“It was a ruse, Baldwin. I am sorry you had to suffer, not knowing the truth.” He set down the lamp and, hesitantly, placed a hand on Baldwin’s shoulder. “I was never dead, only drugged. I escaped from Queen’s Grave to take a message to Princess Theophanu.”
Baldwin surged up and embraced Ivar tightly, bursting into tears.
Ivar was at first too choked up to speak, but he understood how little time they had. “Surely your absence will be noted.”
“Yes, yes,” murmured Baldwin into his shoulder. “I came out to use the necessarium, but she’ll wonder and suspect. She keeps me prisoner. You can’t imagine how awful she is, always watching me.”
“You saved our lives.”
“I know.” He said the words not with anger or accusation, but simply because they were the truth.
He released Ivar, then grasped his hands in his own and stared keenly at him. There was a look in Baldwin’s handsome face that had never been there before, but Ivar could not identify what it was. The light from the lamp, shining up from below, highlighted the perfect curve of his cheekbones and lent sparks to his lovely eyes. The midnight blue of his robes blended into the night, making him appear almost as an apparition, not a real human being at all. He had lost none of his unfortunate beauty.
“Why are you here, Ivar? I knew you wouldn’t abandon me.”
“Will you escape with me, tonight?”
“Yes.”
“I need one thing.”
“What?”
“Parchment, ink and quill, Lady Sabella’s ducal seal, and a person who can write in the manner of her schola. We’ll need a letter to the guard at Queen’s Grave, an order to release Biscop Constance and her retinue.”
“I can get those things by midnight,” said Baldwin.
“Even the seal?”
“Even the seal. I can write whatever you want.”
“I saw that—I saw—Baldwin, how did you learn to write so well? Can you read now, too?” He grimaced, hearing how he sounded, but Baldwin neither smiled nor frowned.
“She doesn’t like it when I pray and act the cleric,” he said softly. “It reminds her of her daughter, so it gives her a disgust of me. That’s why I prayed so much, and practiced my letters so hard. Once I learned, I found I was good at it. Everyone says I have a beautiful hand for letters. They all praise me. I know every word in every capitulary and cartulary that comes out of her schola. I have the seal of Arconia, Ivar. I am the seal. That’s what she calls me. See?”
From the folds of his robe he pulled a small object tied to his belt. Ivar fondled it, feeling the ridges and depressions of a tiny carving impressed into stone. He hadn’t enough light to read its features, but it felt like the sigil of a prince by which that prince set her approval and authority onto every letter and document that left her schola.
“I’ll come as soon as all have gone to their beds. She won’t want me tonight because she’s in her blood. Meet me at the river gate. We’ll need horses.”
“That’s taken care of, Baldwin. But if you can slip away so easily, why haven’t you done so before?”
“Why would I? What have I to live for, if I am alone? Here, I had some hope of finding a way to free the others. I saw them.” His voice trembled at the edge of tears. “I saw them in Queen’s Grave, but we were never allowed to speak. I must go.”
He released Ivar’s hand, gave him a last, searching look, took the lamp, and hurried back inside. The door shut.
Ivar simply stood there, dumbfounded. His thoughts were all tumbled. He gasped in a breath that was also a cry.
“Hoo!” Johanna came up beside him so quietly that Ivar hissed in surprise. “That one! Some say he’s a saint.”
“A saint?” He was flushed, and trembling, and, truth to tell, a little irritated. Since when did Baldwin tell him what to do with so much cool assurance?
“He’s so even tempered, despite the way she treats him.”
“Does she abuse him?”
“She’s got a bad temper. She despises those she has no respect for, and treats them worse. She hates herself for loving his beauty so much. Duke Conrad’s the better prince. All know that. But Lord Baldwin slips food to the starving and a kind word to the weary, behind her back. No natural person can be so beautiful. That’s why he must be favored by God. Now, come. We’ve one more chamber, and then I’m to take you back to the barracks.”
He pulled his cap back over his hair and followed her. His thoughts rolled all over each other in a confusing jumble that he just could not sort out. Nor had he managed it when at last Johanna delivered him to Captain Ulric and he gave his report to the captain and his companions.