The Beltaine spirits and the druid are a distance away, by the sanctuary and the still-burning torches. He and the other one might easily be alone here in the night. The wind had lessened earlier but has returned now. Clouds and stars overhead.

“I know where she is,” Cadell says.

“No you don’t,” he replies.

CHAPTER XII

In the brightness of morning, driving west again with his father and Greg in highway traffic, Ned was fighting a heavy-eyed lack of sleep and the sense that he was a useless, irresponsible person.

He was trying to make himself concentrate on what they were doing, on all that had been discussed last night, but he kept thinking about Kate Wenger as she’d looked before going to bed.

Ned had been alone at the dining-room table leafing through a guidebook—the section on the history of Provence—amid the scattered notes and papers they’d put together earlier.

They wouldn’t have been scattered if Melanie had done them, he’d thought. She’d have stacked and sorted and filed the pages. With coloured tabs. Of course, if Melanie had been around they wouldn’t have needed those notes, would they? He’d just finished looking up something and was feeling even more depressed and confused.

“What’d you find?” Kate said, coming over.

230

He glanced up. She was barefoot, wearing only one of his own oversized T-shirts. He said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that bit up there, before, ‘God will know his own.’”

“Oh. Right.” She made a face. “Siege of Béziers? It’s west of here.”

“Yeah, I found it. In 1209. ‘Kill them all.’ Pretty unbelievable.”

In the muted light and the quiet, her body under the T-shirt and long legs below it were suddenly way too distracting. You weren’t supposed to be thinking about that at a time like this, were you?

Steve and Greg had been at the other end of the room, slumped on the big couch watching television—The Matrix, dubbed into French, which might have been pretty funny any other time. Ned’s father was on the computer upstairs, emailing, and Aunt Kim was showering. Kate was just out of the shower herself, her hair still wet.

“They were after heretics down here,” she said. “It was like a crusade. Those tended to be vicious.”

“Yeah, but from what Phelan was saying, the one who spoke those words—”

“Was with Cadell, I know. And our guy was inside.”

They looked at each other.

“Is he our guy?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“What does all this mean? Like, if they are supposed to battle each other for her, how do armies come into it?”

Kate looked away, out the window into darkness. “Maybe sometimes they fight and one gets killed, but sometimes she makes a choice, and they both live, then the other one goes to war?”

“You’re just guessing.”

She looked back at him. “Well, of course I’m just guessing.”

He sighed. “Sorry. Sit down, eh?”

“No way. This shirt’s too short. This is all the leg you get.”

He smiled. “Want my sweatpants?”

She shook her head. “I’m going to bed.”

“Uh-huh. I should make a bad joke now, right?”

“Probably. Wet T-shirt or something.”

“It isn’t wet.”

“I was careful. I’m a good girl. And you’re obviously the kind of guy who’ll do anything to get a woman to sleep over.”

“Oh, yeah. Druids and blood. My usual. Never fails. You call Marie-Chantal?”

She nodded. “She was shocked.”

“Really?”

“No, idiot. But she did want to know what you looked like.”

Ned blinked. “What’d you tell her?”

“I said you looked Canadian. G’night, Ned.”

She turned and went towards what had been Melanie’s room the night before. Ned was left at the table, images lingering of how clean and fresh she’d looked, her wet hair and her dancer’s legs.

Then he thought about Melanie, and the lean, fierce man he’d first seen in the cathedral. Imagined that one leading a red slaughter by the mountain, then casting men alive down a pit, the way she said Marius had done. He could see it, that was the problem.

I am not a good man.

And if he was understanding anything at all, the other one, Cadell, had burned a city, Béziers, eight hundred years ago, with Phelan inside—and maybe Ysabel, whatever her name was that time.

Revenge? Was Kate right? Had Ysabel made a choice, picked Phelan that time, but Cadell hadn’t died? Had he made that crusade, or just made use of it?

Might that be why one of the men needed to be killed, so her choice was made that way, or else this part of the world could drown in blood?

Had it been the same at Pourrières, where Ned had felt he was drowning in the slaughter? Or was this all so far off base it wasn’t even funny?

And what did a Canadian look like, anyhow?

IN THE MORNING they’d gone back to Entremont first, on the off chance someone had lingered there. The gate was locked, though, the parking lot empty. It was the first of May, a holiday in France. But it didn’t matter: Ned could feel it, there was nothing here. Whatever had been on this plateau during the night was gone. He wondered if the remains of the Beltaine fires would be there if they climbed the fence and went in.

He thought about the bull. How would the guard or the first tourists tomorrow deal with that? Not his problem, he supposed. His problem was a lot bigger.

It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in his aunt, but the hard fact was, if they were actually going to check out all the sites near Aix that had connections to Celts or Greeks or Romans, they were going to need months, not three days.

And they might not even have three days. There were others searching, after all.

The plan, such as it was, had been worked out earlier the evening before. Those had been the notes on the table. Kate, scribbling place names as fast as she or Ned’s father or Aunt Kim could rattle them off, had begun biting her lip part of the way through, he remembered.

It was pretty unbelievably random, Ned had thought, watching the list grow.

GREG TOOK THE MOTORWAY EXIT for Arles and paid the toll. It was a fresh, blue-sky holiday morning, a day for a walk, a picnic, a climb. They continued west for a bit but got off before the city to go north on a smaller road towards a low, spiky range of mountains.

Ned saw vineyards on both sides, and olive trees, their leaves silver-green in the light. There were signs showing where you could pull off to buy olive oil. It was beautiful, no denying it. He had no idea how any of them were supposed to enjoy scenery today, though.

Aunt Kim’s plan had been that she and Ned, with their links—however imperfect—to the world of the rites that had taken Melanie, would each anchor a team. They’d use the van and her little red car to criss-cross towns and ruins and the countryside. If either of them got even the glimmer of a sensation, any kind of presence, they’d telephone the others and…

And what? That was the depressing part. Even if, by whatever miracle of intuition or luck, they actually found the place where Melanie-as-Ysabel was hiding from the two men, what were they supposed to do?

Ask her nicely to change back?

Ned remembered that he’d put the question more or less in those words the night before. He’d been sitting next to Kate, looking at the list she was making: Glanum, Arles, Nîmes, Antibes, Vaison-la-Romaine, Orange, Fréjus, Pont du Gard, Roquepertuse, Noves, Narbonne, Saint-Blais, Hyères. He’d stopped reading there, though Kate kept on scribbling.

Glanum—whatever that was—was their next stop this morning. The red car was going to Nîmes, farther west, and a couple of the other sites that way.

They were all pretty much just names to Ned. And there were way too many. It felt hopeless. There were even connections to Greeks, Romans, and Celts in Marseille itself, and Marseille had three million people. They could spend days there.