DELUGE (46 page)

Mom and Dad both wept then, and we cried with them. It was wrenching, this decision, but it was right. Surely one of us here would survive the plague, saving a dose for Lia and Luca’s unborn child…

Surely.

Surely.

Please, God, let it be so…

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

~GABRIELLA~

We exited our rooms, after administering antibiotics to both Mom and Dad and posting guards, not allowing anyone else to enter or exit. It was lame to create a mini-quarantine room in the heart of the castello. But it was all I could do. One look at Mom and Dad outside, battling an illness and facing the threat of physical assault from the Forentini, and I knew I had to bring them inside, despite their protests. I was only glad they were too weak to fight me, much.

And, truth was, the plague-zombies had fairly coated every wall and stone with the bug, during the attack. Add to that the fact that day after day, more inside the castello came down with the plague than those outside and…Any idea that we were free and clear was just plain ridiculous.

We all knew the antibiotics weren’t a guarantee that they would survive, but we all might get a little sleep this night, feeling as if we had a good chance of waking to see them wake too.

So when I entered the courtyard and saw Chiara, hair in a mass of wild curls, crying, snot running down her nose, I rushed to her. “What is it, sweetheart? What has happened?”
Where was Alessandra? Rodolfo?

But she cried too hard to tell me.

“Gabriella,” Marcello said, soon at my side. Spying me with the grief-stricken child, Marcello had sent Fortino with Mercede, the nursemaid, who would see him to bed. I was glad our son wasn’t here. Chiara’s upset would send him into weeping too.

“What’s wrong, Chiara?” I cooed. “Tell me.”

The child shook in my arms. Empty. Wailing without sound.

“Gabriella,” Marcello repeated.

I looked up at him then. The sorrow in his eyes. The open brokenness for a…brother.

My mouth fell open.

I couldn’t utter his name, but it echoed within me.
Rodolfo
.

Rodolfo.

Gone.

The pieces slipped into place. A child, missing a father; my husband, a brother…and my own jagged loss, of a friend.

“Nay,” I said, tears welling and falling as I rocked the child, feeling her ache as my own. “Nay…”

I sobbed with Chiara a moment before pulling back and stroking her face. “Your mama? Where is she?”

“Outside,” the little girl said, her breath coming in quick gasps, “with her papa.” And then she fell into my arms again.

What?
I mouthed to Marcello. Alessandra’s father was here? Now?

He shook his head, brought a hand to his eyes and held it there a moment, wiping away tears of his own. He looked helplessly my way. “What could I do? They brought him across the border, Gabriella. They brought him with them. And he is sick.”

I looked to the sky, dark and starless, trying for a breath. Was there no end to it? The illness? The death?

“We will go to them,” I said, rising, then bending to take hold of Chiara’s hand. “Your mama, and her papa—they need us.”

“Gabriella,” Marcello said in low warning. “’Tis night. There are yet enemies about.”

“And we have family outside the gates,” I said. “She needs us, Marcello,” I said, softening my tone, reaching to touch his arm. “They need us,” I added, gesturing toward Chiara.

He took a long, deep breath and then said one word. “Come.”

We stood before the gates as they pushed back the massive steel crossbeam and opened the tall doors. Twenty knights watched in doleful silence as we exited. Eight stood in the gap, swords unsheathed. Four more stood between them, arrows across bows. Castello Forelli was taking no more chances.

At some point, I realized that Luca and Lia followed us. He, with sword drawn. She, with arrow upon bow.

But my eyes were on Alessandra, cape drawn around her shoulders—too loose for the winter chill—eyes wide and vacant. Chiara rushed to her, and she took her in her arms, and rocked her, but it was as a shell-shocked mama reacting on impulse, memory.

I knelt beside her, and it took a while for her to recognize my presence. But with one look, her eyes seemed to melt into cualdrons of tears and she uttered one word, “Oh.”

I leaned forward, embracing them both—Alessandra and Chiara—now alone in the world, without their chief protector, the man who had loved them with his whole heart. Rodolfo.

Rodolfo
…

Marcello put a warm hand on my shoulder, and I felt a shiver of betrayal for the momentary leanings I had had toward his friend years before. And yet what had drawn me were many of the same things that had drawn Marcello as his blood brother—intensity, intelligence, passion, drive. It had simply been…different between us. And yet in these last years, chaste, nothing but friendship. The mere acknowledgment that in another place, another time, under different  circumstances…maybe.

But he had been wholly Alessandra’s. And Chiara’s. And now now he was inexplicably, impossibly dead. After all we’d made it through. Survived. After all the battles and strife. It wasn’t even the plague that killed him, but in the end, his fellow countryman’s blade.

I sighed as Alessandra keened in my arms, weakly beating my back with her fists, not wanting to hurt me, but in too much pain to embrace me. “I am sorry, Alessandra. So sorry.”

She cried for a long time, and then she was silent. Wiping her face, her nose, with a dirty rag, she looked up at me, her face only half-visible in the torchlight. “He loved you first. But he loved me last.”

I took her hand and held her gaze. “That he did. I am certain of it.”

She looked to Marcello again. “You will bring his body back? So that I can give him a proper burial?”

“He shall receive a knight’s burial, my lady,” Marcello said. “Honored in every way.”

That made me smile, sadly. I was proud of my husband. For not reacting to her words of the past. For only responding with the honor due of the present.

“What of your father?” I asked, turning to the old man. He looked far smaller and weaker than when we last met, years past. When he had turned away from Alessandra, disowned her.

She took his hand. “I know it shall make little sense. But when I was trapped, when I had no other place to go…I went home.” Her dark eyes moved to meet mine, brows arcing them like parentheses. “And he welcomed me,” she added in a whisper, taking her father’s hand. “When I discovered he was ill, I knew I couldn’t leave him. Not after…Not now when…”

“I understand,” I said, thinking of my own dad, battling for his life, above us, in my own room.

I reached out to take her hand. “Will you come inside for the night? I’ll ask a knight to keep watch over him, and report to you any change.”

But she was already shaking her head. “Nay. My place is here, with him. I shall stay.”

I nodded, squeezed her hand, and rose. “Until the morrow.”

“Until the morrow,” she repeated, tugging her cloak closer, Chiara already asleep beside her.

***

Come morn, Alessandra’s father was dead.

Mom was visibly improving.

But Dad was not.

Dad was not.

***

As soon as I entered the room that night, I closed my eyes against the putrid smell. I knew it well, by then. Buboes, bursting. Fetid poison of the plague, spilling outward.

No
, I wailed inwardly.
No
.

Because from our experience, once the buboes burst, the patient was on the decline. The only relief, death.

Lia handed me a handkerchief, dipped in lemon oil water, and I wrapped it around my face, covering my nose and mouth. Mom was kneeling beside Dad, her shoulders shaking.

Dad’s eyes were closed, and yet he still breathed. But each breath held the phlegm-rattle of death.

Candles lined the room, their flames dancing, impossibly lively and joyous in a room so full of fear and sorrow.

I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand and joined Lia on the bed, beside Dad, across from Mom.

“Girls,” he said, big, brown eyes sad and lined with pain, “don’t give me the third shot. Save it for…”

He dissolved into a coughing fit.

When he settled, I said, “Dad, one more. The full dose is three. It can work. You still have some time.”

“Gabriella. Evangelia.”

I dragged my eyes to meet his. I knew Lia did too.

“I am done. You saved me. Gave me…” He closed his eyes and shook his head, his mouth falling open, as if in awe, and then in a smile. “Gave me such a gift. These last years, here, with you…”

He reached out and touched my cheek and then Lia’s. I closed my eyes, refusing to move. Even if he infected me, this was Dad.
Dad
. And I instinctively knew I might never feel that touch again.

“But what was it for?” Lia burst out. “To save you? Only to lose you again here? Now?”

His eyes were kind, caring, knowing. “Because this chapter of the Betarrinis’ story…” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I couldn’t have possibly missed.”

He fell into another coughing fit, and Mom raised him up. When she allowed him to sink back to the pillows, I saw there was blood on the handkerchief.

“To have missed this…to know you as women?” he said. “To know you at all, for that matter. What you are capable of…And to know your husbands? The joy of becoming a grandparent?” Tears slipped down his face, and I wept in earnest then, my vision blurring.

“Before…” He leaned back and closed his eyes. We waited for him to gain strength to finish his thought. “Before, we were so wrapped up in our work…Forgive us, girls. We missed you. Missed vital parts of your lives. But I’m so glad we had this. So glad. You saved me…and you gave me a part of life I am certain I never would have lived. Not just the medieval part.”

We all laughed then, through our tears.

“And missing this would have made me less of a man. Less of a father. Less of a husband.” He turned toward Mom, and she grimaced through her weeping.

“No, Ben. No…”

“You three are strong. My beautiful Betarrini girls. She-Wolves…all of you,” he said, his words now coming in gasps.

“I love you, Dad,” I said, aware now, we were losing him.

“I love you,” Lia repeated, crying as I was.

“Oh, Ben,” Mom said, straightening on her knees, cupping his face with her palm. “How I have loved you.”

“And I you, Adri. Live life in full, babe. Live it fully. For…”

His lips opened in a circle then.

His eyes widened.

His breath caught.

And there was a hint of a smile.

Before he left us.

Forever.

forever

forever

we’d lost him

and so many others

in the days that came after

to death

to death

to death

until the monster relented

leaving enough time for us to

bury our dead

at last

dad and rodolfo were buried as heroes

funeral pyres

tears

flames

ash

dust

dust

dust

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

~EVANGELIA~

On and on it went, one death after another, with a few miraculous recoveries in between.

The plague raged, the plague receded.

Three months later, word of Lord Barbato’s death came as a hollow victory, thrumming against my chest. He died alongside his skinny wife, and after burying his three adult children, ensuring his particularly foul line of Barbatos was dead for good, but it gave me little sense of victory.

Instead, I felt robbed.

I wanted to sink my arrow into his throat. Hear it enter and exit with wet, bloody finality.

I know how wrong that might sound to others.

How sick and twisted.

They did not know what it meant to long for revenge.

But I did. To me, Barbato had been the first of many terrible dragons unleashed at our door. The one who had nipped and bitten and chased and haunted, and finally descended, wings sprawled so wide it cast a shadow over the castello for every day that followed.

I thirsted for revenge, my anger yawning within like a cavern cracking beneath the surface of the earth.

And it both hollowed me out and buried me at once, even as my body rounded with pregnancy.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

~EVANGELIA~

Tiliani Betarrini Forelli mewled with her borning cry six months later. Luca wanted to name her Adela or Benedetta, but it only reminded me of sorrow. Not joy. How long had it been since I’d felt joy?

Luca cried tears of joy as he held her.

Gabi cried.

But I did not.

I seemed to feel nothing but the ache of longing for my dad, and the friends we’d lost. Nothing but the desire to see Dad hold Tiliani, as he had Fortino and even Chiara Greco. How unfair was it that I was here, holding their grandchild, and they were not?

As much as I was glad she was here, safe, held in my arms, I felt like she was not mine, in a way. She was foreign, a squirming body, impossible to fully hold and contain, as she once was in my womb. An alien. An interloper. A girl out of place, out of time.

My milk went dry, scant as it was.

And Tiliani wept in hunger.

Luca wept in frustration.

Gabi wept in fear.

Mom wept for all kinds of reasons.

But I did not.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

~EVANGELIA~

Month by month, the plague ebbed and flowed from our walls like some monstrous tide. People died. People lived. Dimly, I recognized that the tidal flow was increasing in span, the breaks longer. But still it returned.