luck here, a flash of insight there. These events are not the result of sorcery, but neither are they simple manifestations of chance. Sometimes the gods even nudge things for me without my knowledge. Little coincidences-such as, for instance, a thief appearing at just the right moment to save my life from some particularly bold assassin.
“I know the presence of the divine, my dear. And you have a god looking over your shoulder.”
“His…his name's Olgun,” Widdershins admitted, uncertain how many more surprises she could stand in her life.
“Olgun. He's not a god of the Pact, or I'd have heard of him.”
“Do…” She swallowed. “Do you have to, I don't know, report him or something?”
De Laurent smiled. “Worship of a pagan deity is frowned on by the Hallowed Pact, but it's not forbidden. So long as he doesn't work against the Pact, or flaunt the fact that he's not abiding by all of its strictures, I see no reason why either the Church or our gods should see him as an enemy.”
She nodded. “I sort of picked him up at the same time I…stopped being Adrienne.”
“Do you want to talk about it, child?”
Without entirely knowing why, for the first time since she'd told the whole bloody and painful tale to Genevieve, she did.
“It was about six years ago,” she began, her voice fading, carried back across the sea of years to a far but never forgotten shore. “I was just a pickpocket on the streets, really. One day, I was watching the shops in the marketplace…”
Claude maneuvered through the front door as best he could, arms laden with parcels, and glowered at the servants who had taken so long to admit him. “Find a place for these,” he demanded, shoving the packages into the chest of a startled doorman, and suggesting by his expression just where the fellow might stick them. Barely waiting long enough for the man to take the weight, he spun and strode up the stairs, taking them two at a time in his long-legged stride.
Even as he approached the master's office, his scowl deepened. No doubt the old coot would have something else that needed doing, some new banal task that would occupy time Claude really didn't have. But he wasn't about to overtly disobey, and he certainly didn't want anything to go wrong with the archbishop's arrangements…
But Alexandre was neither hard at work on the books, nor shouting instructions to this servant or that. He sat behind his desk, staring dreamily off into space, a strange grin flittering about the edges of his mouth.
“Sir?” Claude asked, gently shutting the door behind him. “What's wrong?”
“Nothing's wrong, Claude.” Alexandre turned to him, still smiling. “I think…We have to keep this secret, of course, at least for now. Until we can make things right.”
“Um, of course, sir. Keep what secret, exactly?”
“She's alive, Claude. She's alive, and maybe…maybe she'll come back to me.”
The servant's eyes widened briefly, then narrowed. “Perhaps, sir, you'd better tell me everything.”
And he stood, listening, with his hands clasped behind his back so Alexandre couldn't see the violent clenching of his fists.
The candle guttered madly, little more than a floating wick in a pool of gooey wax by the time the young woman's narration finally ended. She'd left out almost nothing-nothing save Alexandre's own worship of Olgun, for that was not her secret to tell. Her throat was raw, and she was surprised, albeit only mildly, to discover that her cheeks were damp once more.
William de Laurent leaned back in his chair. He folded his hands in his lap to prevent himself from overstepping the bounds of propriety, for at that moment all he wanted was to reach out and comfort this poor girl who had suffered so much, persevered through hardship and horror the likes of which few could imagine.
“You are truly blessed,” he said at last, his own voice hoarse with suppressed emotion.
She couldn't help it; she laughed, loudly and bitterly. “You have a unique sense of fortune then, William.” She punched the name ever so slightly, as though pointedly reminding him that he'd given her permission to use it.
“You misunderstand me, Adrienne. Yes, I said Adrienne. You no more stopped being Adrienne when you took the name Widdershins than this desk”-here he thumped a fist against the solid wood-“would become, say, a mule, just because I were to call it one.
“But what I mean is that you have a strength about you that enabled you to come through all this. That is a blessing. And more to the point, it amazes me utterly that Olgun-and I mean no offense to your god, you understand-hasn't gotten you killed by now.”
“What?” Widdershins blinked twice, her own mounting indignation both channel and counterpoint to the deity's own sudden ire. The air around her tingled. “Olgun's saved my life more times than I can count! He's gotten me out of some unbelievably tight spots, and he's usually the one trying to talk sense into me! What could possibly drive you to say something like that?!”