Page 17 of The Devils

Like a Treat

Alex set the lantern on a tree stump, and unfolded the cloth beside it, and pushed the cheese and the bread around a bit till it looked pretty.

Pathetic really. It was only cheese and bread, but she’d a lot of practice at making a meagre meal feel like a treat. Her Holiness had said they should be nice, after all, and this seemed a nice thing to do. Sort of thing she’d want someone to do for her, if she’d been left out in the woods on her own.

Sort of thing no one ever did do for her.

‘Boo.’

Alex jumped. Even though she’d been expecting it. Because she’d been expecting it, maybe.

‘Every goddamned time,’ she muttered, one hand to her pounding heart.

Sunny padded past her to the stump. Padded was overstating it. A cat in fleece slippers would’ve made a din by comparison.

‘How d’you do it?’ asked Alex.

‘I make a sudden noise in your ear.’

‘Not the boo. The vanishing.’

‘I hold my breath … and do it.’ Sunny squatted beside the stump, pushing back her hood, and gave the food a lookover. ‘A feast.’

‘It’s bread and cheese.’

Sunny made a circle with her long fingers in the air above it and peered through. ‘But look how it’s arranged .’

‘Just … how it happened.’

Sunny glanced over, and Alex got that nervous flutter she always did when the elf looked her right in the eye. ‘Then I like how it happened.’ And she picked up the cheese and nibbled it between her front teeth. Elves in stained-glass windows were always armed with terrifying fangs, often being sunk into some saint or other. But Sunny’s didn’t really look like teeth that’d rend the flesh from the bones of mankind. There might even have been an oddly childlike little gap between the front two.

‘How is it?’ asked Alex.

‘Cheesy.’

‘Is that bad?’

‘In many things it would be, but in cheese it’s essential.’

Alex watched her eat. There was something fascinating in how she moved, so neat and quick. Maybe it was rude to stare, but Alex’s manners had never been the best, and probably Sunny was used to folk staring. Had a starring role in a freak show, hadn’t she?

‘Balthazar didn’t like it,’ said Alex, once the silence started to feel like a weight. ‘Thought it was beneath him, I guess. He thinks most things are beneath him.’ Certainly he thought Alex was beneath him. He looked at her like she was a piece of shit. But then she was a piece of shit, ask anyone.

‘He’ll get less picky,’ said Sunny.

‘Can’t see it.’

‘Then he’ll get more hungry.’

‘I reckon he’s up to something.’

‘Everyone’s up to something.’

‘He’s teaching me the history of Troy.’

Sunny looked up. Again, that little flutter. ‘How did such a thing come to pass?’

‘I asked about the place and Baptiste offered to tell me and Balthazar said he couldn’t stand to hear it done so badly. He knows all about the Empire of the East, he says. He knows all about everything, he says. He speaks twelve languages. He says.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Is it?’

‘You can learn twelve ways to tell him to fuck himself.’

Alex spluttered laughter, then couldn’t tell from Sunny’s face whether it was meant to be a joke and tailed off. ‘Jakob thinks I should know about Troy. At least a bit. If I’m going to …’

‘Sit in the Serpent Throne?’

‘Mmm.’ That was right near the top of a growing list of things Alex didn’t want to think about. Along with the smell of cooking flesh in the inn. The way the blood welled from the hole in that guard’s belly. The sound Marcian made when the wolf’s jaws closed around his head …

The wind came up chill, and Alex folded her arms around herself. She missed Duke Michael. She hardly knew the man, and he was the best friend she had. He’d made her feel like she might not be a piece of shit. Or might not always be one, which was a nice thought to entertain. However wrong it was.

‘Maybe you should go back to the others?’ said Sunny.

Alex stood up, wiping her eyes, pretending something had blown into them. ‘I’m annoying you.’

‘No. Thought I was annoying you.’ Sunny broke off a piece of bread and held it out. ‘Stay.’

‘Thanks.’ Alex took the bread and dropped back down on the stump. ‘All Vigga and the baron do is squabble.’

‘Sounds like them.’

‘And Baptiste and Balthazar try to outboast each other, while Jakob frowns into the dark.’

‘Jakob’s a good man.’

‘Is he?’

‘I’ve known some very awful men so probably I’m a bad judge. But I expect Jakob would die for you. If he could.’

That didn’t make Alex feel any better. ‘I’m hoping no one else will have to die on this trip,’ she said, then added in a whisper, ‘especially me.’

‘Hope can’t hurt.’

‘But it can’t help, either?’

Sunny just raised her white brows and nibbled more cheese with her strangely ordinary gappy front teeth.

‘The camp’s mostly empty anyway,’ said Alex. ‘Everyone went for evening prayers at some monastery. Holiest place in Romagna, they’re saying. They’ve a list of all the miracles that happened there pinned up on a big board outside.’

‘Anything juicy?’

Alex shrugged. ‘Couldn’t say. Can’t read. But I can count, and there’s a lot of ’em. They’ve got Saint Bartholomew’s foot there, apparently. The foot he first stepped into the Holy City with. He was declared a heretic, apparently, but returned to the grace of the Saviour. So there’s hope for everyone. Apparently.’

‘Even elves?’

‘Well … no, probably not for them. Brother Diaz says elves don’t have souls, so … The Church is really … not a fan of elves. In my experience.’

‘Nor in mine,’ said Sunny. ‘You didn’t want to see it?’

‘What? The foot?’ Alex shrugged. ‘One dead man’s foot is much like another, I expect. And you have to pay.’

‘Just to see it?’

‘For extra you can touch its case and for even more extra you can drink from some holy spring. Burst forth from the ground the foot touched.’

Sunny’s smooth forehead crinkled a little. ‘You pay to drink water that’s had a dead man’s foot in it?’

‘And they give you a badge to wear.’

‘Why?’

Alex shrugged again. ‘Tell everyone you’re holier than average, I guess. Stick some saint’s name on it and pilgrims will pay for fucking anything . Hell of a racket, if you can find a way in. Get a good relic signed off by the Papal Inspectors and the punters throw money at you.’

‘You’d like that?’

Alex shrugged one more time. ‘Guess there’s worse they could throw.’

The silence settled. An owl tooted. The gabble of the camp away in the night. The wind blew up again and shook the leaves.

‘Don’t you get … lonely?’ asked Alex. ‘Out here? On your own.’

Sunny looked up at the sky. A tear in the clouds where the stars were showing. ‘Why would I?’

‘I don’t like people much, and they certainly don’t like me much, but … I sort of need ’em.’

‘Who would I miss?’

Alex thought through their group. The prissy priest. The pompous magician. The nit-picking vampire. The brooding knight. The tattooed woman who might at any moment become a massacre. Halfway down the list, her shrug was right up around her ears. ‘Me?’

‘But you’re here.’

Alex hunched into her pilgrim’s habit. It wasn’t warm and it wasn’t comfortable, but she’d hunched into worse.

‘I’m so glad we have these talks,’ she said.