“Marie! What are you doing? Get out this minute! Get out, get out!”
The older woman ignored her and looked at me, the scorn on her already unattractive face not improving her looks. Her eyes ran over me contemptuously. “Always ready, I see. You get that from your father.” She glanced at the guards. “Bring him.”
I was forced out of the room with no chance to get dressed. The brunette tossed me a heavy brocaded robe, which I slipped over the embarrassing evidence of my condition, but there was no time to get shoes or even trousers. The girl in the bed screeched strange obscenities after us, most directed at the older woman. It dawned on me that she was not speaking English, although I could understand her perfectly. Or maybe this body could, and was somehow translating for me. I had no time to wonder about it, since I was manhandled down a long stone corridor to a set of stairs. They had deep hollows in the center of each step, where thousands of feet had walked over hundreds of years. It was dark down there and the air coming up was freezing, to the point that I was surprised that I couldn’t see my breath in front of my face.
The woman paused at the top of the stairs and turned to me. She didn’t look scornful now; the emotion in her dark eyes was closer to fear. “I will go no farther. I have already seen what waits for you, and have no wish to do so again.” Her expression changed to something like pity. “All your life, you have experienced the rewards that come from silence. Tonight you will learn the punishment for breaking it.”
She turned away without another word and the guards started to muscle me towards that black hole. I was stronger in this body, but nowhere near enough to allow me to take on those guys. I looked wildly back at the woman, but she was already walking away, spine stiff and straight under her mulberry-colored dress. “Please! Madame! Why are you doing this? I have said nothing, I swear it!” The words weren’t mine—they popped to my lips uninvited—and they didn’t stop her.
“If you want to know who to credit with this night’s work, ask your brother,” she flung over her shoulder before disappearing into a room and shutting the door firmly behind her. It was a very final sound.
The stairs were too narrow for my captors to keep hold of my arms, but since they were behind me and there was nowhere to go but down, it didn’t really matter. There was almost no light; only a few thin slivers of moonlight filtered in through ridiculously narrow windows as we descended. The steps were slick with damp, and the depression in the middle made it almost impossible to keep my footing, especially without shoes. I was also uncomfortably col
d despite the robe, although at least that seemed to have gotten rid of any lingering arousal. But a very unfamiliar weight hung slack between my legs, an unwelcome and alien sensation that was doing more than anything else to make me want to start yelling and just not stop. I stubbed my toe about halfway down but was almost grateful for the pain; I was very close to losing it entirely, and the throbbing in my foot gave me something else to think about.
Torchlight flickered on the stairs as we finally came to the bottom, making shadows dance over everything and gleaming off the trails of liquid that seeped down the walls. Suddenly it was not chilly anymore; it was cold, intensely so, as if my blood had turned to ice in my veins. I was surprised not to see frost hugging the walls, but the damp trickles ran freely.
Far worse than the burning cold or the surroundings were the piteous wails that came from behind an iron-banded door a few yards ahead. They were soft, muffled by the thick wood, but they nonetheless hurt the mind. It was painful to hear voices so raw, so full of despair, and so sure that the help they called for would never come. I instinctively tried to back away, moving into a puddle of light cast by a nearby sconce, when a rough hand shoved me forward. I stumbled, striking my knees on the uneven stone of the floor.
“In there.”
I was slow obeying the command, but a kick to my ribs winded me and a rough hand pulled me upright. I looked down and saw a man, balding, overweight, wearing a bloodstained apron and rough, dirty wool trousers. At five foot four, I’m not used to looking down at many men, and I blinked at him in pain and confusion. Fleshy lips split into a grin, showing a mouth full of gray teeth, and I flinched back. That seemed to please him. “Good. Be afraid, M’sieur le Tour. Remember, you’re no prince tonight.” He looked me up and down. “Soon we’ll see if you live up to your name. Tonight, you’re mine!”
A huge iron key was fitted into the lock, and the door swung open. I had a brief glimpse of a large, square room with thick stone walls and high ceilings before I was pushed through. I fell again, this time onto filthy straw that stank of urine and worse, and did little to soften the hard floor. Some part of me was outraged at the way this crude man was treating me, but a moment later, all feelings besides horror melted. I met the eyes of the emaciated, naked woman stretched impossibly tight on a rack and I was unable to look away. Blood had run in rivulets from her tortured body and dried in thick, viscous rivers on her skin, and brown stains covered the floor below her. There was so much blood, I couldn’t believe one body had held it all.
Men in chains along the walls were crying, begging me to save them, but I barely noticed. All my attention was on the woman, although she made no sound. The torchlight reflected in her open eyes, and I couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the light or if some life still burned in there. For her sake, I hoped not. The man saw the direction of my stare and walked over to her. “Yes, your friend won’t be fun much longer.” He tested one of the ropes binding her hands, and I saw that her nails were missing. The ends of her fingers looked as if they had been shredded, or eaten away by some animal, and the knuckles were swollen so large that there was no way she could have closed her hands, even if she’d been free to do so.
I’d seen a lot at Tony’s through the years, but the violence had usually been fast and unexpected, like what I’d been through tonight. By the time I had a chance to react, it was normally all over. Tony used torture at times, but I hadn’t seen it. Eugenie had been very strict on that point, and I was beginning to see why. This was worse than the ferocity I knew: it was too casual, too matter-of-fact, too studied. There was no anger behind it, nothing personal to mitigate it or at least make it understandable. Her pain was just part of the job.
“She’ll do for a demonstration, though,” the man continued. He motioned to one of the pair of men working the rack and he brought forward a grimy wine bottle. “This is what happens to all who anger the king. Watch and remember, bastard.”
As I stood frozen, saying nothing, the man poured the wine over the woman’s head, face and neck. It soaked her hair until it dripped onto the stone floor below her in a thin red puddle. I snapped out of my shock when I realized what was coming.
His hand reached for a candle stub and I moved. “No! You can’t! Please, m’sieur, I beg you…” I could already tell from the delight flooding his face that I’d given him exactly the reaction he’d wanted, and that he had no intention of stopping. He watched my face with something like glee as he held the candle to a nearby torch. It had almost guttered, but a tiny flame caught on the candlewick nonetheless. I didn’t try to argue with him again, but launched myself forwards, grabbing for the burning candle. I wrestled it from his grip, but the two torturers grabbed my arms and dragged me off him. The man, who I assumed was the head jailer, turned eyes on me that had little humanity left in them; then he smiled. He bent and, very slowly, picked up the candle stub and relit it.
I looked at the woman as he approached; I couldn’t help myself. There was a sheen of tears in her light brown eyes, and she blinked once, drops of wine falling from her lashes, before his body obscured my view. Part of my mind said that he would stop short, that he would not, could not, do this. A voice spoke in my head, saying that he wanted to terrorize me, that this scene had been staged to make me more pliable later, and that may have been true. But it didn’t save her.
The scene before me wavered, and thoughts that I didn’t recognize began to flood my mind. Scenes flashed before my eyes of other places, other people, like a film was being projected onto a transparent veil in front of me. Through it all, I could still see the woman and the torturer, frozen a second before the impossible occurred.
That voice in my head piped up again, gibbering about being brought up in captivity but never knowing true cruelty. I dressed in fine linen and handmade lace, it insisted; I had my books, my guitar and my paints with which to amuse myself; my jailors bowed low when they entered my room and did not sit in my presence unless I gave them permission. Royal blood flowed in my veins, and no one ever forgot that. Never had I seen brutality like this; never had I known such fear. And following quickly behind it was a red rush of pure rage. This was not justice, was not necessary to preserve peace or the stability of the land, or whatever high-sounding phrases they were currently using. It was the actions of a sadistic coward who kept his hands lily white at court, while such things were done behind closed doors in his name. And they called me the abomination.
I shook my head and tried to get the voice to shut up and to clear the cobwebs off my vision; after a second, it worked. But then I was back in the nightmare, with a clear view of that candle inching towards its destination. I watched in stunned incredulity as the torturer held the tiny flame to a few strands of the woman’s wine-soaked hair. It caught with an audible whoosh and the blaze spread eagerly to the rest of her head and shoulders. Within seconds, the top part of her body was only a dark outline in a dancing curtain of fire. I screamed, since I couldn’t do anything else. The other prisoners took up the cry until the room was filled with shrieks and the sound of chains beating uselessly against unyielding stone. We could do nothing else for her, so we made our cries almost shake the walls, but the woman herself made no sound as she burned.
“Mademoiselle Palmer, what is it? What is wrong?” Louis-César’s face appeared in front of my eyes and I vaguely felt someone shaking me. The high-pitched, hopeless cry of the cell filled the room, and it took a minute to realize that it was coming from me.
“Mia stella, be calm, be calm!” Rafe pushed the Frenchman away and drew me against his chest. I ran my hands under the cashmere of his sweater, pulling him as close as I could, and buried my face in the soft silk of his shirt. I breathed deeply of the familiar scent of Rafe’s cologne, but it didn’t drive out the smell of the urine-soaked prison and the cooking flesh of what had once been a woman little older than me.
After a minute, I looked up and met Louis-César’s eyes. “Tell me she was already dead, that she didn’t know!” My voice was desperate, and my face in the mirror over the fireplace had wide, haunted eyes. They looked like the woman’s, only hers had seen far worse things than had mine.
“Mademoiselle, I assure you; I am willing to do all in my power to assist you, but I do not understand what it is you ask.”
Rafe was stroking my hair and rubbing soothing circles on my back. “It was a vision, mia stella, only a vision,” he whispered. “You have had them before; you know that the images, they will fade in time.”
I shook my head and shivered in his arms until he drew me closer. I hugged him so tightly that, if he’d been human, he would have been in pain. “Not like this. Never like this. They tortured her and then they burned her alive, and I couldn’t…I just stood there…” My teeth wanted to chatter, but I bit down on my lip and wouldn’t let them. It would make me remember the terrible cold of that place, and then I might think of the only source of heat. I wouldn’t think of it; I wouldn’t, and it would go away. But even as I echoed Rafe’s words, I knew I lied.
I had had thousands of visions in my life, some of the past, some of the future, and none very pleasant. I’d Seen all kinds of terrible things, but nothing had ever affected me like this. With time and practice, I’d learned to let go of what I Saw, to treat it the way other people do disturbing news reports on television—as distant and not quite real. But then, I’d never before been part of the action, smelled the smells and tasted the fear of someone who had lived the events. It was the difference between driving by a brutal car accident and being in one. I didn’t think I would forget that woman’s stare anytime soon.
“Mon Dieu, you saw Françoise?” Louis-César stepped towards us, looking stricken, and I cringed away.