LOGIS DU MARTINET, LAGRASSE—THURSDAY AFTERNOON
Emerging alone from the winery into the sleepy golden light of late afternoon, Lia felt disjointed and loose, a collection of broken parts. Her mind detached and floated above her shock. She reasoned out her next steps, putting one foot in front of the other before she collapsed with grief.
She called for Isis. “Please be here, girl. Please be the one good thing that remains.” Like a four-legged angel, Isis flew out of the vineyards and into her arms. Lia sobbed into her dusty, light-red coat. When she’d emptied out her heart, she sat back and rubbed behind the dog’s alert ears.
“If we leave now, it’ll still be light by the time we get to Limoux,” she said, and Isis thumped her tail. “Can I hold it together long enough to find Jordí? We have to try, don’t we, girl?” She had nowhere else to go. No one, not even Rose and Domènec, would believe or understand what she’d done.
What had she done? How did a life just disappear? Could she get him back? In the silence that met her questions and prayers, Lia knew there was no going back. And there was no staying in Languedoc either. As soon as she heard what Jordí had to say, she would leave.
LIMOUX—SAME DAY
The afternoon light had deepened to burnished copper when the GPS announced she was approaching the turnoff to Chemin du Rossignol. The car bumped along a dirt road that led into the forest. Isis sensed they were close to the end of their journey and sat at attention in the backseat, her breath steaming up the windows. Lia slid open the sunroof to let the chilled mountain air pour in.
Parked in front of Jordí’s mas was a blue Renault and a bronze BMW. “We have company, Isis.” The greyhound bounded out of the car but stayed close to Lia, sniffing the ground. The front door opened, and Jordí stood silhouetted against the yellow glow of lamplight.
“You’re alone,” he said as she crossed a patch of stone and shrub that was his front yard.
“No, I brought my new best friend,” Lia replied and motioned to the dog trotting at her side.
“Where is Raoul?”
She climbed the front steps. “He’s gone.”
Inside, Lucas stood before the unlit fireplace, hands in the pockets of his dark brown chinos. Isis let out a low whine and looked up at Lia expectantly. She placed a hand on the russet head, and the dog responded with a reassuring nuzzle.
“Jordí,” she said without taking her eyes from Lucas, “Isis needs water.”
“Of course.” He shut the front door with a soft thump and passed behind her. A moment later, the sound of running water came from an adjacent room. He returned, set the bowl near Isis, and sat on a sofa without a word. The greyhound took a few noisy laps at the bowl and leaned her warm body into Lia’s locked knees.
“So, this was a setup.” Lia clutched her elbows, her body rigid with tension.
“I thought if we were all here, I could…” Jordí floundered. “That the truth would save us.” His hands flopped to his knees.
“Your friend here thinks I’m in love with you.” Lucas turned away from the stone hearth. “He appealed to my better nature.”
“So you thought I’d come here with Raoul and then what? What did the two of you have planned for us?”
Lucas stepped in her direction, but Isis rumbled with a low growl. He stopped and spoke in a low, even voice. “You said something during your lecture—that night I first saw you. I’ll never forget it: History assumes the role of truth. We study the past to prepare for the future, and we become historians so the truth of those left behind will not be forgotten.”
Lia nodded in recognition of her own words and waited for Lucas to make his point.
“I am the left behind, Lia. God took everything from me but my life—instead of eternal peace, I was cursed with eternal rebirth.” He drew in a tight breath, and Lia’s eyes flicked to his hands. They curled in, as if he clenched in his fists all those years of anger. His forgotten place in history. The damnation of reincarnation.
“Yet I have now returned to a world where the Cathar Crusade is a tourist attraction. Highway of the Cathars, Cathar Country,” Lucas snapped in disgust as he described the signs directing the curious to sites sacred and profane. “I have a right to my past and to my story, yet my history has been erased or rewritten.”
“Your story? Your past erased? What about the thousands murdered in the name of the Church? Don’t they have a right to the past and to their stories? Generations were tortured and died because your story was more important than theirs.” Lia poked at the sore spots, seeking to lance the infection of lies and deceit. Her heart’s desire was to get as far away as possible from Languedoc and the Cathars. But, for the moment, her head won. She would push aside her grief to hear Lucas out.
“The Crusade would have happened without me, Lia. It was an unstoppable tide.”
“Persecution of the Cathars was happening before you played a role, yes,” she conceded. “But it was you in that abbey in Saint-Gilles. Castelnau’s assassination launched the genocide.”
“I was a soldier following orders. I believed I had the will of God behind me.”
“How many did you kill? Do you even know?”
“Yes, I know,” he replied quietly, his black eyes round and without guile.
“Paloma? Bertran and Aicelina? Did you count them too? Paloma’s baby? You must have known she was pregnant.”
Lia looked to Jordí, expecting him to interrupt, to confirm that Lucas was innocent of the crime Raoul held against him. But the priest no longer seemed to be listening. He sat motionless, his face buried in his hands.
Lucas’s mouth twisted in a grimace. “I tried to save them. I knew d’Aran could never leave Languedoc alive, but I was certain I could save Paloma and the children.” He passed a hand over his face. “I had to create the illusion that I’d sent her to her death, so that later…” His arms dropped to his sides, his palms open in a plea for understanding. “I had spies in the network of priests who helped Cathars escape. But this time I used it for good. I arranged to send them across the mountains into Spain, to hide until the madness had passed, and I would find them when I could. But I was too late.”
GRUISSAN—DECEMBER 1208
Lucas sat in front of a window that overlooked the Étang d’Ayrolle. His knees pushed against a pedestal carved in the form of a mermaid. Her arms stretched over her head, and she held a round of polished oak in her palms.
The walls of Jean Duchesne’s library were lined with shelves enclosed by leaded-glass doors. Behind the ornately cut glass were volumes of leather-bound books that only the most learned could read and the wealthiest could obtain. But Lucas ignored the merchant’s riches, absorbed instead by a sheet of parchment on the table before him that was held down by glass weights. A list of names spilled down its creamy surface: nineteen names under the heading Gruissan. With his eyes on the list of the deceased, Lucas picked up a bottle and pewter cup that sat to one side. He let the clear marc flow to the cup’s brim.
“Nineteen, my lord abbot. Twenty, to be precise. The Gervais woman was with child.” Rancor laced his rasping laugh. “Was this my test? Did I pass?”
“The actual count numbered twenty-one, Sénéchal. A last-minute acquisition for the Church.”
Lucas raised his eyebrows in a question. The abbot picked up the quill and dipped it in a still-open vial of ink before him. He scratched one more name below Aicelina d’Aran’s and blew across the sheet to dry the ink.
“We came upon a young monk entering the church through a bolt hole, one that your men failed to notice until it was almost too late. He informed us he was one Brother Jordí Baltasar Bonafé, late of Saint-Maurice of Gruissan. Very late, as it happens.” He smirked, his face pale as a fish belly.
Lucas struggled to swallow without choking. His free hand, resting on his knee, twitched in search of the slim dagger in his boot. Instinct.
“Odd thing, though, Sénéchal.” Amalric caressed his chin with long, white nails. “Brother Bonafé said you were Castelnau’s assassin. That he was the same unfortunate clergyman who found the body of our beloved archdeacon. Such a wonder of coincidences!”
“Where is Bonafé now?”
“Oh, he confessed his intentions to spirit away the heretics from the church. So we helped him back inside to suffer their same fate.” Abbot Arnaud Amalric’s voice held a snake’s hiss in its sibilant wake. “Though it took some doing—those Franciscans are always so fat. We made certain to seal off his escape.”
Lucas’s throat closed in horror. But the abbot hadn’t finished.
“Father Raimond and Father Humbert said you put on quite a show, declaring your unrequited love for Raoul d’Aran’s wife, tossing chairs about, frightening her children. So that’s all done then? No weeping regrets for sacrificing the woman you loved? And where is d’Aran?”
Lucas didn’t respond. He refused Amalric the satisfaction or suspicion of detecting his anguish.
“Not yet found?” Amalric smirked. “Time you were on your way, then. Curious that you knew the d’Aran family was hiding here. I was informed only days ago that the heretics were being protected by Jean Duchesne.” The abbot helped himself to a cup of the piercing marc. “Although it’s not likely we’ll do more than excommunicate the merchant, if even that. The tax from his trade is too valuable,” Amalric muttered into his cup before swallowing the wine with a shudder. He set down the cup and looked expectantly at the sénéchal.
“Let’s not talk around each other any longer, shall we, Abbot? I don’t have time for intrigue.” Lucas pulled the sheet of names around to examine them again, running his fingers down the list. “I never told you of the archdeacon’s dying words: I have seen the spirit of God. They are not heretics. They are the Trinity.” Lucas watched the abbot as he repeated Castelnau’s rant, taking satisfaction as the blood rose in Amalric’s white face. “I’d wondered all these months what he meant, until I read this letter.” From inside his cloak, he removed a calfskin pouch and handed it to the abbot.
Amalric received it, the taut space between his brows wrinkling in puzzlement as he withdrew the vellum within. His face went gray the moment he opened the folded sheet, and a grimace twisted his bloodless lips. “Castelnau. What a fool. He should have destroyed this.” He tossed it on the desk in front of Lucas.
“So it’s true,” Lucas said. “Plessis wrote to tell you that not only had Castelnau changed his mind about the heretic Cathars, but he also believed them to be divinely chosen. Castelnau believed the heretics to be the embodiment of the Holy Trinity. What greater blasphemy could there be than the pope’s own emissary betraying his Church and his faith?”
“The archdeacon had requested mercy for the heretics.” Amalric sniffed, rose, and left the table, bending slightly to examine Duchesne’s bookshelves. “Clearly, he’d taken leave of his senses.”
“And that’s your script at the bottom, is it not?” Lucas pressed on. “Plessis is the bear. I am the falcon. Castelnau was the dove. You sent this letter on to Castelnau as a warning that Plessis plotted his death and that I would be his assassin. Why?”
Amalric clasped his hands behind his back with a shrug. “We needed to broker the settlement between Toulouse and Baux, and I thought the warning would be enough to silence Castelnau’s raving. The Church needed that peace.”
Lucas snorted. “You mean, of course, the Church needed the money promised by Baux if the settlement went in his favor.”
Amalric raised his palms in a twisted benediction. “Plessis was correct about one thing. The pope reacted to Castelnau’s murder just as our famed Templar knight thought he would. But that”—he waved at the letter—“that is more dangerous than any crusade.”
Amalric crossed to the fire and crouched in front of the small flames burning themselves out in the cold room. “It goes without saying, Mauléon, that only the three of us need know what happened in that church.” He lifted an iron poker from the floor and thrust it into the fire, shifting the wood and raising sparks. “Hand me that letter. I’ll destroy it now.”
When the abbot turned to see Lucas’s reaction, he was greeted by the soldier’s empty chair. The table’s surface held only one sheet: the list of the dead. The letter was gone.
Amalric’s mouth twitched in a half smile, and he spoke into the air. “Never mind, Sénéchal. Soon there will be just two of us. I’m sure Plessis would agree that your service is no longer needed.”
LIMOUX—THURSDAY
Lucas laughed without a trace of humor. “I took that letter with me. To do what with it, I had no idea. When I realized everyone I loved had died, I no longer cared what happened to me or what would become of Castelnau’s heresy. And justice was done. Lucas Mauléon ended there, on that plain, in the very grave he’d had others dig for the souls he’d condemned.”
“How did you die, Lucas?” Lia’s voice was a whisper. As his grief spun out, her anger trickled away.
Lucas raised his left arm and pulled his shirt from his waist. He approached Lia, and Isis snarled, stopping him in midstride.
“It’s okay, girl. Lie down.” The dog’s ears flattened, but she dropped to her belly and laid her head between her paws, eyeing Lucas from under pointed eyebrows.
Lia pulled Lucas’s hands away from his shirt. His beltless chinos hung low, and she traced the thick, white scar that ran between his hip bones. She choked back the bile burning her throat. He’d been gutted. Her shaking legs began to give way, and backing up, she sank onto a wooden chair. The black shell of anger she’d been holding began to release and soften into compassion.
“Who did this to you?” she asked, looking up. Thin threads of golden light shone in Lucas’s eyes, the black melting into a dark brown, suddenly so like Raoul’s that her heart broke anew.