Excerpt of The Lost Saint by Rachael Craw

Chapter 8

Music called Leon up from the deep. A series of queer notes, cycling in repetition. A harp? A lute? But the growing awareness in his body told him this could not be so. He was lying flat on his back, numb with cold. 

Light seeped beneath his lashes and every half-drawn breath brought stabbing pain beneath his left arm. A bright, searing pain that eclipsed the many other pains in his aching body. His skull felt as though it had been removed from his neck. The straps for his breastplate dug chain mail into his spine. Breathing was hard, a sawing labor, rasping as he tried to fill his lungs. His jaw felt like it had been struck with a flail. His entire body felt like it had been struck with a flail.

He groaned and opened his eyes. The pale sky spun slowly overhead. The strange music kept trilling and movement in his peripheral vision dragged him fully awake. Through the fog of his breath, he saw the girl. 

She was splayed six feet up the slope, her tiny blue breeches bunched tight around her buttocks, her thighs trembling with the effort to climb. Her skin was grazed and bleeding and she was reaching with all her might for a small rectangular object. A box?

Impossibly thin and dully gleaming, it was lodged at the root of a bramble bush. His foggy brain struggled to comprehend how such a thing could produce such a sound or how it might come to be here on the slope. Had the girl been holding it when she fell?

“You need a stick,” he croaked.

She yelped, losing her footing, and skidded back to the grass with a strangled cry. She grabbed his sword and whirled toward him, struggling to bear the weight of the blade. 

He blinked at her bizarre clothes and winced at the blood and dirt staining the shreds of her flimsy overshirt. Nothing about her fit inside his head. 

“I seem to have one,” he gestured, flapping his hand at the horrible branch stuck in his side. “It might do the job.”

Her eyes darted to the wound. “I should drive it all the way in and this sword too.”

He screwed his eyes shut and grimaced. “It feels quite … painful … as it is.” When he opened his eyes again, she had cast his sword aside, well out of his reach, and was unlacing one of her unusual white boots. He tensed, fearing she might intend to beat him about the ears with it. 

“You understand me?” 

He frowned, at a loss as to how to respond.

“My words!” She waved the shoe at him and he flinched. “You understand what I’m saying?”

“I … yes?”

“My lips match the sounds?”

“Ah … yes?”

Her brow crumpled. “What language is this?”

“What … language?” He blinked at her. “We … we speak the common tongue of Allemannic.”

“Like old-school German?” She brought trembling fingers to her lips, her eyes welling as she stared at the ground, nodding and muttering, “Right … why not medieval German? If we’re losing our shit, we may as well go the whole way.”

Leon eyed her warily. Was she mad? It would explain her near nakedness.

She turned away and threw the boot at the bramble bush. Remarkably, it landed right in the middle, lodging in the branches above the musical box. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she shrieked. Leon jolted.

Still the box trilled on, its melody growing irritating as it looped. “How does it play without a crank?”

She shot him a scathing look. “A crank?”

“Your musical box. It is some manner of hurdy-gurdy? A symphonia?” He rotated his wrist, to demonstrate the turning of a crank. He’d seen a minstrel play such an instrument at a festival in Modeh, though it had been a much larger contraption.

“Are you for real?” she spat. 

“I have never heard such a hurdy-gurdy as this, nor seen one so small. It is surely a marvel.” 

She tipped her face into her hands, indulging a brief hysterical sob. “A hurdy-gurdy.”

“Have I … misspoken?”

“Misspoken?” 

“I seem to have offended—”

“Offended? You beat the shit out of my friends and ran me off a fucking cliff!” She took a step toward him, spittle flying from her lips. “You murdered innocent schoolkids—you shot them with arrows!”

Leon’s lips parted as he absorbed the girl’s response and reconsidered his next words. She was staring at the stick wedged in the soft skin of his underarm. He feared she might, indeed, kick it deeper if his diplomacy failed. It also triggered a deeper fear, one he had been ducking even as consciousness returned to his body. Where were his men? It struck him as ominous that not one of them had come searching for him and the girl.

A dark possibility swept in. Had Oleg’s scouts been on their heels? Perhaps his men were all dead. He pushed the horrible thought down. “I swear, that was not our men.”

Tears sparkled in her pale green eyes, pressure building in her face. 

He held her gaze. “We would never kill innocents.”

“But sneaking up on them in the dark, assaulting them, tying them up and dragging them away—that gets the green light?”

“What is … the green light?”

She fixed him with a poisonous glare. “Green means go.”

“Go … where?”

“Listen to me, Sir Jerks-a-lot,” she snarled, gesticulating at the musical box. “I’m getting my phone and my shoe and I’m going…” She straightened up, her eyes widening. “I’m going and I’m not staying here. I don’t want to be here. I don’t even know where here is. I don’t know when this is. Or how this is. But I can’t be here. I can’t be here with a—” A bout of soft, unhinged laughter rocked her shoulders. “A medieval knight in shining armor.”