Page 64 of The Captive Duke
“Be glad, St. Just, you don’t have to add to a soldier’s confusion the burden of a ducal succession.”
St. Just put the knife down beside its mates on a bed of blue velvet. “What can be confusing about that? Surely even the French couldn’t spoil your recall of those activities.”
No fire had been laid in the armory. It was summer, after all, and who in their right mind lingered here?
St. Just held his drink up to a branch of candles, as if light had never done anything more fascinating than shine through an inch of brandy. “What aren’t you saying, Mercia? You’re no damned eunuch.”
Damned, perhaps, nonetheless.
“I am not whole.” The words were out, four little prosaic words, but Christian’s throat promptly closed up, as if to stop any more prosaic words from escaping and mortifying him further. The small crossbow occupied his line of vision; a compulsion to smash it suffused his hands.
Both of his hands.
“You are not…” St. Just’s mouth screwed up in consternation. “I’ve seen your scars, but otherwise…”
In for a penny… St. Just wouldn’t pretend he’d misheard, wouldn’t brush such a disclosure aside, and maybe Christian had known he wouldn’t.
“Girard enjoyed decorating me with scars,” he said, blowing out a breath. “You’ve seen the symmetry of them, front and back, side to side. I bloom with delicate, pink scars, as if I wore a bouquet. At first, it nigh cost me my reason, to know every time his superior officer came around, Girard would cut on me again, slice at my flesh, murmuring sympathy the whole time…”
St. Just swore with soft Anglo-Saxon intensity.
“But then it became almost a relief, not a pain but a…consolation. His knife was always sharp and clean, and it stung, but it also… I could manage it in silence, without fail, I could manage those messy, interminable sessions in silence. He never cut deeply, never. I soon realized Girard cutting on me was for show, and Girard comprehended my grasp of his agenda.”
Christian’s words were swaddled in the quiet of a bigold house late at night, and what was a guest supposed to say to such a disclosure, anyhow?
“I’ve heard the like,” St. Just said, so very calmly. “One of the laundresses had scars.”
Christian had notheard the like, though it was rumored the Regent was far too willing to open a vein, even when the physicians told him he’d been bled enough.
“A woman with scars?”
“On her arms, well above her wrists,” St. Just said, rearranging the knives so they formed not a fan but a circle on their blue velvet. “She wasn’t trying to end her existence, and the other women said she’d long had the habit.”
Christian had not taken a sip of his drink, and neither had St. Just.
The brandy was, after all, French.
And yet, Christian wanted to finish the topic, though it would probably mean he never saw St. Just again.
“Girard sensed his little torment was no longer doing much mental damage to me, if any, but cutting is bloody, dramatic, and impressive to those who witness it. Anduvoir in particular seemed to enjoy those sessions with the knife.”
“Then may Girard and Anduvoir both die a slow, painful, bloody death.” St. Just lifted his glass, a toast to the eventual demise of two Frenchmen who’d been no credit to their nation.
“And roast honestly in hell,” Christian said. “Iunderstand spies are tortured if they’re taken captive out of uniform, but Anduvoir’s interest in me was beyond the natural perversions of war, if there are such things.”
“One understands your meaning.”
St. Just wouldn’t pry. Christian would have to make this confession on main strength.
“Girard occasionally traveled to Toulouse to meet with his superiors. The first time he was gone, the guards thought to extract a confession of treason from me, and damaged my hand in his absence. He was wroth with them for overstepping, to the point that I remained safe in his absence thereafter.”
“No, you did not.” And neither did St. Just look away, play with his drink, or study the ancient, priceless weaponry.
“Girard went on leave again, I know not where, and his immediate superior dropped in on the Château. If Girard was sick, Anduvoir was sicker. He was jealous of the prisoners sent to Girard, but lacked the skill Girard had for keeping us alive while flaying our souls. With not half Girard’s skill with a knife, Anduvoir rendered me…as a Hebrew.”
A few beats of silence, then St. Just’s rapidly indrawn breath. “Almighty, everlasting, merciful, bleeding Christ. Hecircumcisedyou?”
Christian nodded, memory abruptly flooding his mind with the scent of his own blood, the horrific burning, the uncertainty…
