Page 61 of My Hero
“Nay!” he cried out. His chest burned with longing. “Nay!”
“Hold him still, Andrew,” a nearby voice murmured.
“I’m trying, Father.”
“Nay!” Garth yelled hoarsely.
“Stephen, help him. I’ve got to get this down him.”
“Cynthia!” he wailed. “Cynthia!”
“Cynthia, Father? Who—?”
“Later, Stephen. Hold him steady now.”
Cynthia shrank away from his sight until she was a tiny bright spot across the dark abyss, no bigger than a bee’s stinger, lost between his fingers. His lungs ached with grief.
Someone clutched at his shoulders, restraining him. A noxious odor assaulted his nose. He jerked away.
“Stephen!”
“I’m trying, Father. But he seems to…”
A hand anchored his jaw, pulling his teeth apart. Something cold and vile gurgled into his mouth. Poison! His throat spasmed, and he gagged the liquid back out. Wildly, he flailed his good arm about, hoping to knock his assailants back. He contacted flesh. Then something shattered on the stones with a brittle crash.
“Garth! Can you hear me? Are you awake?”
He lifted his lids the merest fraction of an inch, just enough to make out the worried face of the prior hovering over him.
“You must swallow this concoction, Brother Garth.” He turned to the novitiate beside him. “Bring me another vial, Andrew. Quickly.”
Garth looked at the ugly green splashes staining the prior’s cassock where the first vial of God-knew-what had spilled. He looked at the fat bandage binding his arm where he’d been bled. God’s wounds—he might die from whatever it was he had, but he wouldn’t do it with a belly full of poison and a body full of holes.
With the dregs of his strength, he snagged the front of the prior’s cassock and with inborn de Ware command, yanked him down till they were nose to nose.
“Get me Cynthia Wendeville,” he demanded, the words scraping painfully across his raw throat like quicklime. “Now.”
“All right,” the prior answered, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously. “All right, then.”
But already Garth was drifting back toward his private world of illusions.
Chapter 15
Cynthia’s horse plodded along the gray road toward the village, as reluctant as she was to brave the morning cold. In the interminable gloom, the world seemed to have no beginning, no end, and her path through it, no purpose.
She wasn’t hurt, she told herself, wiping away a tear brought on certainly by the chill, nothing more. Only a fool would be hurt.
After all, Garth had made no promises to her. He hadn’t pledged his undying love. He hadn’t sworn to forsake all others for her. Hell, he hadn’t even promised to remain at Wendeville. Only a fool would take an impulsive midnight encounter as a sign of something deeper.
She wrapped the reins tightly around one fist. The leather bit into her palm.
Nay, it wasn’t hurt. It was only anger—anger at the way he’d left Roger and Elspeth without a word, anger at his abandonment of the good people of Wendeville, anger that he hadn’t even lingered long enough to tell her goodbye.
When she glimpsed his cell, clean and blank as the day he’d arrived, her heart sank. The note he left her was succinct.Under the circumstances,it said,I think it would be better for both of us if I found you a more qualified chaplain.
He’d undoubtedly fled to the monastery. At the monastery he could seclude himself behind safe stone walls and contemplate the error of his ways for months to come. By day, he could bury his nose in some dusty religious tome, and by night, punish himself for feeling the passions of an ordinary man.
The pervasive fog swirled about her. It had both her eyes watering now. She dabbed at them with the tippet of her sleeve. It wouldn’t do to let the villagers see her upset. The sick depended upon her strength and spirit, and for that she must maintain a cheerful countenance, not the melancholy face that the gloomy day painted upon her.
