The Virgin's Spy (Tudor Legacy #2)(34)

“Teaching her to stretch her mind, rather. At this age, it doesn’t much matter how it’s stretched, as long as she absorbs the tenets of how to learn. Then she can turn her mind to whatever she wishes in future.”

“And is this your wish? Being married to a man four times your age? Being exiled to a backwater country far away from all you’ve known?”

Maisie’s smile was all youth and openness. “No one in this world, man or woman, always gets everything the way they want when they want. A wise person takes to any circumstance with an open mind.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to become a military tactician?” Ailis laughed. “I think you’d do very well planning field maneuvers.”

“I don’t think battlefields are to my taste.” Maisie, too, laughed. “Too dirty.”

Only much later that night did Ailis suspect that she had been neatly deflected.

—

Christmas Day passed quietly in church service and subdued feasting. If Stephen had been capable of feeling glad, he would have been glad to have Lucie there for the feast. Left to himself, he wouldn’t have known what to say or how to behave with his household and their families, but Lucie could be charming when she wished, and Julien never seemed to have any trouble talking to people. It made his own reticence barely noticeable, Stephen decided. He’d never been at Farleigh Castle for Christmas before, so it wasn’t as though his people had any great expectations of what he would do.

In the days that followed, Stephen accepted Julien’s offer to train with him and strengthen the left arm that had been broken. Julien was good, in an eccentric, street-fighting manner grounded in the essential principles, a style Stephen had not encountered before. He could also be demanding. “One has to know the rules before one can break them,” Julien explained.

It was the second day of January, glassy cold and clear in the practice yard, when Stephen realized that, for the last half hour, his mind had been blessedly silent while his body twisted and lunged and broke many of the rules his father had taught him about fighting. He was not yet as adept at switching hands as Julien, but his broken arm no longer ached—or at least no more than the rest of him did after a demanding bout.

But in that very moment of noticing his quiet mind, a thought tumbled out clear and mocking: This would have been a useful skill in Ireland.

Stephen stumbled. Julien’s sword came at him from the left and he parried it, but then he could hardly see and it didn’t feel like he was in his own practice yard any longer, but in a landscape wasted beyond repair, and then there was the stink and taste of blood, so thick in his throat he gagged, and men were dying and women…not even women, really, just girls they were…and two boys who would never grow up…and he couldn’t get to them to stop it, there were too many in his way…

He came back to himself trying to fight free of the men who held him back. His own men, he slowly realized, restraining him from attacking, not an enemy, but his sister’s husband. Julien’s sword pointed out and away at the ground with his hands spread wide as though approaching a spooked horse.

Julien was speaking. Just one word, over and over. “Stephen,” he said softly. “Stephen.”

Stephen met his eyes and forced his clenched hand to open and allow the sword to drop. Julien jerked his chin, and the men holding Stephen released him. “Stephen,” Julien said warily once more.

But Stephen didn’t stay to hear the rest. He bolted from the practice yard. It was a flight of another kind he made now, a flight from his senses, pursued by the cries of the dead, but even when he slammed shut the door to his chamber they wouldn’t stop. He tried to pour wine into a glass but the bottle slipped from his hands and smashed on the floor.

He crouched instinctively to clean it up. But his hands seemed divorced from his thoughts. Instead of carefully picking up one shard at a time, his fingers clenched themselves around the broken glass. He could feel each prick, each edge, each jagged piece where it tore into his skin. And where it pierced his hands, there was an almost physical sense of relief. Like bedding a woman, he thought hazily, only pain rather than pleasure.

He loosed his hands, letting the shards fall, then picked up the longest, sharpest piece of glass he could find. Standing, he contemplated his arms, and imagined the relief of one long cut rather than dozens of small pricks. He breathed in…

And from behind him, a strong hand clamped onto his wrist.

“Don’t,” Julien said quietly.

They held like that for a seeming eternity.

“Don’t,” Julien repeated.

Stephen dropped the glass. Julien let go and Stephen swung round to face him. “Aren’t you going to ask me what the hell I think I’m doing?” At least the interruption had served to subdue the noise in his head.

“I know what you were doing. Having spent weeks drinking to dull the pain, that remedy has begun to lose its power. At the same time, you have your sister—who knows and loves you too well—living entirely too close and with entirely too much natural curiosity. And so the pain and guilt are beginning to spill out of the cracks in your control and maybe, you think, just maybe if you widen those cracks in your very skin, the pain and guilt will pour out enough to give you relief and let you breathe.”

Stephen turned his back. He would not let Julien get to him. No one could get to him.