Understandable or not, a man with a broken spirit would be no good for Isabelle. Either she’d spend all her time propping him up, or he’d drag her down. In neither case would she soar as she ought.
Another handmaid, younger than Adel, with eyes as wide and black as a doe’s, poked her head in the room. “Se?ora. Don Angelo is here, and the royal surgeon, Esteban, to see the musketeer.”
“Tell them I will see them in a moment,” Jean-Claude said. They were here for his apology, no doubt. He did not look forward to apologizing, but Isabelle had promised, and he would not betray her word. To Adel he said, “Help me put some pants and boots on.”
“The doctor is going to want to look at your leg,” Adel said reprovingly.
“Then he can look at it through my pants. Look, the wound isn’t hot, and if it was going to go septic, it would have done so by now.”
Reluctantly, Adel helped him dress and maneuver into an upholstered chair. Even those slow, orchestrated movements brought new pain. Already, he yearned for another sip of the dream spirits. Where had she put that cup? Away. Saints be praised. He wondered, briefly, if Adel was married, but then quickly put the thought out of his mind. His duty as Isabelle’s protector had long hampered his own romantic inclinations, and he had limited the pursuit of his primal urges to the occasional whore.
Once he was delicately arranged in a firm upright posture, Jean-Claude allowed his visitors in.
Don Angelo had come dressed to impress, wearing so many layers of fine purple silk and brocade that Jean-Claude wagered he’d doubled his thickness. His mustaches were waxed in perfect spirals. The doctor, Esteban, was a middle-sized, middle-aged man dressed in maroon robes of a more functional cut, though of an especially fine material.
Both of them gave him respectful half bows. Jean-Claude replied in kind from his sitting position. “Please pardon me for not standing, gentlemen, but my leg is still weak.”
Esteban said, “I should imagine it is in agony.”
Jean-Claude swallowed his distaste for the man’s profession and got down to the business of this audience. “Not at all, thanks to you. Please allow me to apologize for my harsh words to you yesterday. I was quite out of my head with pain and worry for my princess, but that was no excuse for the unkindnesses I heaped upon you, and you, Your Grace.”
Don Angelo hesitated, as a man prepared to besiege a fortress might do upon finding the gates flung open in welcome. After a moment of thought in which he apparently found no irony lurking in the corners of Jean-Claude’s apology, he said, “Apology accepted, se?or musketeer. I must say I found your dedication to your task … compelling.”
“Indeed.” Esteban smiled and a half-dozen concentric laugh lines rippled away from his white teeth. “Different people react differently to pain. It turns some men into babies, but it only makes you mad. You have the heart of a lion.”
Jean-Claude liked Esteban better already. Yes, he was a doctor, but that wasn’t necessarily his fault. Some jobs were inherited—like fulling or dung gathering; others involved apprenticeship at an early age. They weren’t duties people necessarily wanted or enjoyed, but they had to be done. Embrace the man, despise the mission; that was the key.
“I have something for you,” Esteban said.
“Not more medicine, I hope,” Jean-Claude said warily.
“Memento,” Esteban said. From his belt pouch, he flourished a small roll of silk that he unfurled to reveal a twisted, jagged piece of metal about the size and shape of Jean-Claude’s thumbnail. “This came out of your thigh. One inch to the left and it would have severed a major blood vessel. You are a very lucky lion.”
Jean-Claude rolled the lump of metal between his fingers, its jagged edges creasing his fingers. It was iron, forged and—“What’s this?” He stopped rolling the projectile and stared at its largest flat face. There were molded ridges on it. He stared at the pattern they made. It was incomplete but recognizable.
“What is what?” Esteban asked diffidently, as if Jean-Claude had just rudely pointed out a flaw in a guest gift.
Jean-Claude showed it to him. “Look at this. See the raised pattern? It’s a maker’s mark.”
Esteban’s brows lifted in curiosity. “I hadn’t noticed that.”
“Are you sure this is the piece that came out of my leg?”
“Oh yes, very sure. Why?”
“Because before that, it came out of the Aragothic royal armory.”
Don Angelo said, “That’s not entirely inexplicable. The armory distributes munitions to all the city’s artillery outposts. This bomb could have been stolen from any one of them.”
“True.” Jean-Claude leaned back in his chair. His mind kept trying to pounce on some vital clue that would lead him straight to Isabelle’s enemies, only to have his inspirations evaporate in a puff of logic. Perhaps it was only weird to his drug-fuzzed mind that every last clue seemed to point in a different direction immediately before it ceased to be a clue. So was there any place the clues didn’t point, or rather that they collectively pointed away from? Isabelle had a word for that, “trifangulation” or similar. It was hard enough to do that with sticks planted in the ground. With people who kept moving around, it would be impossible.
He said, “I don’t suppose the royal armory would respond kindly if I showed up and asked them if they were missing any mortar shells?”
“Probably not,” Don Angelo said stiffly.
Jean-Claude drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair and said, “Your Grace, may I trouble you for a crutch and a carriage?”
“Of course,” Don Angelo said. “May I inquire why?”
“Because I’m not fit to ride,” Jean Claude said. “And I want to have another look at that sharpshooter’s nest.”
*
By the time Jean-Claude’s chaise pulled up in front of the bomb-scarred building, pain had reclaimed his leg, and he had exhausted his supply of invective on whatever misbegotten soul had invented cobblestones. As good as the undercarriage springs were, and as slow as the cautious driver had been, he still felt as if someone had been hammering on his thigh with a red-hot tenderizer. For a long moment, he just sat in the soft, upholstered seat—this was a royal chaise—eyes closed, contemplating amputation. Perhaps the surgeon’s saving his leg had been the cruel thing to do.
But, no, this pain was temporary … he hoped. Esteban said he should heal nicely, if he didn’t overexert himself—if he didn’t do his duty. Don Angelo had suggested he send someone else to examine the building, but who else could he trust? Who else would know what to look for? Breaker’s breath, even Jean-Claude didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, or even that he would recognize it if he found it. That was why he had to do the looking.
He opened his eyes and stared up at the half-stone building. A large chunk of the wall was missing, and the edges of the hole were scorched and ragged, like old scabs.