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“No,” she grudgingly admitted. The problem was, with this stupid curse, he seemed to think that the simplest things were outside his power when clearly they were not—taking a stroll in the daylight, for example, or eating a decent meal. “I suppose not.” She pulled the key out of her pocket. “Come inside and have some food while I explain.”
“I’m not hungry,” he answered, sitting down on the steps. “Give the key to Orlando, and you can explain right here.”
Now he was just being stubborn—just like a man, she thought. “Very well.” She held out the key to the wizard. “Here, Orlando.”
“Thank you, my lady,” he said, taking it. “But perhaps I should listen as well.”
“Why?” Simon said. “Can Orlando assist me in my task, my lady?” He wasn’t even looking at her now, just sitting on the steps and glaring across the courtyard— pouting, she would have called it if he hadn’t been a man full-grown.
“Not really,” she admitted, giving Orlando a smile. “Go on, master wizard. I promise he won’t be long.”
“Yes, go,” Simon ordered. He looked back at Orlando and managed a ghost of a smile of his own. “I think I can manage if she tries to throw me out.”
“I don’t want to throw you out,” she said as the dwarf left them alone. She hovered over him for a moment, then sat down on the step beside him, apparently oblivious to her gown. “I want you to stay.”
“That’s a comfort,” he muttered, unable to help himself. He could be managing this problem a great deal better, he knew, with a great deal more diplomacy. But he couldn’t seem to reason past her saying she would send him packing if he didn’t do as he was told.
“Simon… there is no Black Knight.” She was turned toward him slightly with one leg tucked beneath her so that when he looked up, their eyes met. “Or rather, he is no demon. He is a man, an old man, one of my father’s old retainers. His name is Brautus— you saw him yourself a little while ago before you left.” She paused as if waiting for him to speak, but he said nothing—he had already deduced this much on his own. “Ever since my father died, he has been pretending to be the Black Knight to drive off men who want to marry me and claim Charmot, not because he is evil but because I asked him to do it.”
“Why?” He turned toward her as well. “Why don’t you want to be married?”
“I don’t… that doesn’t matter.” She looked away, unable to face him, thinking of what Susannah had said before. “The point is, Brautus is old, and he’s been injured. If you had come to challenge him, if you had been the man we thought you were when you and Orlando arrived, you would have beaten him—you probably would have killed him.” She shivered, the night air suddenly cold. “And that man is still coming, a brigand named Michel. He said he would defeat the Black Knight and claim Charmot because he was stronger and more wicked than any demon in hell.”
“He told you this?” Simon asked with a slight smile. Having met Michel, he could believe it. “I am near to acquiring a castle,” the villain had said when he wanted to purchase Orlando. He must have meant Charmot.
“He told everybody,” Isabel answered. “I never saw him; none of us here did, but we had word he was coming from Father Colin, the priest at the Chapel of Saint Joseph, the church where I went today. Michel and his men were supposed to be taking lodging there the night before you came here, then coming here to challenge the Black Knight the next day. But he never came. You came instead.”
“I call that good fortune,” he joked, hating the fear he could hear in her voice, wanting to drive it away.
“But where did he go?” she persisted. “I went to the church to ask Father Colin, and he said he’d never seen Michel. He acted as if he didn’t even remember coming here to tell me about him.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t remember,” Simon said, silently cursing himself. He was the one who had made the old priest forget, not realizing what the end result might be. In truth, this was all his fault. “Perhaps this Michel never went to the church; perhaps he changed his mind about coming to Charmot.”
“I don’t think so,” she answered, shaking her head. “Something happened at the church, something terrible. Father Colin either would not or could not tell me what it was, but I’m positive Michel was there. Someone broke down the gate and spilled blood on the floor of the chapel. And there was something else.” She reached into her pocket and took out the cross she had found in the churchyard. “I found this outside the chapel, half buried in a patch of mud.” She held it out to Simon, but he didn’t take it. “I think it was a grave, Simon, an unblessed grave.”
“Why would you think that, sweetheart?” he said, forcing his voice to sound even and calm. He had even managed not to recoil from the cross, though he doubted he could keep up that pretense much longer. He had trained himself to face the cross in all its guises long enough to fool the priests who protected much of the records of the Chalice, but the sight still caused him pain and would grow worse the longer it was before him.
“The grass was all torn away, and the ground was soft,” she explained. He was still staring at the cross, but he made no move to touch it. “This looked as if someone had dropped it in haste and stepped on it.”
“I think your imagination may have gotten away with you, cousin,” he said with laugh. “More likely your Father Colin started planting cabbages and forgot what he was doing halfway through. He probably dropped this himself.” He closed her hand around the cross to put it out of his sight, and a sudden flash of heat passed through his flesh into hers. “You said yourself, he forgot he had come to see you,” he went on as if he had felt nothing. “How old is Father Colin?”
“Old,” she admitted. “But he’s always been quite clear in his mind before.” She looked at Simon, searching his face. Had he not felt the frisson of fire that had passed between their hands? “This thing feels cursed,” she said aloud, holding up the cross again for a moment before stuffing it back into her pocket. “But I know you think I am a silly girl.”
“No, I do not.” In truth, he was horrified to hear how wise she was, how much of the truth she had guessed. But how was that possible? He had buried Michel himself, and the villain’s cross had been around his thick, broken neck. He had hidden all three graves very carefully, replacing the turf down to the last blade of grass. All three had been together, yet Isabel spoke of seeing only one. And somehow the cross had found its way to the surface. “I think you have had a very difficult day,” he said, barely thinking of what he was saying, the only possible answer to the puzzle making him feel sick. “First Father Colin acting so strangely, then seeing that dead woman, then encountering the wolf in the woods. Tom and Raymond both said you were very brave.”
“Why, because I didn’t have hysterics?” she said with a wry smile. “Someone was killed at the chapel, Simon; I’m certain of it, and Father Colin saw it. Someone was murdered and buried, and I’m certain Michel must have done it.”
“Michel,” he repeated, making himself smile. “The phantom knight who never appeared at Charmot.” The villain Simon himself had apparently made immortal.
“Yes,” she insisted. “He and his men must have killed someone in front of Father Colin right in front of the altar—that must have driven him mad.”
“Isabel,” Simon began, trying to calm her.
“And that woman who was killed,” she went on, becoming more agitated instead. “What wolf would be so cruel as to rip out the heart of its prey? A man did that, an evil, hateful man.” She looked up at him with eyes now wild with fright. “And he wants Charmot. He wants to come here, to defeat the Black Knight and claim my father’s castle. I don’t care about myself, Simon, I swear.”
“Darling, please—”
“If I thought I could save Charmot by not fighting him, that he would be satisfied with just me, I would meet him in the road,” she plunged on desperately, all of the thoughts and fears she had hidden for so long pouring out in a single rush. “But he doesn’t really want me at all; he’s never even seen me. He wants my father’s castle, and Brautus can’t stop him, not now.”
