Watermark (25 page)

Sometime in the
middle of the night, the bolt on the door of the cell unlatched. Auda opened her eyes into the brightness of moonlight. Putting up a hand against its incandescence, she struggled to sit up. A shadow crept into the room and, before she could scream, clamped a hand tight over her mouth.

Struggling, she bit into fingers rough with calluses. The grip around her tightened.

“Shhh! I won’t hurt you!” a whisper hissed out.

She knew that voice, how could she not? Rising above the damp odor of the cell, the familiar scent of charcoal and paint danced in the air. She relaxed.

Jaime released her, turning her around to face him. Removing a dark scarf from around his face, he reached out a finger to stroke her dirty cheek.

He was tall, too tall for her to see without moving her injured head. She held a hand to the bruises in her neck and stared at him, wide-eyed. What was he doing here?

“They’ve hurt you,” he said in a gruff voice, crouching beside her. “Shhh.” He followed her eyes to the door and
shook his head. “It’s not safe to leave. Not yet. The signal will come, we must wait for it.”

Auda trembled. Drawing her arms around her chest, she stared at this phantom man who stood before her. Her memories of him seemed like they belonged to someone else, in another lifetime.

Jaime cocked his head toward the door. “We’ve planned a distraction. The city’s a mess. The river has flooded and the town is awash. This is the time. Rubea is watching—it was her idea to gain entry as a girl of the night. I didn’t know how else to get to you.”

His forehead, which she could see only in profile, furrowed. “I’ve searched every day for you, for any bit of news. The town’s been rioting. The archbishop has been put aside. The inquisitor is in charge now.”

Auda watched through swollen eyes, understanding little of what he said. She focused instead on his voice, the warmth of his familiar tone. She wished she could envelop herself in it.

Jaime crouched beside her, stroking her face. “I’ve failed you,” he said, his voice cracking. “But I will never forsake you. Listen. There is a plan. We’ll sneak out of here to a meeting point by the new scriptorium. I have a cart waiting for us.”

Auda struggled to follow the conversation. When she was gone, who would they go after next? Poncia?

Sister?
she signed. But before he could answer, a thin scream split the air. Jaime stood and ran into the corridor.

“The river!” someone yelled.

He came back for her. “Come, we have to leave!”

Auda hesitated only for a second. Her father was dead. She thought of her sister, of the babe within her, praying Jehan would keep them safe.

Entwining her hand in his, Jaime led her along a long cor
ridor and down a dark flight of stairs. In the hallway, they rushed toward a group of guards and priests, jostling about the narrow passage. Auda turned her face, her heartbeat so loud she wondered it didn’t eclipse the commotion. But they didn’t look at her, didn’t even notice her. They were too concerned with getting out.

“The river’s silted up,” someone said behind her.

“It’s the mountains, they’ve overflowed!”

“No, it’s the dam, she’s broke—”

“God fails us!”

Jaime plunged through the gaps in the crowd, dragging her with him. They squeezed into gaps in the crowd and made their way toward the door.

Outside, amid the thronging crowd, the air smelled fresh, wet with rain and fury. Lightning cracked overhead. Its thunder roared, like the voice of God.

They waded into the road among the others milling outside the keep with nowhere to go. The river had flooded and now it seemed to be washing the town away. Water rose to Auda’s knees, her waist, threatening to wash her away also.

The water surged with power. Another wave engulfed her and she lost Jaime’s grip. She flailed as her head went under the water. Kicking desperately, she pushed with her arms and sought anything that would propel her to air. She hit something and grabbed on to it. It was the platform upon which René had burned. The wooden legs of the dais were already buckling under the weight of the people clinging to it.

Auda’s feet slipped as she fought to push herself upright. Bodies of the young and elderly floated among the rats in the water. In each corpse, she saw the face of her father. She coughed, throat and eyes burning. She was surrounded by stragglers, but where was Jaime? She couldn’t see anything clearly.

“Help!” a man’s voice rang out, familiar and strange all at once.

Auda turned to see someone perched on a precarious wooden slat at the far end of the platform. The inquisitor. A rough current rushed past him. She squinted to see better. If she climbed the palace steps from higher ground, she could reach him. But should she save him?

Jaime surfaced, not far from her. “Auda!” he yelled, reaching out.

She turned back to the inquisitor. She had to help him. It had to end somewhere.

Pointing at the struggling man, she turned her back on Jaime and started moving toward the palace steps.

“No, Auda!” She could hear the telltale hatred and desperation in Jaime’s voice as he understood whom she was going to help.

A sudden wave surged, dragging Auda into its waters. The current threw the inquisitor from his raft. She saw his black cloak swirling on the surface.

Feeling herself sink, she tried to clutch at what remained of the podium. Her lungs burned to breathe. The river was violent, its fury raging and rushing, grabbing at her.
We know you
, the waters sang to Auda.
We’ve tasted you before.

She pushed hard, at the voices and the bodies around her. Even in the darkness she could tell she was being carried under and downstream. She struggled to keep her pace.

With a final gasp for air, she clenched her muscles and brought her knees to her chest. She searched for the surface but couldn’t tell which way to swim. Her hand brushed against skin, another person searching for leverage. Arms grabbed at her, pushing her under.

The chill of the water melted into her skin, so cold. Her limbs failed.
Sleep with us
, the river tempted her. It would be
so easy to let go, to be carried into a blissful slumber here and end her misery. A heavy weight pulled at her. But this time Auda pushed back. Back, ahead, arms and legs, she pulled herself forward.

Crawling on top of stone blocks breaking the water, she scrabbled toward shore. She spotted the inquisitor, still hanging on, and yelled at him. He looked up and saw her. His lips curled in revulsion but he reached out.

She stretched her arm and grasped him. They locked hands. She strained to pull him toward her. Just then Jaime appeared beside her and joined his grasp with hers. With one heave, they dragged the man to the steps. Auda spared him a moment’s look and then Jaime tugged her away.

She looked at him in gratitude.

“Not for him, but for you,” he said, putting a finger to her lips. “Always for you.”

In the darkness, strangers helped them find their footing. Auda pointed toward the city heights. They headed into the residential streets, where the water level dropped, a slow climb up the gentle hill. Over her shoulder, Auda saw the gray waters run down the way they had come, leaving behind only muddy dregs. Yes, this was the best choice. There were more people in the streets now, others with the same idea.

“The river’s changed course,” someone said behind them.

“The town has drowned!”

“We need to find the scriptorium,” Jaime said. He cast about. “I’ve a cart waiting.”

Auda looked at him, startled. That’s right, there had been a plan. Looking at the city once more, she saw torches moving in erratic paths against the ebb and sway of the river.

Somewhere out there were Poncia and Jehan. But not her father.

She turned her back on the lights, forging further up the hill.
The scriptorium. But the whole bourg seemed underwater. She had no idea where it was being built, which direction to even look.

As she vacillated in the wind, something caught her eye: a pelican flying overhead. Determined to keep it in sight, she tugged at Jaime’s hand and followed its path to an arch above the door of a small church. Moving closer, she could see intricate incisions chiseled into the marble crescent, a manticore, a basilisk. Etched on the door was a quill and bottle of ink.

Half finished and with no roof, it stood pummeled by the rain. She dropped Jaime’s hand and rushed toward it. On the other side, a small hill rested under a short break in the clouds. A gray silhouette stood in the waning light. The cart.

She turned her face up to the sky and in the dim light caught sight of the pelican, flying away. Half laughing, half crying, she tracked its flight until it disappeared.

Then Jaime came up beside her, laughing too as he drew her into his arms, and she was alone no more.

They settled in
a small town inhabited mostly by simple monks.

Auda sat by the open window in their one-room cottage, penning the last line of her verse on a smooth sheet of paper. She scrawled her name on the bottom with a flourish, laid the quill on her workbench, then blew on the page to dry the ink. Her father’s watermark peeked out in the early morning light. She smiled.

“Such zeal,” Jaime said, laughing. He winked at her from his easel, where he sketched a scene of two boys fighting with wooden swords. His fingers, blackened with charcoal, worked quickly over the paper canvas.

Looking at the new drawing over his shoulder, Auda snorted. But the drawing delighted her. It had taken some
time for Jaime to start sketching happier scenes like this one. His melancholy still lingered, right under the surface, in the sadness of his eyes or the tender way he looked at her sometimes, as if she would break. But it dominated him less and less each day.

Setting down his charcoal, Jaime rubbed his hands in a cloth moistened with sage oil. “Are you ready?”

Auda nodded. As he went outside to wash up in a barrel of rainwater, she looked out their window. They had been lucky to find this small village, tucked between the limestone gorges. In the days after Narbonne’s flood, she and Jaime had journeyed uphill, hauling only the donkey-led cart that carried their few possessions—his paints and what sketches he grabbed from his room, and Martin’s favored mould and deckle, their watermark still attached to it.

“It was a simple funeral, but fitting,” Jaime told her the only time they spoke of it.

Providence had brought them here, Brother Calvet said. Certainly Jaime had not planned to stop in this tiny town. Wherever they might be headed, it certainly was not a town steeped in monastic life. Auda was, however, feverish from infection and tossing in the back of the empty cart. When she began to cough up blood, Jaime had no choice. It was already well into the night when the cart creaked into the meager village of St. Chinian in the Hérault district.

The watch guard had sent for Brother Calvet, who looked once at Auda’s writhing body and went for the monastery’s healer, Brother Jaufres. Jaime paced the halls that night and the next, until finally the healer announced that she’d passed out of danger.

“There’s room enough here for a couple wearied of life’s cruelties,” Brother Calvet said a few days later, when Jaime inquired about payment. “We have need of a gardener to tend
to the vegetables and herbs for our daily meals,” he said to Jaime, who was worrying over Auda’s wounds. “If you and your wife would like the work, we will give you lodging and food.”

He asked nothing about the state they’d arrived in, who had inflicted Auda’s wounds and why. But when he smiled at her, there was a knowing sadness in his eyes.

“Till our debt is paid and she’s fit for travel,” Jaime agreed, not telling him he and Auda weren’t married. Not in any traditional way.

“Work is prayer,” the priest said.

Later, that night, Jaime and Auda made a pledge to each other. If the Inquisition found them, if they were still looking for her, they agreed, they’d flee before the Church ravaged this secluded town. Each single deed, they knew, had its own consequence, its own reward—she’d learned that from René. And from the inquisitor.

That had been over a year ago. Though neither admitted it, they had grown comfortable in this simple town of priests who, when not at prayer, worked the vineyards that lay around their monastery. Herdsmen drove their sheep across the green fields that covered the foothills beyond town, selling their wool for fair prices in the town’s marketplace. At night, Jaime sometimes regaled the town’s children with Auda’s stories while she looked on in amusement.

Soon word of their arrival spread, and other monks came bearing paints for Jaime and, when they learned of her skill, old rags for Auda. The cloths sat unused in a corner of their cottage. A few months later, the pope in Avignon sent word to his churches that he needed large quantities of “cloth parchment.”

No
, was Auda’s only word on the subject. To Jaime. To Brother Calvet. She had no desire to use what her father taught
her to help the men who’d killed him. But when Brother Jaufres entreated, she frowned over the valerian root she was planting in the church garden.

“We had a papermaker once, but he’s long since passed away,” the monk explained. “The monies the pope offers will go toward feeding the poor in the next town. And to fix our leaky roof.” He watched her hands. Intrigued by her gestures, he’d learned to recognize a few words.

Sighing, Auda nodded.
For you.

With the Brother’s help, it took her only a few weeks to get her workshop started. Someday, she thought she might build a barn to act as her studio, where she could keep a larger vat and more barrels for linens. She made a new watermark for the effort, an image of a fish in memory of René, his religion, and the lessons she had learned from them. No ladders. No bridges.

Now Auda moved from the window to her workbench and unwrapped a square of brown cloth, counting out fifty small slips of paper from the latest batch. She’d bleached them in the sun until they were a pure white, then cut them to size with a sharp blade. The script on the pages was all the same:

Indulgentia a Culpa et a Poena

Underneath was a line for the penitent’s name, and for his list of sins. The thin trace of the piscine watermark was barely visible.

She searched under her pallet, where a signed and sealed indulgence was stored in an oilskin parcel. She’d thought to burn it when it arrived, unasked for, as payment for the town’s papermaker who’d made such fine wares. Auda snorted, wondering what the pope would say if he knew whom he’d
absolved. She’d resolved to burn the worthless scrap, yet somehow, the time for burning had never seemed to come.

Drawing out a wooden box, she stacked her new batch of indulgences inside and nailed the lid shut. Putting it in a linen sack that she slung over her shoulder, she joined Jaime outside.

“The decorations are well done this year,” he said as they strolled down the cobblestone path to the monastery. Holly, laurel, and ivy bedecked the town, while simple carols from the monastery choir broke through the thin mountain air. Stalls along the main road sold strong drinks made of honey, ale, and spices, along with humble pies made of venison.

Every morning Jaime bought her faerie floss, spun colored sugar that hung like gossamer on a wooden straw. When she laughed, he only said, “Two weeks more of this indulgence, and then it’s onto the new year.”

Leading their way into the main hall of the monastery, Auda left the box with Brother Calvet, who would send it to the pope. Then they wandered to outside the rear of the building, along a rivulet that further downhill joined the great Hérault River.

It was a favorite path of theirs, a dirt road that followed the creek down through town and ended at the threshold of their small cottage. Birds chirped unseen from the bushes and trees along the path.

“The trade routes no longer go through Narbonne,” Jaime remarked, his voice nonchalant.

Auda stopped. She knew he had sent messages asking for word of the area, what had happened after the flood. He’d never talked to her about it before, and she’d never asked.

“The flood ruined the town’s commerce. The port has silted up and the river has changed its course.” He shrugged
and pulled at her hand to keep walking. “The old Narbonne is gone.”

Auda swallowed, nodding. They hadn’t spoken of what had happened in the months between her father’s arrest and the flood. What he knew, he did not share; what she knew, she would not. She wondered what had happened to the inquisitor, whether he had survived the flood. She even felt a twinge of pity for the
vicomte
, who’d looked so broken the day he had condemned René to burn, and the
vicomtesse
, whom Auda had so easily betrayed. But that life seemed so far away now, nothing to do with her.

Jaime slowed his pace, eyes straight on their path. “Your sister raises a boy,” he said after a moment. “He’s healthy and hale. They’ve named him Martin Aude.”

Auda bit back tears at the sound of her father’s name. Strange that she only felt mercy for her sister, a sad compassion for the life she’d chosen. They’d made mistakes, all of them—Poncia’s were just nearer to the surface. Someday perhaps Auda would go back to see her, to hold her nephew and teach him his letters. But for now it was better that Poncia thought her gone, drowned or killed. Safer, for both of them.

Tugging Jaime off the path, she turned toward the creek. The river had been with her all her life, a giver and taker of life. Now it somehow just seemed like an old friend.

“Are you ready?” Jaime repeated, a smile curving the edges of his lips.

With an eager smile, she reached into her sack and pulled out a bottle, into which she’d stuffed her latest verse.
The Crow’s Delight
, written for the innocence of a child and scribed on one of her remaining pages with her father’s watermark. An identical copy of the tale lay in her chest, illustrated with Jaime’s drawings. She kept a copy of everything she wrote, to be
sewn into a book later. The time for her brand of song had not yet come, but when it did, her verses would be ready.

Jaime bowed with a flourish and, without another moment’s hesitation, she dropped the bottle into the water. The package bobbed with the current, maneuvering around fallen branches and jutting rocks until it disappeared into the distance.

Who will find it?
The words were part of their ritual.

“A lonely girl with three spiteful sisters and a biting chicken,” he said this time, “desperate for a smile and a tale.” She laughed, suddenly feeling effervescent, full of beauty, full of life.

Jaime’s crooked smile was the only reply she needed. He took her hand in his and, with a light kiss to her fingers, they followed the water home.