“Or he may not.”

“If he does not, then when I…in a little while, we can return to the wharf and contact him from there. He should be able to assist us, or at least give us an update.”

Yeah, as long as we manage to avoid evisceration first, I didn’t say, because it wouldn’t have helped. “But until then we’re on our own.”

“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.

“It worked a little differently for the women,” he reminded me. “Particularly in France.”

“The good old double standard.”

“Oui. Most of the noblemen had mistresses, the kings even official ones. But their women were expected to be pure as new-fallen snow.”

“And when they weren’t, they pretended.”

“And removed the evidence.”

I looked at the evidence, and wondered how anyone had ever found him a burden. “That sucks.”

He reached past me for the wine, a ripple of fine muscle under finer skin. “Not…entirely. But my birth did make me stand out.”

“How did anybody know?”

He shrugged. “Rumors had spread of a fine lady who came to see me, all muffled up, a few times when I was a child. And then there was the money that was sent, every month, to pay for my schooling. It was thought that I was being educated for a reason, and that someday I would be summoned. And go away.”

“And the girls didn’t want to go away with a handsome sort-of prince?”

“It was not a matter of what they wanted. Their fathers had put the fear of God into them. For the best, as it turned out.”

He didn’t elaborate, but he didn’t have to. I knew what that was like, to live with a group but never really be part of it. To have people find you useful but also strange, foreign. To have them automatically exclude you, suspect you, dismiss you. To stop talking when you came near, not because it was anything important, not even because they were afraid you might tell someone.

But because you were different.

What was weird was to think that somebody like Louis-Cesare knew it, too.

I glanced around the unprepossessing little shed again. And wondered about the young man who would remember a place like this so vividly, and for so many years. And about the foolish, foolish girls who had gone off with someone else.

And turned back to find him watching me again.

He was lying in a beam of firelight leaking around the side of the mostly missing wall. It was bathing that part of the room in an eerie ginger twilight. It bathed him, too, haloing his hair, darkening his eyes, warming his skin to damp golden velvet. I licked wine off my lips and watched his eyes follow the movement.

“Is there a reason you brought me here?” I finally asked.

“As living beings we stand out against the background of the memories we visit,” he said softly. “To someone gifted in the arts of the mind, it is as if we were in color and everyone else in black and white. But the more we sink into a memory, the better we blend in. If we sink far enough, Mircea thinks it may allow us to appear as part of the background, and so be overlooked.”

“That was option number three,” I guessed.

He nodded.

I drank wine. “And how do we do this fade thing, exactly?”

“I…did not have time to get complete instructions.” I looked at him. “Or any,” he admitted.

“But you have an idea.”

He finished his own wine in one long swallow. And then he got up and bowed slightly. And damned if he didn’t pull off courtly despite being dirty and half naked and covered with hay.

“If you allow, I would be honored to show you.”

And he held out a hand.

I stared at it.

An hour ago, I wouldn’t even have hesitated. An hour ago, I’d have just said no. Because it was what I always said, what I’d always had to say. So I wouldn’t hurt anybody, so I wouldn’t get hurt myself. No, you can’t have that person; no, you can’t stay in that town; no, you can’t live that life.

No, no, no.

An hour ago, I’d have reminded myself that I wasn’t going to be with someone who was with me for the wrong reasons, and whose life I was likely to screw up to a gigantic degree. I’d have pointed out that we probably didn’t even need to do this, because I’d been along for that crazy ride and I couldn’t have re-created it, so how could she? I’d have told myself to relax, to have another drink, to wait for Mircea to work his magic.

But things had changed in that hour, hadn’t they?

I’d gone from thinking I might someday find a way to conquer my demon, to having it almost conquer me. From struggling to finally get my life together, to watching it all fall apart. From yearning to be alone in my skin, to wondering if I was about to live my oldest nightmare, trapped in a prison of my own mind, unable to get out, to stop her, to—

From having a future, to living on borrowed time.

And suddenly a lot of things didn’t seem so important anymore.

I stared at the hand. It was fine-boned for such a large man, long-fingered and slender. A fencer’s hand, if there was such a thing, a duelist’s hand. Louis-Cesare’s hand. Waiting. Offering…

A chance that might never come again.

I drained my wine. Screw it. I’d had a lifetime of no. And can’t, and shouldn’t and don’t. I was sick of no. Tonight, just for once, I wanted a little—

“Yes,” I told him, and locked my fingers with his.

Chapter Thirty-seven

I thought the whole standing and bowing thing was just Louis-Cesare being, well, Louis-Cesare. But no. He grabbed the carafe of wine and the blanket and out the missing door we went. Jehan gave me a knowing smile as we passed, like he’d seen it all before. And then we were through the trees and into the next field, and up a gentle incline carpeted with clover.

The Milky Way was a river of silver overhead, glittering in between dark clouds laced with distant lightning. The clover was soft and cool, and so thick we could have left the blanket behind. The dancers were still flickering around the fire, orange-red shadows on the hill above us, like darker flames. But I thought there might be fewer of them.

Like we weren’t the only ones to slip away into the night.

But the musicians seemed to have gotten a second wind, or possibly a second barrel, and were really going at it, pounding out a throbbing beat that made the stars seem to pulse, the flames to leap, the shadows to jump, as if the whole hillside were dancing. It reminded me of that night in Claire’s garden, only that had been fey magic. And whatever was here tonight…was not.

Primal, earthy, human, there was nothing otherworldly about it. Or even necessarily magical, at least not in the way humans defined it. But I knew better. The people here were glorying in the simple things: not grand mansions and fine clothes, but food in their bellies, the taste of new wine on their lips, and a lover beside them, under them.