Queen of Swords
Page 34

Luke said, “We’ll never be able to repay them.”
It was what he always said when they spoke of the Savards. Hannah knew that their dependency on people who were as good as strangers to Luke was a trial to him. But Leo was waiting, not bothering to hide his impatience, and Hannah was tired. A sensible conversation that would put her brother’s mind at ease would have to wait.
Leo, never cheerful, always suspicious, was more dour than usual this evening. Hannah wondered if he might really be worried about their safety, given the fact that the streets were full of men who had been drinking Major General Jackson’s health all day long, shopkeepers and clerks and fishermen intermingling with Kentucky riflemen and the militia. But the rue Royale was well lit, and there were constables on most corners, and she and Leo didn’t have very far to go.
She pulled the hood of her cape so that her face was more hidden, out of simple good sense and also to calm Leo. She said, “You were a great help to me in the clinic today. Thank you.”
He threw her a sidelong glance and nodded. Hannah, overcome with the full force of the last twenty-four hours, couldn’t find the energy to work any harder for Leo’s smile, and so they walked along in silence. At the gate that led into the courtyard behind the little clinic, Leo paused. He said, “I’m going to see my mother.”
Surprised, Hannah turned. He held the lantern so that his face was in the dark, but she still had the sense of his eyes, very large and overly bright. He had never before mentioned his family.
“Is she unwell? Does she need help?”
“That’s why I’m going,” Leo said. “To find out.” He thrust the lantern at Hannah and ran off, disappearing into the dark so quickly and completely that he seemed to have simply melted away.
There was something wrong. That thought was still forming itself in her head when she felt a sharp prodding at the small of her back. The muzzle of a gun.
“Don’t turn around,” said the voice behind her. “It is only a musket, but still, it would make short work of your backbone.”
Hannah took a very deep breath and let it out. “What do you want?”
The musket prodded again, more forcefully. “To start with, some privacy. Your Redbone Clinic will serve, I think.”
The thoughts tumbling through Hannah’s mind were too bright and quick to grab. A question presented itself: Am I going to die? Is he going to kill me? And the answer: Very likely yes.
Strikes-the-Sky had talked sometimes about what it was like to go into battle. How the world seemed to shrink down and vision to expand, so that there was no room for thought or words of any kind, no sense of mortality beyond a calm understanding that he was walking into the shadowlands and might never turn back. Now Hannah understood what he meant when he said that to go into battle was to stop feeling.
The shutters were closed tight, so that the little clinic looked like a long, dark cave lit only by the lantern. The few things that would serve as weapons were out of her reach: at one end of the room, in a box on a shelf, the simple surgical tools lent to her by Paul Savard; at the other end, a neat pile of firewood.
She could throw the lantern down and start a fire, but the idea of being in this closed space while it burned brought back memories long buried, and she hesitated too long.
“Put the lantern on the table there, and sit on the stool.”
Hannah did as she was directed. The urge to ask questions was strong, but stronger still was the sense of her father, who would volunteer nothing in a situation like this. Not a word, not a tremor.
Honoré Poiterin came into the lantern light to look into her face, and found nothing there at all. At her shoulder she sensed her father, and his approval.
Poiterin wore a long, dark cloak and a hat pulled down low on his brow. There was a deep shadow of beard on his cheeks, and a crusting scab at the corner of his mouth. He vibrated with tension, but it did not feel like anger to Hannah. She would have preferred anger to the cold appraisal and eyes empty of everything that would have made him human.
She understood that he had used Leo, hurt Leo’s mother or threatened to hurt her, laid this trap. That meant that he knew where she had been, where Jennet was. Maybe he had followed Luke after they saw each other early in the day; maybe his grandmother had got word to him. He wasn’t in uniform, which must mean something, but what?
Poiterin pulled off his gloves one finger at a time, watching her closely, his eyes narrowed. He had tucked the musket into a wide belt at his waist, just next to a knife sheath of tooled leather.
“So,” he said in a conversational tone.
Hannah caught the flicker of intent in his eyes but too late. The blow knocked her from the stool. In the part of her mind that remained detached she analyzed the pain in her cheekbone and left shoulder, noted that nothing had broken. She rolled herself into a ball as the first kick came, and it connected with her hip.
Poiterin leaned down and grabbed her by the hair, pulled her upright, and levered her onto the stool, where she sat holding her nerveless arm.
“So,” he said again. He was looking at her intently. “You are Luke Scott’s half-breed sister, is that right?”
Hannah’s voice creaked. She struggled to control her breathing. “Yes.”
He nodded. “You were with him on the Isle of the Manatees, when he rescued the slut he calls his wife from Dégre?”
Hannah nodded. “Yes.”
“You call yourself a doctor.”
It wasn’t a question, and Hannah didn’t answer it. She watched him pace back and forth, in and out of the lantern light.