The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [48]
“I will t-try—” Adrienne stammered.
“She will try, Ivana,” Crecy finished for her. “I will see she does.”
“Thank you, Aunt Nikki.”
“Run along, children. Stephen, you keep your sister's hand until you get back to your nurse, yes? Go, now,” Hercule said.
When they were gone, he turned to her. “You shouldn't be up yet.”
“How else was I to see you, Hercule?”
“You might have summoned me,” he said stiffly. “I am your servant and cannot refuse your commands.”
“You are my friend. I do not wish to command you. I want you to talk to me.”
Crecy cleared her throat. “I'm past due to inspect the guard. Hercule, can you take my place here?”
Hercule blinked for a moment, then nodded.
“I will sit, for a space,” Adrienne said, and lowered herself onto a bench.
Hercule dithered for a moment while she caught her suddenly rare breath.
“I have reduced speed,” he offered. “If I hadn't, we would have caught them by now, and I feared with you unwell …”
“That was a good thought, Hercule. You were right, and I shall need all of the strength I can find.” She looked at him significantly. “All of it.”
He compressed his lips. “I'm sorry,” he murmured.
“Why must you avoid me? Why can't we be friends the way we once were?”
“Because nothing is as it was, Adrienne. Irena was a good wife to me, yet I never loved her. Now she is dead, and I am left with the pain of knowing that at the moment she died, I was probably thinking of you. And now my children—my children whom I adore—are without a mother. And still I love you, and still you will never love me, and I am ashamed, ashamed to think that even when Irena is dead—”
“I do love you, Hercule,” Adrienne said quietly. “I do. I should have married you, all those years ago. I know that now.”
His face twisted curiously into anguish. “That's not true. Don't torture me like this. I may deserve it, but please do not.”
“You deserve no cruelty, Hercule, no blame. It was all me. I lost my first love to bullets. I lost my only child to the malakim. I could not—I could not let myself feel what I should have, when I needed you to live. Those I love die.”
“You love Crecy.”
“Crecy is different.”
Hercule could hardly argue with that. But after a moment he said, “It is too late for all this, isn't it? It doesn't matter. It's too late.”
He turned, but she grasped his hand and held it tightly. “Not too late,” she said. “Not too late, but too soon. But in some tomorrow to come, when all of this is behind us …”
“Yes. Of course,” Hercule said, and he gave her hand a squeeze.
This time the silence that lay between them was almost comfortable, an old friend.
“Speaking of ‘all this,’ ” Hercule said after a moment, “we are now following the wake of the army itself. Our trackers believe that this Sun Boy has several thousand troops, most mounted, and a number of airships. We will be outgunned and outnumbered.”
“And you wonder how we will fight them?”
“Well—yes. Not that I am afraid, of course,” he went on, some of his old bluster coming back. “After all, I have led few against many on more than one occasion and snatched victory from the jaws of death. We will succeed. But—it will require, I think, a miracle such as only a saint can provide.”
“You know better than anyone, old friend, that I am no saint,” she said, “but I do have power. And this battle, I think, will not be won with armies. That isn't the part you will play. Get me near, keep me alive—that is all I ask of you and our men, though I cannot promise victory.” Near. So I can convince my son of who I am, so he will remember me at last.
Hercule shrugged and brushed his oversized nose with his thumb. “We will do what must be done. I am a simple man, and have been much distracted of late, but I think I understand that this is a battle we must not lose. Not if my children are to grow old. Not if that tomorrow you mention has any hope of arriving for anyone.” He sagged a little. “The weight of that has nearly broken my back, I think, as much as anything else. And yet you, how must you feel? For you bear more of this on your shoulders than any of