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“Yes.”
Louis-Cesare rested his head against the wall, his eyes closing. And I ate in silence for a while, my thoughts going to all those back-to-back transitions he’d made. Which hadn’t been too healthy, but may have been worth it. My evil twin might have inherited Mircea’s mental gifts, but how much experience could she have had chasing people through somebody else’s memories?
Maybe we were okay.
Maybe we’d lost her.
Or maybe she was just taking a while to follow the trail. How long had it taken her to show up on that ship? Ten minutes? Fifteen? I wasn’t sure. But I didn’t think it had been longer than that. And how many transitions had we made on the way here?
I did the math, and didn’t like the answer. I thought it had been six, maybe seven. I couldn’t be sure because the first few had been blurry. But that was close enough.
So say ten minutes apiece, or fifteen, assuming she wasn’t getting better with practice and shaving off time.…
I scowled.
I hoped Louis-Cesare rested up fast.
He was watching me when I looked up.
“So this was like May Day around here,” I said, to take my mind off it.
“Something like that,” he agreed.
Of course, in May, you had a nice pole to dance around, I thought, watching the shadows leap and whirl. A nice phallic symbol to piss off the church, which hadn’t liked the obvious symbolism. Or the fact that a large number of the local teens would be slipping off into the woods to celebrate the return of the earth’s fertility in the time-honored way.
But I guessed a bonfire and a vat of wine worked, too.
Louis-Cesare didn’t deny it. “There were a number of children with birthdays every year, nine months from now.”
I bet.
I took a sip of the wine I’d found in a pitcher that had somehow been overlooked. It was harsh, bright and tart in a way that modern wine never was, but packed with fall fruit that gave it a hint of sweetness. Like a French version of sangria. I liked it.
“And how often did you bring someone back here?” I asked, licking my lips.
“I didn’t.”
I looked at him over the cup, and raised a skeptical brow. Because sure.
“It is true,” he insisted.
“And how old were you?”
“Old enough.”
“Then why…”
He shrugged. “I was considered…different. No one knew the truth of my birth, but they knew that much. Most people guessed that I was some noble bastard who had been quietly removed from sight.”
“I thought most noble bastards were kept around, put to work.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Where did you hear that?”
“My own grandfather was born on the wrong side of the blanket,” I reminded him, in between crunching bread. It was good, coarse but crusty, and nutty with barely cracked grain. “And he did okay. Ended up as an errand runner for the Hungarian king, who loaned him an army to conquer the throne he couldn’t win by birth. So it all worked out.” I thought about it. “Well, for a while.”
“Ah, but he was a man’s bastard, yes?”
I nodded.
