“So am I.”
Rohan looked down at his dirty wife, at her right sleeve that was torn off her shoulder, drew her against him again, and kissed her once, then again, more thoroughly this time.
“It was the goblet, wasn’t it?” Phillip said, his voice stark, layered with fear, fear of the unknown, fear of what none of them understood.
“Yes,” she said, her voice jubilant. She was nearly dancing, laughing now. “It was the goblet. But now I know what it is—at least I think I do.”
Both men spun around to stare at her.
She said simply, her voice calm and sure, “It’s the Holy Grail.”
The only sound breaking the stunned silence was the croaking of a frog in the water reeds close to Phillip’s boots.
“But that’s a myth, a legend,” Rohan said slowly, trying to grasp the truth of it, trying to make it fit with what he knew. “Surely that can’t be true.”
“Yes, it is.
That’s why Tibolt let me drink only a few drops from it. He feared that if he gave me more that I would gain the power, not he.” She pulled away from Rohan and jumped to her feet. “We must hurry. We must get the Grail from him. You know he would abuse it endlessly.”
Rohan rose slowly, dusting the dirt off his britches, more to give himself time to think, time to come to grips with this business that he couldn’t understand, much less accept. “Yes,” he said finally, “we must find him.”
“We’ve got to go back to the inn and clean ourselves.”
Susannah was shaking her head, nearly jumping in her anxiety. “No, who cares if we’re on the dirty side? I want to find Tibolt. We must find him. He might escape. We can’t allow him to escape with the Grail.”
“I’m sorry about Tibolt, Rohan. He did leave us to die and then, well, somehow Susannah saw things we didn’t, and that hidden door saved us. But there is no reason for him to leave Dunkeld until morning. Let’s go get ourselves clean. Then we’ll find him.”
They met again at the front of the inn twenty minutes later, the three of them as clean as one basin of tepid water could make them.
Where were Tibolt and Theodore Micah?
33
IT WAS JUST AFTER THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING WHEN they walked to the Dunkeld stable.
It was a moldering old building of wattle and daub with a thatch roof. It smelled of decades-old sweat, cracked leather, linseed oil, and horse manure. A horse neighed when they eased inside. They could see very little even with the stable doors wide open.
“I hope the owner doesn’t come down with a gun,” Phillip said quietly. He gave Susannah a brooding look. “I suppose if the owner does come, then she can simply wave her hand at him and he’ll forget we’re there. That or he’ll offer us his services with a smile. I don’t like this, Susannah. It makes me feel cold inside.”
“I as well, Phillip,” Susannah said.
“We will get through this,” Rohan said. “Come along, you two, and keep quiet.” Even as Rohan turned away from them, he heard his mother telling him about her vision of him and a young lady in a cave and they’d been frightened, only Susannah hadn’t been frightened at all.
They stepped into the stable. “There are no empty stalls,” Phillip said after exploring. “One of the old mares actually bit my arm, then she smiled at me. I wonder if there are some oats about for that old girl over there. I think I’m in love.”
Rohan sighed. “No clue here. If one of these horses is Tibolt’s, I don’t recognize him. There must be other inns in the town. There is only this one main street. We will simply walk the length of it. If he’s still here, he must be in another inn.”
They did wait the one minute it took Phillip to feed some oats from a half-hidden bag, which was probably meant to be wholly hidden, to the sweet old mare who had bitten and smiled at him. They heard him say, “I will send for you, my pet. You are meant to be mine. Rohan says I must have a wife. I believe that to accustom myself to the concept, I will begin with a mare. I wonder if a wife will bite, then smile.” He turned to face them. “Damnation, for those few moments I forgot. The Holy Grail,” he added on a near whisper, “it exists, it has powers a man can’t accept, and yet it is real. All right, let’s get to it.”
“Yes. Now,” Rohan said to Phillip once he’d rejoined them, wiping his hands on his breeches.
Ten minutes later they stood in front of the Abbot’s Inn, the very last building on Cathedral Street. It was set back a bit from the street, very old, three stories high, and completely dark, except—
“Oh, goodness, look,” Susannah whispered, “a light. In that third-floor window, there on the corner.”
Phillip looked down at the gun he’d just pulled out of his pocket.
Rohan cursed, and said in a low voice, “It’s got to be them. Damn, there’s no hope for it. My brother is a rotter, more than a rotter. He would have left Dunkeld faster than a snake if he’d thought we could have escaped. This is too much to bear. But we must bear it. We must have the goblet.” He realized he had great difficulty calling the goblet what it was: the Holy Grail. It was too wondrous, too fantastic, too otherworldly. He agreed with Phillip: it wasn’t easy to accept even though they’d seen it with their own eyes.