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.
“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.”