Page 100 of Blood and Moonlight

I follow Lambert into a side door of the palace and through several twisting corridors and stairways, each level down getting cooler and more damp until the walls glisten with perpetual moisture. My breath fogs in the air in front of me, making me glad I bothered with the cloak though the rain had stopped. Just before what Lambert indicates is the last passage, a guard catches up to us with a summons.

“The provost wants you, sir. Says it’s urgent.”

Lambert clenches his jaw. Oudin takes the jug of stew with a wink at me. “Good thing I came along after all. I can escort Miss Catrin.” The way he says my name makes it sound almost like “Kitten.”

“Will you be all right?” Lambert asks me as he hands the key he wore on a steel chain around his neck to his brother. “We can come another time if you want.”

I’ll endure a hundred hours in Oudin’s presence if it means seeing Magister Thomas for five minutes. “I’ll be fine,” I assure Lambert. “Thank you for everything.” On impulse, I stand on my toes and kiss his cheek.

“Careful, there,” says Oudin as soon as Lambert’s gone. “He gets jealous easily.”

I yank the bread from his hand. “And you don’t?”

“Not really, no,” he says, unlocking the last door.

The narrow passage beyond is lit by a single torch on the wall. I count ten doors with bars across the middle lining either side. “Not sure which he’s in,” says Oudin.

I’m not eager to look into any of the wrong ones. “Magister?” I call.

Chains stir behind several doors, but a familiar voice comes from the one on the far end. “Catrin?”

I run past eyes gathering to watch and fall to my knees in front of the last door. “It’s me,” I gasp, dropping the wrapped bread to clutch the rusty bars. “I’m here, Magister.”

The fingers which cover mine are cold as ice. “Light and Mercy,” he says. “Are you well?”

“AmIwell?” I shake my head. Oudin strolls up behind me and sets the jug down next to the bread. “You’re worried about me?”

The white streaks in the architect’s beard move with his smile. “Of course. About you and Remi and his mother, and poor Sister Marguerite as well. Have you heard anything about her?”

I shake my head and switch my hands to fold around his, willing warmth to flow from my fingers to his. “This is all my fault, Magister. I’m so sorry.”

“Did you take that hammer?” he asks gently. “Did you leave it with Mother Agnes?”

“No, of course not.” I lean my head against the bars. “But I knew it must have been used in Perrete’s murder, and then later in the others, but I never told Simon.”

“Is that the true reason you joined the inquiry, Cat?” Magister Thomas whispers. “To protect me?”

“Yes.” My tears fall onto our joined hands. “But I failed.”

He sighs and kisses my forehead. “Oh, my dear.”

I sit back to look at him. “There has to be a way to prove your innocence.”

Magister Thomas glances up at Oudin. “Would you mind giving us a little privacy, sir?”

Oudin shrugs and saunters away. The architect refocuses on me. “Catrin, that’s not how justice works. It’s not innocence that must be proved, it’s guilt.”

“That’s how it’ssupposedto work,” I say. “But they already hanged a man falsely for two of these murders.”

“He was guilty of the one, however,” the magister points out. “And that one was proved beyond doubt.”

How can he be so serene? Doesn’t he understand how well he already fits into the mold Simon has created? “Why wouldn’t you tell the venatre where you were that night?”

The architect leans closer and lowers his voice. “I was in the Quarter.”

Since I shouldn’t know that, I try to look shocked. “But why?”

“That’s something I need to explain to you, but not here,” he says. “It’s not safe. The walls have ears.”