The Space Between (Outlander, #7.5)(26)

“Why are you here?” Rakoczy blurted.

Ma?tre Raymond’s brows were black—surely they had been white thirty years ago? One of them lifted in puzzlement.

“I was told that you were looking for me, monsieur.” He spread his hands, the gesture graceful. “I came!”

“Thank you,” Rakoczy said dryly, beginning to regain some composure. “I meant—why are you in Paris?”

“Everyone has to be somewhere, don’t they? They can’t be in the same place.” This should have sounded like badinage but didn’t. It sounded serious, like a statement of scientific principle, and Rakoczy found it unsettling.

“Did you come looking for me?” he asked boldly. He moved a little, trying to get a better view of the man. He was nearly sure that the frog appeared younger than he had when last seen. Surely his flowing hair was darker, his step more elastic? A spurt of excitement bubbled in his chest.

“For you?” The frog seemed amused for a moment, but then the look faded. “No. I’m searching for a lost daughter.”

Rakoczy was surprised and disconcerted.

“Yours?”

“More or less.” Raymond seemed uninterested in explaining further. He moved a little to one side, eyes narrowing as he sought to make out Rakoczy’s face in the darkness. “You can hear stones, then, can you?”

“I—what?”

Raymond nodded at the fa?ade of the cathedral. “They do speak. They move, too, but very slowly.”

An icy chill shot up Rakoczy’s spine at the thought of the grinning gargoyles perched high above him and the implication that one might at any moment choose to spread its silent wings and hurtle down upon him, teeth still bared in carnivorous hilarity. Despite himself, he looked up, over his shoulder.

“Not that fast.” The note of amusement was back in the frog’s voice. “You would never see them. It takes them millennia to move the slightest fraction of an inch—unless of course they are propelled or melted. But you don’t want to see them do that, of course. Much too dangerous.”

This kind of talk struck him as frivolous, and Rakoczy was bothered by it but for some reason not irritated. Troubled, with a sense that there was something under it, something that he simultaneously wanted to know—and wanted very much to avoid knowing. The sensation was novel, and unpleasant.

He cast caution to the wind and demanded boldly, “Why did you not kill me?”

Raymond grinned at him; Rakoczy could see the flash of teeth and felt yet another shock: he was sure—almost sure—that the frog had had no teeth when last seen.

“If I had wanted you dead, son, you wouldn’t be here talking to me,” he said. “I wanted you to be out of the way, that’s all; you obliged me by taking the hint.”

“And just why did you want me ‘out of the way’?” Had he not needed to find out, Rakcozy would have taken offense at the man’s tone.

The frog lifted one shoulder.

“You were something of a threat to the lady.”

Sheer astonishment brought Rakoczy to his full height.

“The lady? You mean the woman—La Dame Blanche?”

“They did call her that.” The frog seemed to find the notion amusing.

It was on the tip of Rakoczy’s tongue to tell Raymond that La Dame Blanche still lived, but he hadn’t lived as long as he had by blurting out everything he knew—and he didn’t want Raymond thinking that he himself might be still a threat to her.

“What is the ultimate goal of an alchemist?” the frog said very seriously.

“To transform matter,” Rakoczy replied automatically.

The frog’s face split in a broad amphibian grin.

“Exactly!” he said. And vanished.

He had vanished. No puffs of smoke, no illusionist’s tricks, no smell of sulfur—the frog was simply gone. The square stretched empty under the starlit sky; the only thing that moved was a cat that darted mewing out of the shadows and brushed past Rakoczy’s leg.

* * *

Worn out with constant walking, Michael slept like the dead these days, without dreams or motion, and woke when the sun came up. His valet, Robert, heard him stir and came in at once, one of the femmes de chambre on his heels with a bowl of coffee and some pastry.

He ate slowly, suffering himself to be brushed, shaved, and tenderly tidied into fresh linen. Robert kept up a soothing murmur of the sort of conversation that doesn’t require response and smiled encouragingly when presenting the mirror. Rather to Michael’s surprise, the image in the mirror looked quite normal. Hair neatly clubbed—he wore his own, without powder—suit modest in cut but of the highest quality. Robert hadn’t asked him what he required but had dressed him for an ordinary day of business. He supposed that was all right. What, after all, did clothes matter? It wasn’t as though there was a costume de rigueur for calling upon the sister of one’s deceased wife, who had come uninvited into one’s bed in the middle of the night.

He had spent the last two days trying to think of some way never to see or speak to Léonie again, but, really, there was no help for it. He’d have to see her.

But what was he to say to her, he wondered, as he made his way through the streets toward the house where Léonie lived with an aged aunt, Eugenie Galantine. He wished he could talk the situation over with Sister Joan, but that wouldn’t be appropriate, even were she available.