Jean-Claude felt as if he had been harpooned, a massive pronged barb pierced straight through his chest. No. No. Not this. He laid Olivia down and scrambled for the doors. Strong hands grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to spin him around. “Monsieur, wait! You can’t go in there.”
“Unhand me!” Jean-Claude turned and rammed his fist into DuJournal’s groin. The mathematician fell with a yelp, and Jean-Claude hurtled through the doorway. Black smoke, stinking of scorching meat and burning wood, enveloped his face, choking and blinding him. He dropped to his hands and knees. Beneath the smoky pall, a dozen figures lay sprawled in death, suffocated or trampled. Jean-Claude crawled past them. Flame filled the corridor beyond the foyer, greedy worms of heat gnawing on the wood. Tapestries blazed and sheets of flame danced across the carpets. The heat broiled Jean-Claude’s face like dragon’s breath.
“Isabelle!” he cried, and the smoke reached down his lungs. No! Not her. Please, Builder, not her. Take me!
Something grabbed Jean-Claude’s feet and hauled him backward. His face scraped along the floor. “Princess,” he gasped, “Isabelle!” He tried to kick his way free, but his legs did not avail him. Cool air seared his lungs as he was dragged into the courtyard and pinned fast. Several people piled on top of him as greedy fingers of fire claimed the entire residence as their own.
*
The fire burned for a day and a night before the royal and city fire brigades managed to put it out. To add insult to grievous injury, the sky unleashed rain three hours after the blaze was extinguished, and the downpour hadn’t abated in the three days since.
Wrapped in heavy oilskins, and accompanied by DuJournal, Jean-Claude hobbled in numb desperation through the wreckage of the residence. The building had been reduced to a blackened shell. Bits of the outside wall remained upright, but the whole interior had collapsed down to the ground. Recovery crews worked day and night, clearing a path to where Isabelle’s chamber had been, but progress was slow. So far, fifty bodies had been recovered from the massive building. The fire had spread so fast that few escaped.
Jean-Claude had inspected all the bodies recovered so far. The worst of them were unrecognizable, charred husks curled into fetal balls, but none of their clawed hands had Isabelle’s distinguishing digit.
Jean-Claude staggered through a muddy black slurry of ash and debris, picking his way carefully around broken timbers and splashing into holes where the stone floor had cracked from the heat. Before she died, Olivia had managed to convey that she had been looking for Isabelle, but when she opened the door to Isabelle’s chamber, the room had exploded.
Adel, still abed with the drowning lung from the smoke, had described a blast like a bomb that had thrown Olivia across the room. “It all happened so fast,” she wheezed. “There was an explosion and then suddenly the whole world was on fire. Isabelle’s room looked like the inside of a forge.”
And then Jean-Claude had gone back to losing his mind. He’d stood on the porch of the infirmary in the rain and slowly ripped his fancy, soot-stained musketeer’s uniform into shreds, strip after strip, until those threads that remained were too small even to be used as bandages. A musketeer was all he’d ever been. He’d been so proud. Of the king’s blessing, of raising Isabelle, of being too damned clever by half. What damned good had it been? What a fool. What an ass. Why her and not me? When there were nothing left but shreds, he threw the sodden tangle in the gutter with the rest of the filth.
Yet nobody had said Isabelle was dead. Nobody dared. They hadn’t found her body—until an hour ago they hadn’t even found anything from her room—and until they did, the forlorn shadow of hope remained, a whisper against a howling gale of despair.
Amongst the courtiers, accusations of blame had begun to fly. When something like this happened, someone had to be blamed, but nobody wanted to be the one accused, and the best way to avoid that was to accuse someone else. Several members of Queen Margareta’s faction tried to pin fault on Jean-Claude—where had the musketeer been when Isabelle was attacked? Out carousing, no doubt—and only Lord DuJournal’s persistent defense had kept him from being thrown in a dungeon on an accusation of murder.
Not that disgrace mattered anymore. Jean-Claude had failed his master, his child—the child of his heart if not his loins—his maker, and his soul all at once, and he hadn’t even managed to acquire a fatal wound doing it.
In the end, he had only one duty left to perform. To find her, and to find the one who had done this. To wrap his fingers around the villain’s throat and hurl him from the sky cliffs.
On the fourth day after the fire, with DuJournal at his side, Jean-Claude splashed into what was left of Isabelle’s bedroom. He did not know why the imposter accompanied him—what purpose could Jean-Claude serve for him now?—but he was glad for the company.
The area underneath the princess’s chamber was only now being uncovered by salvage teams being overseen by Don Angelo. Standing under a military rain tarp, surrounded by aides de camp, in the midst of the soggy destruction, the gray-haired nobleman looked like a field commander on the battlefield of the damned.
Jean-Claude ducked under the overhanging canvas and doffed his soaking hat. “Your Grace, may we join you?”
“Of course,” he said solemnly. He offered wine, which neither accepted, and then said, “I am grieved. Princess Isabelle seemed a very worthy woman.”
Jean-Claude had thought he had no tears left, which didn’t account for why he had to fight back a fresh wave of them. Enough. “She was that and more.” His voice was rough, and not just because of the smoke damage. “By your leave, we would like to witness the recovery.”
“Of course,” Don Angelo said.
As they turned away DuJournal whispered to Jean-Claude, “Did you know his daughter was once destined to be Príncipe’s Julio’s bride?”
Jean-Claude hesitated, planting his walking stick in a puddle. “Lady Sonya?”
“No, no. This was years ago. When Príncipe Julio was an infant, he was betrothed to Do?a Angelina, who was a year his senior. She was sickly for years and finally died about two years ago. “
Another woman murdered. Jean-Claude shook off the assertion as baseless. Sometimes people got sick and died; he had seen it many times. Besides, even if she had been killed, what good did it do him to know it? He had failed his charge.
“Your Grace!” came a cry from the work site. Two dozen wet burly men had stopped hoisting fallen beams and clearing away rubble. They clustered around a pile of wreckage near what once had been her writing desk, and the foreman called again, his voice strained between excitement and horror. “Your Grace, I think you ought to have a look at this.”
To Jean-Claude’s mind, that could only mean one horrible thing, and he limped into the space where the room had been with a sick anticipation.