Chapter Text
The pre-dawn air was so comfortably mild I wasn’t even aware of it unless the wind picked up. The crickets and frogs, so recently returned with the warmth of spring, grew quieter as the sky lightened and the stars began to fade. My mare whickered and brushed her velvet nose against Nicki’s leg as his own mount went ahead a few paces.
Fine animals, both of them. The horses, I mean.
I had selected the very finest from father’s stables for us, when we raided them earlier that evening. It was a long road to Paris, and I wanted to ensure we got as far as we could that first stretch.
Imagining the look on father’s face when he found them missing was amusing to say the least, and spurred me on into a laugh and a gallop.
“Slow down, Lestat. You’ll wear her out before we reach the inn,” Nicki called after me. “We’ve covered enough ground. We can take our time.”
I turned the mare and trotted her back to him. “You’re much more calm than I expected you’d be.”
There was a thorn in the back of my mind that cut into my optimism. Nicki was so sure we were free now, but I knew that wasn’t necessarily true. I kept listening for the sounds of hoofbeats behind us. We’d left late enough that I’d hoped it would be dawn before the stablehand or one of my brothers would discover that two horses were missing, but one could never be sure of those things.
He shrugged. “The hard part is over. It’s done. We decided to leave, and we left. Well, you decided.” He sighed and relaxed into his saddle as he looked at the first rays of sunlight touching the tops of the trees. “Whatever happens now is out of our control.”
The smile on his lips was a bit wry, almost sarcastic, if a smile can be. I loved it on him. I wanted to lean over and kiss him right then and there.
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “Are you hungry, mon cher? We should find a place to stop and take our meal.”
He agreed and we dismounted in a small clearing. He unloaded the basket of food he’d pilfered from the kitchen. There was a loaf of good bread, a ball of fragrant creamy cheese, and a few pieces of cured meat. He tossed me a crabapple as I sat down next to him in the dewy grass.
“So, what shall we do first? When we get there?” I asked.
“We’ll go straight to the Palais-Royal to request an audience. You will have to be properly introduced.”
“Just like that?” I took a thoughtful bite of my apple. “Do you think they’ll recognize my name? None of my family has been to court since-”
Nicki threw a piece of bread at me. “Tu es bête comme tes pieds. Of course not. You make it too easy, you know.”
I tossed my apple core at him. “And you take advantage of my good faith. I look to you for guidance and I’m repaid with sardonic wit.”
He shrugged. “You would do well to take a pseudonym, I suppose. We can never be too careful. Nobody back home besides your mother knows of our destination but it won’t be hard to infer…”
I stayed silent, my stomach churning. I hadn’t told him what my mother had told me, that the innkeeper had overheard our conversations and alerted Nicki’s father. I knew it would have filled him with nothing but crippling anxiety, crowding away all the hope. He might have called off our plans.
Nicki frowned, noticing my change in mood. He dug into the basket again. “Lestat, I have a surprise for you.”
I leaned back on my elbows. I raised an eyebrow, already with half an idea what it was. “What is it, my love?”
He produced a bottle of wine. “The finest vintage in my father’s collection. I was going to save it for our first night in Paris, but…”
I crawled into his lap and kissed him. “Oh Nicki, you are wonderful, so wonderful…”
“Yes, well,” he said between kisses. “Let me uncork the bottle first, and then you can tell me how wonderful I am.”
I obliged. He let me have first taste and it was a lovely, deep red. Worlds better than the watery vinegar we usually had to content ourselves with. I pulled him to me and let him take his first taste from my lips. He was so beautiful, his lips glistening red in the pale light of early dawn as if drenched in blood. I tipped the bottle to his mouth and a thin burgundy stream of it ran over his jaw and down his neck.
“Careful, Lestat. You’ll waste it,” he protested as he took the bottle away.
“It won’t go to waste, chéri,” I said as I bent down to taste it on his skin.
At first, I thought I imagined the sound. There was a rhythmic beat of hooves from far away, so faint that I was sure it was the beating of my own heart. But then a twig snapped, the sound echoing through the forest. Nicki broke away from me and looked over my shoulder.
“Did you hear that?” he said.
“Hear what?” I answered, pressing another several kisses against his jaw. I was hoping against hope that not acknowledging it would make it go away.
“Someone’s coming,” he whispered.
He stood up fast and pulled me with him. I swayed against him, already feeling the effects of the wine. As I leaned on him and listened the sounds came closer and I thought I heard a voice, still too distant to make out any words. Male, I could tell that much. Then another voice joined the first and as they approached I realized I knew them.
I swore loudly. “It’s my brothers!” Thankfully I hadn’t had so much wine that such a call to action couldn’t overpower it. I went to my mare and mounted, pulling her away from her grazing. “No, get on with me!” I said when Nicki went for his horse. My brothers were nearly as skilled as I am on horseback and I knew Nicki couldn’t keep up. He snatched up his precious violin in its case and I helped him into the saddle behind me. I turned my mare toward a gap in the trees before digging my heels into her sides.
She sprang into action swiftly, but the terrain wasn’t clear enough for a full gallop. She weaved her way between the trees and over tangled roots. We came upon a narrow deer trail that passed under low-hanging branches. “Watch your head!” I warned Nicki as I ducked down. He tightened his arm around my waist as he did the same. When the path opened up again I risked a brief backwards glance and saw movement far behind us, near where we had abandoned our picnic. If they stopped to investigate, that might give me just enough time, I thought. And somewhere along this trail there would be a concealed thicket or some other sheltered place where the herd stopped to bed down at night. I prayed it was ahead and not behind us.
After another tense few minutes of riding I was beginning to contemplate how best to handle a direct confrontation when I saw it. Not a thicket, but the next best thing: a steep drop down to a small gorge where a stream trickled through the forest.
“Get down, this is our best chance,” I said.
“We’re stopping? But they-”
“Do you trust me or not?” I hissed over my shoulder at him.
He cursed, but dismounted and I quickly followed.
I led the mare carefully down the incline and positioned her behind a dense stand of brush which would hide her from view if they passed by the same way we had. After securing her reins to a tree I led Nicki to the half-rotted trunk of a felled one I had noted on the way down and crouched behind it. It was big enough to provide cover for us both, but barely. I was certain more than a cursory glance in our direction would give us away, especially given how my golden hair stood out against the brown and green of our surroundings. But we had no other choice.
He was trembling, and I put my arm around him. I heard voices above, and I tried to slow my breathing so I could make out what they were saying.
“I could kill him,” Augustin was saying. “He’s a disgrace. He doesn’t deserve to bear our father’s name.”
“Wasn’t that his horse back there? The mare tied to the tree. I recognize it from our stable.”
“And a thief as well,” Augustin raged. “We had two horses missing, remember? They probably left that one and rode off on the other. Him and the de Lenfent boy.” I heard him spit on the ground.
“Well, we’d better take it back. One less loss for the stable. Worth more than he is, at the very least.”
“He pretended to kill some wolves and he fancies himself some village hero? It was all an act, and a very poor one at that. You know he plans to become an actor? An actor. That’s what the innkeeper overheard. That childish delusion of his never left. Well, he won’t make it as an actor. He’ll soon find out exactly what he’s worth, which is less than the dirt under our feet. He’ll end up someone’s cheap whore and then die in the gutter. Both of them will. It’s good they’re gone. We don’t need that poison in our village.”
I heard the faintest creaking sound and saw Nicki was clutching his violin case so tight to his chest that his knuckles had paled. “Lestat,” he whispered.
“It’s nothing,” I hissed, a little too loud. I needed to say more, the words were bubbling up inside me, I needed to drown what my brother had said under a deluge of my own. But Nicki was drawn up tight as a bow, and the mare was already getting restless. I desperately willed her to stay calm and still, just a few moments longer. If they hadn’t seen us by now then surely soon…
“Why don’t we let them go, then? They could have gone any direction from here, it could take hours to track them down. And father won’t know the difference either way if we just tell him they had too much of a head start.”
Augustin heaved a great sigh. “You’re right. I don’t want to waste any more of my time on that brat anyhow.” I heard the clink and rattle of their tack and the clomp of hooves as they turned their horses around. “He’ll be grateful enough for the return of the mare. Let’s go.”
I released my own tension with a slow exhale as I listened to their retreat.
Nicki threw his arms around me and let out a sob. “Oh Lestat, oh God…” he was saying.
I laughed giddily and pushed him off. I went to untie the mare. “Well, that was exciting, wasn’t it?”
“What? No! Exciting? No, it…” He came up to me and grabbed my arm, startling the horse. “Lestat, they know everything! Augustin knows, you heard him!”
“So what if he knows I want to be an actor? I–”
“No, he knows about us.” He gestured between the two of us to illustrate his point. “The… nature of our… Lestat, we can’t ever go back now. We’re ruined.”
“Why the hell would we ever want to go back?” I was beginning to get angry at him. “Wasn’t the whole purpose of this to leave and never go back to that awful place? To live freely as we always wanted to?”
“Yes, I know, but-”
“Well then what, exactly, is the problem? What does it matter to us if the whole village knows?” The mare gave a distressed little whinny and I turned my attention back to soothing her.
“I… I don’t know.” He paced a few steps away. “God, Lestat, I… What have we done?”
The sudden lowered tone of his voice made me look back at him. His head was bowed, one hand rubbing his brow.
I could sense one of his episodes coming from a mile away, and this one was announcing its approach more loudly than usual.
I sighed. I patted and stroked the mare’s neck for a moment. Finally I made my way over to where Nicki stood, suffering, which he was so very good at. I rested my arm on his shoulder, leaned against him, crossed one leg behind the other. Augustin used to do this when we were small and he made me cry with his bullying, and he didn’t want me to go running off to tell mother. Just stand there and lean on me, as if I were nothing but a fence post or a wall. A crying object. The absurdity of it and the indignity always worked to stop the tears, if only by way of embarrassment.
I cast a sideways glance at Nicki. He wasn’t quite crying, just on the verge of it. He looked briefly at me and then away again.
“What have we done? Hmm. What do you think we’ve done, Nicki?” I said this gently, as if it were an ordinary conversation.
“Ruined our lives,” he said, so glumly it was almost comical.
I suppressed a snicker and sighed dramatically instead.
“Ah, yes, indeed. Such charmed lives we led before we followed the Devil’s Road to sin and damnation! Just think; you shall never see the inside of that dark, musty, stuffy tailor shop for the rest of your days. And I!” I threw my head back and laid the back of my hand across my brow as if I felt faint at the very idea. “I shall never again roam the winter wastes to fell foul beasts in deadly combat. Whatever shall we do, we two exiled souls, cast out from Eden so cruelly?”
“Stop it, Lestat,” he hisses. “Don’t mock me.”
I relent. Shake my head, kick at the ground. “We should go. In case they come back.” When he didn’t respond I returned to the mare and mounted, walked her back to him. “Let’s go, Nicki.”
I held out my hand.
I saw hesitation seize him for a brief moment, but he took my hand and climbed on.