CHAPTER FIVE - The Scar

He had a gold cup in a tent.

That was the thing Eva's brain got stuck on, in the way that a brain will pick one stupid thing to hold when it cannot hold any of the rest. The tent was enormous, and it was a tent, it moved when the wind hit it, and there was a table in it, and on the table there was a cup of solid gold with garnets around the lip, sitting next to a wooden bowl and some cheese, like a mug.

They had ridden two hours in the dark. The wolf pelt had kept her alive. She had not been able to feel her feet for some time.

He came in behind her and the flap dropped and the noise of the camp went muffled, and Eva turned to put her back to a table, because she had been putting her back to furniture since she was eleven and it wasn't a decision anymore.

He was even bigger indoors. Her head came to the middle of his chest.

"Hands," he said.

She didn't move.

He waited. He had — she would learn this about him over the next eighteen months, and she would never entirely get used to it — an enormous capacity for waiting. He simply stood there in the lamplight with his hand out, in no hurry at all, for long enough that Eva's arms began to ache from holding still.

Then she put her chained wrists out.

He took them. His hands were hot. Not warm — hot, running four or five degrees above what a person should, so that the heat of him went up her forearms and made her fingers throb as the blood came back.

He turned her wrists over, looked at the split skin under the iron, and something went across his face that she could not read and did not like, because it looked like an animal deciding something.

Then he set a blade against the pin and popped the chain apart in one movement, like a man snapping the stem off an apple, and threw it into the brazier.

The iron sat in the coals and started to glow, and Eva looked at it, and her hands, which had been perfectly steady for eleven days, began to shake so badly she had to put them under her arms.

"Sit," he said.

"No."

He glanced at her.

"You've been eleven days in a wagon."

"I'm aware."

"Your feet are cut to pieces."

"I'm aware of that too."

"Then take off the dress and let Sabine tend you."

And there it was.

Eva laughed.

It came out of her before she could stop it, high and wrong, and she put a hand over her mouth and then took it away because covering your mouth is a small surrender.

"No," she said.

The tent was very quiet.

"You've bled through it," he said. "In three places. It's gone into the wounds and it's filthy and it will putrefy, and then you will die in about nine days, badly, and I will have paid a great deal of money for a corpse."

"Then you've made a bad investment. No."

"Woman —"

"I have said no twice," said Eva, and heard her own voice go up, and let it, "and where I come from that's usually enough, so let me be extremely clear, because I don't know if we have this word. I am not taking off my clothes. Not for a doctor, not for you, not for anyone in this tent, on this mountain, in this entire —"

She stopped, because she had been about to say century, and some last shred of self-preservation caught it.

"Not for anyone," she finished.

She was standing in a ruined shift in front of a man who had killed someone four hours ago with one hand, and her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her eyes, and she had absolutely no card left to play and they both knew it.

And Lucien St. Claire looked at her for a long moment.

And then he sat down on the floor.

He did it the way you'd sit down at a fire — a big man folding himself down onto a rug with his back against the table leg and one knee up, and it put his eyes below hers, nearly two feet below hers, and Eva's entire body reacted before her mind did. Her shoulders dropped. Her breath went out. Some animal in her, an animal that had been standing braced against a wall for fourteen years, sat down too.

No man had ever done that. Not once. Not one man in her entire life had ever lowered himself to end an argument.

"What are you doing," she said, and it came out unsteady.

"Waiting."

"For what?"

"For you to do it yourself," said Lucien, "or to die of it. Both are yours to choose. I find I'd prefer the first."

He put his head back against the table leg and closed his eyes, apparently entirely relaxed, a seven-foot man on the floor of his own tent.

"The bowl is hot," he said, without opening them. "The linen's clean. Sabine left the salve on the chest; it's the green one, and it stinks, and it works. I'll keep my eyes shut or I'll turn round or I'll go and stand in the sleet, and I promise you I would rather be anywhere than out in that sleet, so consider it a measure of how tedious I find this argument."

Eva stood with her arms around herself and her back against the table and looked down at him and did not move for a long, long time.

Then she said: "Turn around."

He turned around.

And Evangeline Cross took off her clothes in the fifteenth century, alone, on her own terms, with nobody's hands on her but her own.

It took a while.

The linen had dried into the cut on her hip and the one under her shoulder blade, and she had to soak it away with a cloth, and it hurt in a slow dragging way that made her eyes water, and twice she had to stop and stand with her palms flat on the table and breathe.

He talked the whole time.

That was the second thing that undid her. He faced the tent wall with his arms folded and he talked, in that low unhurried voice, about absolutely nothing — about the man he'd killed, who had apparently been a thief and a poisoner and, worse, a bore; about the road; about a horse he'd owned who had hated him personally; about the fact that the cheese on the table was the only good thing to come out of the eastern valleys in forty years, and that if she didn't eat some of it he would consider it a slight against his house.

And somewhere in the middle of it, with her hands full of bloody linen, Eva understood: he's talking because the silence frightens him.

It was the strangest, most disarming piece of information she had ever been handed.

"Why did you buy me?" she said.

The talking stopped.

"I didn't."

"You paid money."

"I paid a dead man's money, which is a different thing, and I paid it to a man who no longer has an arm to hold it with. Nobody was sold in that square today."

"That's a technicality."

"It's a distinction," said Lucien, "and you'll find I'm very careful with them."

"You put a chain in your hand and walked me out of a market."

"Yes."

"So what am I?"

He was quiet for a second.

"Mine," he said. "For now. And that word means something different here than it does wherever you're from, and I haven't decided yet whether to explain it to you tonight or let you sleep."

Eva put the cloth down.

"Let me guess," she said. "Where I'm from is a question you've decided not to ask."

"Where you're from," said Lucien St. Claire, "is a question I have known the answer to for a very long time."

She had the salve in her hand and her back to him and the green stink of it in her nose when she said, tightly:

"I can't reach the one under my shoulder."

There was a pause about two heartbeats long.

"Say it plainly."

"Help me," said Eva, and hated every syllable.

He came and knelt behind her.

She had wrapped herself in the length of clean linen and pulled it down to the waist at the back, and she stood with it clutched against her front in both fists and her eyes fixed on the tent wall while a man she had known for four hours put his hands on her.

She had been braced for it to be unbearable.

It was worse. It was not unbearable.

His hands were enormous and his hands were careful — two fingers, a fingertip's worth of salve, the whole weight of him held back somewhere behind his wrists. He worked the cut under her shoulder blade in small patient circles, and the heat came off his palms and spread out across her back, and after about thirty seconds Eva's head dropped forward of its own accord and she made a small involuntary noise into her own collarbone.

Eleven days. Eleven days and nobody had touched her except to move her.

"Nearly done," he said, and his voice had gone rough at the edges.

She could hear him breathing. It had changed. It had changed quite a lot.

And then his knuckle grazed her ribs — just the side of one finger, on the way past, on an unmarked stretch of skin that needed no salve at all — and Eva Cross turned around and bit him.

She got him on the meat of the hand between thumb and forefinger, and she did not do it gently. She felt the skin go under her teeth and the hot copper of it on her tongue, and she stayed there a full second, staring up at him with her jaw locked and her eyes wide and furious over the top of his own hand.

Lucien went absolutely still.

He did not pull away. He did not raise the other hand. He knelt there with a woman's teeth in him and let her have it.

And then — slowly, disastrously — he smiled.

It transformed him. It took the cold beautiful thing off his face and put something underneath it that was young and hungry and delighted, and Eva felt it go through her like a dropped glass.

"Well," he said quietly. "There she is."

She let go. She stepped back until the table stopped her, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist, breathing hard, absolutely certain that she had just killed herself.

"Do it again," said Lucien, "and I'll have you on that table, and I'll take a very long time about it, and you'll be extremely rude to me the entire while, and we'll both enjoy it more than is decent. So don't. Not tonight."

"You —"

"Not tonight," he said, and it came out low and ragged and not remotely like an order — more like a man talking himself down off something — and he got to his feet and turned away from her and stood with his back to her and one hand braced on the tent pole for three full seconds, breathing.

Eva stood with the linen clutched to her chest and her pulse going in her throat and her mouth full of the taste of him and understood, with a kind of horror, that she was not frightened.

She was something else entirely, and it was hot, and it was low, and it was moving.

"Why aren't you angry," she said.

"Because you're allowed."

"Nobody's allowed."

"You are," said Lucien. "You may bite me any time you like. You may throw the cup at my head, and it's worth a village, so choose your moment. There is nothing you can do to me tonight that I have not already forgiven."

"Why?"

And he said: "Because I owe you."

"You've known me four hours."

"No," said Lucien St. Claire. "I haven't."

And he pulled his shirt off over his head.

Eva's first reaction was pure physical stupidity — a jolt so hard it hurt, because he was, without his shirt, very nearly an act of violence against the eye: a long brutal architecture of shoulder and back and flank, all of it scarred, some of the scars in sets of four.

Her second reaction, half a second later, was that she had stopped breathing, and not because of any of that.

He turned around.

Across the whole width of his chest, from the point of one shoulder to the low edge of the opposite ribs, running at a slight diagonal, there was a scar.

It was old. It was silver-white and flat and forty years settled into him. And it was not a wound, because wounds are shapes, and this was not a shape.

It was handwriting.

Four words. Cut into a living man, deep enough to hold, in letters that were shaky in places where the blade had dragged and confident in others, in a language that would not exist in this form for another two hundred years and would not be written like this for four hundred more:

COME BACK TO ME

Eva made a sound.

She had restored eleven thousand objects. She had spent her adult life learning to read the hand of a maker — the pressure, the lean, the tell-tale hesitation before a difficult curve, the way a person makes a letter when nobody is watching. She could identify a gilder from a fingerprint in a ground layer. She could tell you who had cut a monogram from the shoulder of the M.

She knew this hand.

She had known it since she was six years old.

The linen slipped in her fists. She crossed the tent without deciding to, close enough to touch, close enough to smell snow and iron and the blood she'd taken out of him, and she put two fingers on the B the way she would have put them on a fresh varnish — not touching, hovering, one millimetre off — and her whole arm was shaking.

"Who did this to you," she whispered.

And Lucien St. Claire looked down at her with four hundred years of patience finally coming to the end of itself, and said:

"You will."