She watched the baron’s eyes roam the room, as if searching for just the thing. Apparently he found a suitable task, for his mouth quirked in a sly grin and his eyes challenged Simone.
“Have him bring me that brace of candles,” he said, gesturing toward a weighty-looking, iron candelabra, holding three long, unspoiled tapers. Then his finger whipped around to point at Simone. “And you stay where you stand, Lady Simone—I’ll have no sleight of hand from you this time.”
She gave him her sweetest smile.Too easy, by far,Simone thought to herself. Aloud, she said, “Didier, fetch the candles to Lord Nicholas.”
“Didier, fetch the candles. Didier, do be quiet. Didier, get down from there,” the boy mimicked. “I vow ’tis more work for me to be dead around you, Sister, than when I lived.”
“Just do it,” Simone said, her eyes never leaving Nicholas’s. “Please.”
Simone knew the instant the candelabra took flight by the stunned expression on the baron’s face. A moment later, the heavy object floated past Simone’s left shoulder and hovered, weaving hypnotically, before the baron’s chest.
One by one, the tapers flamed to light.
“My God,” Nicholas breathed. He waved both hands over, under, and around the piece, as if checking for hidden supports. Finding none, he looked to Simone, his face not a little pale under his swarthy skin.
Simone shrugged and turned to walk back across the chamber to her trunk. She knelt before it and eased open the lid.
“Sister, have him seize it—I’m tiring.”
Simone glanced over her shoulder at Nicholas, who still stared at the now wildly bobbing brace. “My lord, take hold of it, if you would. Didier can only suspend heavy items for a short time.”
Nicholas turned questioning eyes to her, as if he did not understand her request. The candelabra fell to the floor with a great crash, snapping each of the waxen stems and dousing the tiny flames.
“Oh, he could not—” Nicholas broke off abruptly and shook his head.
“No matter.” Simone dug in the depths of her trunk until she found the item she sought. She turned on her knees and, seeing that Nicholas had made no move farther into the chamber, gained her feet and crossed the room.
The baron’s complexion was as waxy as the broken candle pieces littering the floor, and his eyes darted about the room. Simone felt a pang of sympathy for him.
“There is naught to fear, my lord,” she said, giving him a smile.
Although her intention had been to put him at ease, her words seemed to have the opposite effect.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Lady Simone,” he said so gruffly that she flinched. “I am a battle-seasoned warrior—’twill take more than a mere trick of light to frighten me.” He strode past her, giving her a wide berth, to a table holding a jug of wine and a selection of chalices.
Simone watched him tilt the jug skyward and drink—what seemed to be—the majority of its contents. The fine linen of his undershirt strained against his chest muscles, his tanned throat working convulsively to accommodate the liquid, and her stomach fluttered. She tentatively approached.
“My lord,” she said, and when he half-turned, she held forth the small, cloth-wrapped object she’d retrieved from her trunk.
Nicholas looked at her hand for several moments, and Simone held her breath. Finally, he took it from her and, with a sigh, made to sit on the chair next to the small table. He paused in a half-seated pose and glanced over his shoulder.
“Didier isn’t…?”
“Nay, he’s not under you.” In fact, Simone could no longer locate the boy within the now cozy-warm chamber. She wondered briefly where he’d gone off to.
Nicholas sat, the wine jug still hooked in one hand, and looked at the cloth-wrapped object he held in the other. Simone watched him closely as he set the jug aside and unfolded the rough rag.
Inside was a charred chunk of wood, blackened and hardened by fire and barely discernable as the wooden hilt of Didier’s play sword.
Nick’s face gave nothing away. “A wooden sword?”
“Mamanbought it for him on our last trip to Marseilles, only weeks before the fire,” she said. “Didier was to be sent to his fostering soon, and she wanted him to have his own special playthings.”
Nicholas raised his eyes from the ruined toy as Simone lowered herself to sit on the edge of the chair opposite him. “’Tis a costly piece, for a toy.”
“Yea, and that is not even the whole of it. There was a shield, a helmet…a pouch with a flint, and small blade. It was his soldiering outfit. Our mother and Papa argued over it for days, butMamaneventually won.” Simone could feel a melancholy tug at her mouth. “She usually did. And Papa always doted on Didier, much more so than he ever did me.”
Nicholas glanced again at the last toy Didier ever touched while alive before laying it—almost reverently, Simone wanted to think—in the center of the table between them. He drank again, from a chalice proper this time, and drummed his fingers on one knee as if waiting for her to say more.
