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Day One
Michael
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“Hurry,” Livia said as Michael reached up to help her dismount, having reined in a few yards inside the entrance to the Templar commandery where they were staying. Since there was nothing to connect them to David, they were free to find lodging in the commandery’s guesthouse and come and go as they pleased through the main gate instead of having to use the tunnels. “You don’t want to lose them.”
“I won’t.” He squeezed her hand, which was all the public display of affection they could allow themselves, and loped back through the gatehouse and into the street. He was just in time to see Samuel, Rachel, and Aaron enter the city on the heels of a typically sneering guard.
Livia went the other way, towards the keep, the most prominent building of the Paris Templar commandery. As second-in-command to Elisa, and the current head of David’s new spy agency, Y Ddraig Goch (The Red Dragon), in Europe, Livia’s role was more administrative than Michael’s. The divvying up of responsibilities suited them both, since he had never been one to sit behind a desk. Besides, a woman on the streets of Paris at night—especially one as beautiful as Livia—would be subjected to unwanted male attention, which would defeat the entire purpose of surreptitiously trailing their friends to their prison cell.
Up until very recently, Michael had acted as David’s bodyguard. But because he was new to Earth Two, something of a linguist, and none of the French had met him before, he had been deemed too important to waste at David’s side—and too noticeable once there. Like Darren, Michael was a person of color, and while that wasn’t all that rare in 1295 Paris any more than it was in London, according to Elisa, while Darren was a handsome man, Michael was objectively gorgeous. As was Livia, of course. It seemed ridiculous to think it, much less say it out loud. Enough people had told him so, however, that he supposed by now he had to believe it.
Michael came upon the first of his watchers a few yards from the Templar gate. The man in question was perfectly nondescript, with brown hair, brown eyes, brown beard, and no real distinguishing features other than intelligence behind his eyes. Like most of their manpower, Gerard was a Templar sergeant, on loan from the commandery, though not dressed tonight in his distinguishing black robes with a red cross.
In the past, it had been against the Templar code to wear informal clothing, but since David had come into the picture, the stricture had occasionally been eased, specifically when dressing in Templar garb made spying impossible. In this instance, the Grand Master himself had decreed that every cooperation was to be given to David and his companions in the pursuit of their current endeavor.
Michael didn’t look at Gerard, but stood with a hand on the hilt of a knife he wore at his waist, silently observing what was happening at the gatehouse. As this was August, the sun had set very near to eight o’clock at night, and it was now a good two hours after that. While Paris had no streetlights of any kind, since allowing a lantern, torch, or brazier to burn unattended would be folly in a city built from wood, individuals on the street sometimes carried their own lanterns, and enough light spilled from open tavern doors and unshuttered windows that Michael could see.
At the moment, however, the only real light on the whole block came from the gatehouse and from the single torch one of the guards carried as he herded Samuel, Rachel, and Aaron down the street. Since the torch would ruin their night vision, none of the guards who surrounded them would be able to spot a tail.
“The gate has been busy this evening, my lord,” Gerard said.
Michael still didn’t move his head. “How so?”
“Two men were stopped as they entered the city and were taken away as well.”
“They were Jewish too?”
“No. But they were foreign.” Gerard shifted, adjusting his shoulder on the wall against which he was leaning.
“English?” King Philippe hadn’t actually ordered all English people to leave the city, but Michael could understand why they might want to.
“No. I didn’t understand the language they spoke, but I’m thinking it was Italian.” He cleared his throat. “The guard gave the prison a new name too: la fosse noire.”
That translated to the black pit. Michael rolled his eyes. “That’s not at all ominous.”
Gerard shifted. “Sometimes when you speak, I cannot understand your meaning. You say one thing, but you mean another.”
“Believe me, I mean another in this instance.”
The Bastille, the infamous prison on the right bank, wouldn’t be built until the Hundred Year’s War as part of the city’s expanded defenses in the fourteenth century. But the current prison was bad enough—and la fosse noire conjured up something a bit too terrible, especially when his friends were about to disappear inside it.
According to Gerard, in the past, when Jews had been arrested at a city gate, onlookers had stood along the curb, jeering. By now, however, the sight was commonplace, and none of the pedestrians were looking twice, instead keeping their heads down against the rain.
Michael eased away several steps, anxious to follow his friends, but at the same time wanting to give them a head start. “Have you heard what happened at the palace?”
Gerard kept his focus on the street. “King David surrendered Aquitaine, and it wasn’t given back.”
“Already?” Michael grunted his dismay. “Is it common knowledge in the city?”
“It was shouted in the streets.”
Michael nodded. “Thank you. Keep watching.”
“This wall might fall down without me leaning against it.”
As Michael strode after his friends, he found himself grinning.
It was a new thing to be the one in charge. Initially, he hadn’t known if the men and women who spied for him would accept him, since he was an Avalonian by origin and English to boot. But once they had, he’d discovered he liked working for Y Ddraig Goch, abbreviated, as it would be, to DG, almost as much as he liked being David’s bodyguard. It definitely involved less loitering in doorways and corridors, though there was still plenty of that, and trailing his friends was actually the simplest task he’d taken on since he’d arrived in Paris.
Besides, as Gerard had indicated, it wasn’t a mystery where they were going. Given the frequency of raids on Jewish households, synagogues, and places of work over the last six months, everybody in Paris knew where Michael’s friends were being taken.
Eventually he fetched up on the street that ended in a T at the prison, so he was able to watch the guards march their prisoners right up to the front gate. After a brief discussion Michael couldn’t hear, five were admitted—two guardsmen plus Aaron, Samuel, and Rachel—while the other three guardsmen, who’d been part of the escort to ensure compliance, peeled off, back to their duties on the wall-walk.
Then the heavy wooden door closed behind them.
