It had been Benjamin—his son—who had tortured Philippe during the war and not some Nazi functionary.
Benjamin struck Matthew across the face, breaking his cheekbone.
“Quiet. I am telling you a bedtime story.” Benjamin’s fingers pressed into the broken bones of Matthew’s face, playing them like an instrument whose only music was pain. “By the time the commander at Auschwitz released Philippe into my custody, it was too late. After the witch there was only one coherent thing left in that once-brilliant mind: Ysabeau. She can be surprisingly sensual, I discovered, for someone so cold.”
As much as Matthew wanted to stop his ears against the words, there was no way to do so.
“Philippe hated his own weakness, but he could not let her go,” Benjamin continued. “Even in the midst of his madness, weeping like a baby, he thought of Ysabeau—all the while knowing I was sharing in his pleasure.” Benjamin smiled, displaying his sharp teeth. “But that’s enough family talk for now. Prepare yourself, Matthew. This is going to hurt.”
On the plane home, Gallowglass had warned Marcus that something unexpected had happened to me at the Bodleian.
“You will find Diana . . . altered,” Gallowglass said carefully into the phone.
Altered. It was an apt description for a creature who was composed of knots, cords, chains, wings, seals, weapons, and now, words and a tree. I didn’t know what that made me, but it was a far cry from what I had been before.
Even though he’d been warned of the change, Marcus was visibly shocked when I climbed out of the car at Sept-Tours. Phoebe accepted my metamorphosis with greater equanimity, as she did most things.
“No questions, Marcus,” Hamish said, taking my elbow. He’d seen on the plane what questions did to me. No disguising spell could hide the way my eyes went milky white and displayed letters and symbols at even the hint of a query, more letters appearing on my forearms and the backs of my hands.
I expressed silent thanks that my children would never know me any different and would therefore think it normal to have a palimpsest for a mother.
“No questions,” Marcus quickly agreed.
“The children are in Matthew’s study with Marthe. They have been restless for the past hour, as if they knew you were coming,” Phoebe said, following me into the house.
“I’ll see Becca and Philip first.” In my eagerness I flew up the stairs rather than walking. There seemed little point in doing anything else.
My time with the children was soul shaking. On the one hand, they made me feel closer to Matthew. But with my husband in danger, I couldn’t help noticing how much the shape of Philip’s blue eyes resembled that of his father’s. There was a similarly stubborn cast to his chin, too, young and immature though it was. And Becca’s coloring—her hair as dark as a raven’s wing, eyes that were not the usual baby blue but already a brilliant gray-green, milky skin—was eerily like Matthew’s. I cuddled them close, whispering promises into their ears about what their father would do with them when he returned home.
When I had spent as much time with them as I dared, I returned downstairs, slowly and on foot this time, and demanded to see the video feed from Benjamin.
“Ysabeau is in the family library, watching it now.” Miriam’s palpable worry made my blood run colder than anything had since Gallowglass materialized at the Bodleian.
I steeled myself for the sight, but Ysabeau slammed the laptop shut as soon as I entered the room.
“I told you not to bring her here, Miriam.”
“Diana has a right to know,” Miriam said.
“Miriam is right, Granny.” Gallowglass gave his grandmother a quick kiss in greeting. “Besides, Auntie won’t obey your orders any more than you obeyed Baldwin when he tried to keep you from Philippe until his wounds healed.” He pried the laptop from Ysabeau’s fingers and opened the lid.
What I saw made me utter a strangled sound of horror. Were it not for Matthew’s distinctive gray-green eyes and black hair, I might not have known him.
“Diana.” Baldwin strode into the room, his expression carefully schooled to show no reaction to my appearance. But he was a soldier, and he understood that pretending something hadn’t happened didn’t make it go away. He reached out with surprising gentleness and touched my hairline. “Does it hurt?”
“No.” When my body had absorbed the Book of Life, a tree had appeared on it as well. Its trunk covered the back of my neck, perfectly aligned with the column of my spine. Its roots spread across my shoulders. The tree’s branches fanned out under my hair, covering my scalp. The tips of the branches peeked out along my hairline, behind my ears, and around the edges of my face. Like the tree on my spell box, the roots and branches were strangely intertwined along the sides of my neck in a pattern resembling Celtic knotwork.
“Why are you here?” I asked. We hadn’t heard from Baldwin since the christening.
“Baldwin was the first to see Benjamin’s message,” Gallowglass explained. “He contacted me straightaway, then shared the news with Marcus.”
“Nathaniel had beaten me to it. He traced Matthew’s last cell communication—a call made to you—to a location inside Poland,” Baldwin said.
“Addie saw Matthew in Dresden, en route to Berlin,” Miriam reported. “He asked her for information about Benjamin. While he was with her, Matthew got a text. He left immediately.”
“Verin joined Addie there. They’ve picked up Matthew’s trail. One of Marcus’s knights spotted him leaving what we used to call Breslau.” Baldwin glanced at Ysabeau. “He was traveling southeast. Matthew must have wandered into a trap.”
“He was going north until then. Why did he change direction?” Marcus frowned.
“Matthew may have gone to Hungary,” I said, trying to envision all this on the map. “We found a letter from Godfrey that mentioned Benjamin’s connections there.”
Marcus’s phone rang.
“What do you have?” Marcus listened for a moment, then went to one of the other laptops dotting the surface of the library table. Once the screen illuminated, he keyed in a Web address. Close-up shots from the video feed appeared, the images enhanced to provide greater clarity. One was of a clipboard. Another, a corner of fabric draped over a chair. The third, a window. Marcus put down his cell phone and turned on the speaker.
“Explain, Nathaniel,” he ordered, sounding more like Nathaniel’s commanding officer than his friend.
“The room is pretty barren—there’s not much in the way of clues that might help us get a better fix on Matthew’s location. These items seemed to have the most potential.”