Page 10 of Sea of Love

She applied more of the concoction to her toes. “I stumbled through a fire. The salve is odorous, so I brought it out here.”

The stink that came from the bowl did make his stomach turn, but then he noticed the condition of the skirt wadded around her dimpled knees.

“Your clothes are not singed.”

“I did not linger in the flames,” she said and set aside the bowl. Then she picked up a strip of cloth she had torn from her head drape. “Floronius has a rain barrel, but it is almost empty and filled with wigglers. You should use the public fountain at the end of the street.” She began winding the strip around her toes.

“You cannot wear sandals while you are healing,” Shelton said. He sat down and began unlacing his boots. “The burns will fester.”

Elettra uttered a laugh that made his belly clench despite the unpleasant needling of the cilice wound around his thigh and the stench of her poultice.

“Of course they will not. By morning I will be healed. All F…female Wiccans are quick to mend.”

Shelton had already picked up on how often the little witch had to correct herself. She’d also called larvae wigglers just now, a word that had fallen out of use long ago. Wiccans preferred to live as they had in the past, but this wench seemed to have skipped entirely the modern centuries. Or perhaps she had come from a place too remote to take notice of the changes brought on by mortal inventions and industry.

“You will wear my boots,” he told her as he took them off. “Stuff them with cloth to make them fit.”

When he handed the boots to her, she tossed them into the flames. “As I told you, I will not.”

The fire began to smoke as the leather burned. Shelton rose to his now-bare feet and strode away from her. Another Templar might have clouted her for her insolence, but he did not fear his temper. The very reason he had been imprisoned had been due to his cowardly lack of it.

Shelton walked down to the public fountain to fill his jug, and stared at the burbling stream pouring from a carved fish’s mouth. The passage of time had not dulled the memories of his betrayal of the order. The morning his battalion had ridden into the Scottish highlands to rid them of heathens remained bright and crisp in his head. As the best tracker Shelton took point, and easily found the signs that led them through a winding passage to a concealed croft.

The reports of the vicious attacks by Wiccans on mortals had been grim. He had expected the battle to be fierce, even fatal. Yet when they arrived at the coven’s hiding place, it appeared no more than some rough huts clustered around a thriving garden. The men and women who tried to flee them carried no weapons. Only when struck did they cast their spells. Two Templars died burning alive with strange green fire, but the witch who cast the deadly spell was struck from behind and fell dead at Shelton’s feet.

“Find where they have hidden their spawn,” his commander had told him.

The task put to Shelton had proved simple. He followed the faint sounds of weeping to a ditch behind one of the hovels. In it crouched a dozen children. Some held infants clutched in their arms. When their eyes beheld him they all went silent. Shelton reached for his sword hilt, and then let his hand fall away. He had done much that had disgusted him while serving the one, true God, but this he could not do.

“Take them into the forest and hide,” he told the oldest boy. When the lad did not move he hoisted him out of the ditch. “Now, before the rest come.”

The boy looked past him, and Shelton turned around to find his commander drawing his blade.

“They are but children, my lord.”

“They are the get of the devil,” the older Templar spat, and shoved him aside. He lifted his arm to strike, and then stiffened and looked down at the sword that had punched through his chest.

“Go,” Shelton shouted at the boy.

The Wiccan children climbed out of the ditch, and scattered among the trees. By the time the commander’s aide came they were gone. Shelton stood over his superior’s corpse.

“This is your blade,” the aide said after jerking it from the commander’s body. “You killed him? Why?”

Nothing could be said in his defense. Shelton had spared the enemy. He sat down beside the dead man and bowed his head, waiting for the blow that would end him.

It never came.

Shelton kept waiting to die as he was beaten by his comrades. Even tortured by the inquisitors, life held him tightly in its claws. By the time they imprisoned him in the catacombs beneath Rome he realized they were making an example of him by allowing him to live. The empty cell built in the funerary tunnel contained not a single thing he could use to end his life. When he tried to starve himself, the guards held him down and fed him through a tube. Bashing his head against the bars of his cell earned him weeks of hanging from a hook by his bound wrists. Even taunting the guards with the vilest of insults resulted in a ruthless whipping, but still alive. Decades passed until time ceased to have meaning. But then the Grand Master himself had come to offer Shelton a bargain: betrayal again, but this time of the Wiccans.

The silly, unattractive witch could rile Shelton as much as she liked. It would make no difference to him. When their mission ended she and the others would die, and the crystals would purchase his freedom. He could not spend the rest of eternity surrounded by the bones of long-dead mortals. Even if he and Bowers failed, he intended to fall on his sword.

“Shelton.”

He turned around to see the little witch holding his boots, which were not burned. “What is this? More heathen trickery?”

“As it happens, yes,” she said and dropped them at his feet and hobbled back inside.

When Shelton returned to his room he found Bowers standing by the window overlooking the courtyard.