Seraphim

“Now, pray tell what it is you do not like besides this new coif with which you’ve gifted me?”

Sera slowed Gryphon and Baldwin sidled up beside her. His pale blond lashes were frosted with tiny icicles. “What you have become,” he said boldly. “What you are becoming. This is not you, Seraphim. You have killed two men—”

“I know what I have done.” She heeled Gryphon in the flank and the gelding clopped two paces ahead of the squire. “It is what is necessary,” she called back, the deep grit in her voice gifting her with an authority more suited to a man. “I am adapting. A week ago my soul was torn to shreds and stolen away by Lucifer de Morte. With that evil triumph in hand he stole my family’s souls, as well. I will not rest until I can reclaim what was taken from me. An eye for an eye, squire.”

Gryphon dug heavy hooves into the snow and pounded ahead, leaving the shivering squire in a wake of fine, diamond-glittering particles of winter.

An eye for an eye, indeed. Seraphim d’Ange had changed drastically upon the entrance of the New Year. A change Baldwin could attribute to the surprise attack laid on her father’s home, and all she had suffered from such.

But she was wrong about her stolen soul. The woman still possessed a soul. The evidence of such blazed brightly in her pale blue eyes, and in the fire that lit her path toward the ultimate goal. Mayhaps it had been damaged, for it had been stripped and beaten and bruised by that bastard Lucifer de Morte, the leader of the de Morte demons.

Was Seraphim d’Ange’s soul beyond repair?

Baldwin prayed not. For she would need a soul intact to battle the devil himself.

Tor’s breaths powdered the air before his gray suede nose. Dominique San Juste spied a village just ahead, settled like a giant’s stone tossed amidst a thatch of forest. A fortuitous discovery, for he was weary, peckish, and he’d already once caught himself dozing.

He knew Tor would not stop should his master fall in a dead sleep to the soft pillowing of fresh-fallen snow. Dominique imagined the elegant white Boulonnais might be waiting for that very incident. The stallion would suddenly notice the loss of weight upon its back and, without pause, pick up into a gallop and be off, never to be seen again.

He leaned forward and gave Tor a reassuring smooth across his withers, then scratched the sensitive spot just below his long feathery mane. “Not yet, my fine one. When this mission is complete, I promise you the freedom you desire. You have served me well over the years; you deserve as much. Mayhaps we shall someday find that which has been lost to you?”

In response, Tor lifted his head and tamped the air with his nose. At the stamp of an agreeing hoof, spray of snow sifted up, coating Dominique’s face with a fine kiss of January cold.

Unseasonable, this heavy snowfall. And the frigid chill. There was something amiss in this fine and darkened moon-glittered world. Since the morn of the New Year, Dominique had felt the odd fissure between nature and the mortal realm. But he could not explain it any more than he could reason his acceptance of this bizarre quest he now found himself embarked upon.

One final mission and then he, too, would find the freedom he desired. The Oracle had promised as much. If that is what the ghostly figment of an innocent-faced boy who had been appearing to him over the past few years really was. Could be a damned ghost, for all Dominique knew. Didn’t resemble any child—living or dead—he had known. Oracle was as good a title as any.

Leaning forward once again Dominique smoothed his palm over the bald spot on Tor’s forehead, reassuring in a manner he knew Tor understood. Perfectly round, the wound never did heal, though it did neither fester. It merely remained pink and moist, as if waiting. Waiting to become whole once again.

“We both seek wholeness,” Dominique whispered, then straightened, and closed his eyes.

Another battle last night. Mastema de Morte had been executed; his troops had retreated behind the safety of twelve-foot-wide battlements. Word told that a mysterious knight clad in black armor had arrived midcombat. Deftly, he’d woven his way through the clashing, battling men, right up to Mastema de Morte. One swift blow had cut through leather coif and flesh and bone to sever the man’s head from his neck. That done, the black knight had turned his mighty black steed and galloped away in the same mysterious manner that he had appeared.

He’d done the same less than a week ago, when Satanas de Morte had laid siege to Corbeil for no more reason beyond boredom and the need to see fresh blood purl down the groove in his sword.

The black knight sounded more myth than legend to Dominique. But he was not the man to dispute the tale. Especially not in these troubled times, when the common man needed a vision of heroics to cling to in the face of certain death.

’Twas rumored the de Mortes served the English king who occupied Paris in his never-ending attempts to possess French soil. The French king, Charles VII, who had been crowned but two years ago thanks to the ill-fated Jeanne d’Arc, had yet to banish all the English from Burgundian France. After almost a century of fighting, these were surely the blackest years yet.

But at this moment in time Dominique did not care for any man other than himself. He was on a mission. The finding of this legend.

Tor’s lead took them dangerously close to the prickles of a bushy gorse. Dominique’s spur caught up on the spiny branches that splayed out over the path. At contact, a cloud of iridescent particles coruscated into the air.

Dominique eased Tor to a stop and dismounted. “Not at all favorable,” he muttered, as he slapped at his left calf with a leather-gloved palm. The platelets scaling the back of his gauntlet chinked with the motion. “It’s been too long.” Another slap released a generous cloud of glitter from his lower leg. The accursed dust permeated all clothing, even his leather boots and braies.

A few stamps of his feet and finally, the last of the renegade particles dispersed. It besprinkled the ground and lay upon the moonlit snow like diamond dust.

He had to be cautious. Dominique was destined for the first tavern that offered fire and food. It wouldn’t do to wander in and seat himself in a dark corner only to begin to coruscate.

Then rationality overtook peevishness. Anger served no man but to draw him farther away from his own soul. Besides, anger was for the dawn.

Drawing in a deep breath of icy air, Dominique lifted his face to the eerie white moon sitting low and fat in the sky. It hung as if a pearl framed between the black iron latticework of a twisted, leafless elm. Midnight. ’Twas the time of the faeries.

The first time he’d ever heard that phrase—the time of the faeries—Dominique had been nursing watered ale in an ash-dusted tavern, sharing a table with a grizzle-bearded old man. With a bristle of his shoulders, and a hearty swallow of his own ale, the man had then nodded toward the door, where the moonlight seeped through cracks in the boards. “’Tis the time of the faeries,” he’d said, as if imparting great wisdom.

And so, Dominique had walked outside, lifted his face to the moon, and had decided that indeed midnight and all its mysterious darkness was a time of magick.

“The stroke of midnight finds the Dragon of the Dawn at his weakest,” Dominique muttered now. He closed his eyes and drew upon the moon’s glow as if it were the sun and cast beams of heat upon his face. “Avoid the dawn. Triumph beneath the moon.”

Seeking to break the cold silence that had settled between the two of them since he’d inadvertently mentioned Sera’s new coif was rather ugly, Baldwin hiked a heel to his mount’s side, and came upon Gryphon. “’Tis magical, no?”

“What? Your amazing ability to irritate?”

“No, my lady, the air, the sky, the—why the moment. Look all around, the moon glimmering upon the snow. ’Tis as if the faeries have danced about and laid their magical dust over all.”

“Speak not to me of the foul creatures,” she snapped.

“Foul—you mean—faeries?”

“There shall be no more talk of such.”

“Very well.” Baldwin smoothed a palm across the saddle pommel. That attempt at lightening the mood had gone over about as well as a cow tiptoeing through a pottery shop.

“They are mischievous, evil creatures,” Sera muttered.

Evil? He’d always thought faeries rather whimsical, fey things. Course, should the abbe Belloc discover he had such thoughts—well, it mattered not anymore. That dream had been dashed on the eve of the New Year.

Baldwin pressed his mount faster so he could hear Sera’s quiet words. She did not pay heed to her own request for silence. “When I was twelve my mother gave birth to my sister, Gossamer.”

He’d not known the d’Anges had another daughter. When Sera was twelve? That would have been, hmm…right around the time Elsbeth d’Ange had taken ill.

“Gossamer was but one month in the cradle when the faeries stole into my mother’s solar under the blackness of midnight and made the switch. A changeling they laid in the soft nest of silk and down where once my sister had cooed.”

Baldwin cringed at Sera’s dour recitation of the word, changeling. The mere thought of such a beast curdled a shiver from his spine up to his earlobes. Everyone knew changelings were hideous, sickly things; far from whimsical.

“The creature lived but a day. My mother was not the same after that. She grieved in silence, would but utter few words. She closed herself from others. I could see her limbs literally begin to curl in on themselves. Until finally she was so crippled she could not take up a needle or even walk without assistance. ’Twas then I took over her duties as chatelaine.”

“I’m so sorry,” Baldwin said, meaning it, and wishing he’d never tried to brighten the mood. Brighten? He’d just snuffed out any light that had existed. There was much he did not know about Seraphim d’Ange.

“No more mention of faeries?”

“Most certainly not—” A glimmer of steel flashed in the squire’s peripheral view. “What is that yonder?”

They came upon a lone rider dismounted at the edge of Pontoise. Moonlight poured over the sharp angles of his face and glittered in the plush snowflakes capping his shoulders.

Sera did quick reconnaissance of the man. Leather jerkin and braies, a grand black wool cloak ornamented with metallic-black stones around the collar. Hematite, she knew, a stone that quickened the blood. A two-handed battle sword and dagger glinted at his hip, both of simple design, with brown suede wrapped about each hilt.

No doubt a knight—no, his spurs were steel, not gold. Perhaps he was a mercenary, looking for his next purse.