Page 100 of Honey Cut
What is a tweaked ankle to the pain of heartbreak, anyway? Self-createdheartbreak, at that, which is a hell Dante failed to properly describe.
I look over to my uncle now, whose characteristic grin has faded. His heterochromatic eyes are turned to the fountains of the World War II memorial as we pass it by. It’s a weekday morning, the day before Halloween, and aside from the usual clumps of school groups and out-of-town tourists, the National Mall is rather empty. There is only the sound of the water and the wind through the leaves.
“I am afraid this is coming to a head much quicker than I’d planned,” my uncle says as we turn back toward the Lincoln Memorial.
“Looking into Ys? I still don’t think we know much more than we did?—”
“No,” Mortimer says heavily. “The usefulness of your marriage. The usefulness of Mark Trevena remaining alive.”
The last several words don’t make any sense at all to me—they’re a joke, Mortimer is joking right now, and I can’t help the laugh that comes out. “I only think of murdering him once or twice a day these days. A big improvement from when I was eighteen and told to marry him.” The memory of blue eyes over a chessboard flashes through my mind. And then the memory of red-orange light catching on his eyelashes and hair and the tight curve of Tristan’s ass.What, still crying, my bride?
Maybe it’s not a good thing that Mark’s grown on me. Inside me. Through me like a bramble. Because now he hates me and I love him and it hurts and I’m so, so lonely.
“Isolde,” my uncle says, coming to a stop. “I’m being serious right now.”
I stop too. I can’t make any sense of what he’s saying. “Serious about what?”
“Killing your husband.”
“You need him,” I say slowly, because I still don’t understand. “I married him because you need him.”
“No,” my uncle says. His face is kind, pitying. “The Vatican needs what Mark Trevena knows. There is a difference.”
But I need him, I almost say.
I shake the words out of my mouth, try to get my bearings. This can’t be a real conversation we’re having. “It wouldn’t be clean. It couldn’t be. Lyonesse is a fortress, and he’s so careful when he’s outside it. Whoever tried to kill him?—”
“You, Isolde,” Mortimer says. “You would be the one to kill him.”
The wind picks up enough that leaves blow around our feet, dance in the air, flashes of saffron and the rare glimpse of a red cherry leaf.
I don’t answer—I can’t answer because there’s nothing to answer to, because this doesn’t make sense.
“You are one of my best saints,” Mortimer says gently. “If not the best. You’ll find a way to make it clean and implicate someone else.”
“No.” The word comes unbidden; I’m saying it before I know that I’m saying it. I don’t have a plan or an argument or a plea for more information.
Just.No.
“Yes,” my uncle says, his eyebrow lifting the tiniest amount, like I’m a child being warned. “You must.”
The wind is cool enough to nip at my cheeks, but I barely notice it right now. “I don’t think you understood what I told you earlier. He killed for me in Belgrade. Hecaresabout me.” I leave out the part about the destructive triangle between him, his bodyguard, and me. “That was the plan, Mortimer, to make him care, and I did it. We are just now getting to the place where we can start exploiting this marriage in full, and so why change now, when the plan is working?”
Why change now, after it’s too late and I’ve fallen in love with him?
“This was always the plan, Isolde,” my uncle says gently. “This was always what was going to happen.”
“No.” The word is choked. “No.”
“I admit that I thought it would take a few more years, that we’d have more time to wring Lyonesse dry of intelligence. Maybe build our own shadow network inside it. But things have changed because Mark’s plans have changed. I’ve been informed by the Scales that Mark is planning on going after not only Ys but the Church too. And we can’t risk a rogue operator of his skill coming for the Vatican. Nor can we risk him revealing something from Lyonesse’s storehouse of information. I don’t know what he has or what he could have, but I cannot doubt that if it’s worth a membership fee, it would be damning.”
“Mark isn’t going after the Church. That’s ridiculous.” He’s never mentioned anything about the Church, other than going to Mass whenever the mood strikes and bland comments about the pope’s health.
Except…
First stop, Ys; second stop, Rome.
He couldn’t have meant…?
