“What made you become a surgeon?” de Clermont asked him.
“Tom. He fixed me up. Taught me things.” Marcus remembered the lessons in anatomy and doctoring he’d learned in Buckland’s Northampton surgery.
“You should have gone to university, studied medicine properly,” de Clermont said. “You are already a fine physician. I suspect you might have been a great one, given an opportunity.”
“Harvard,” Marcus whispered. “Ma says Chaunceys go to Harvard.”
“Far be it from me to contradict your mother, but these days the best surgeons go to Edinburgh,” de Clermont replied with a smile. “Before they went to Montpellier or Bologna. Before that, it was Salamanca, Alexandria, or Pergamum.”
Marcus sighed, wistful at the prospect of so much knowledge, forever out of reach. “I wish.”
“And if someone could grant you that wish—could give you a second chance at life—would you take him up on the offer?” De Clermont’s face bore a strange, avid expression.
Marcus nodded. His mother would be so pleased if he went to college, even if he didn’t attend Harvard.
“And what if you had to wait a time before you could begin your studies—establish a new name, learn a new language, polish your Latin?” de Clermont asked.
Marcus shrugged. He was dying. Polishing his Latin seemed easy in comparison.
“I see.” De Clermont’s shrewd eyes darkened. “And what if you had to hunt, every day of your life, just to survive?”
“Good hunter,” Marcus replied, proudly thinking of the squirrels, fish, turkeys, and deer he’d shot to keep his family alive. Hell, he’d even gotten a shot off on a wolf once, though they were supposed to be gone and Noah Cook said it was just a mangy old dog.
“Marcus? Did you hear me?” De Clermont’s face was very close, and his eyes reminded Marcus of that gray and grizzled animal who yelped and ran away, never to be seen again. “You don’t have much time to decide.”
In his bones, Marcus felt he had all the time in the world.
“Pay attention, Marcus. I asked if you would be willing to kill someone for this chance to live a doctor’s life. Not an animal—a man.” De Clermont’s voice held a note of urgency that cut through Marcus’s fever and the fog of disorientation and pain that accompanied it.
“Yes—if he deserved it,” Marcus said.
* * *
—
MARCUS SLEPT FOR A WHILE after that. When he woke, the chevalier de Clermont was in the midst of a story that was more fantastic than Marcus’s own dreams. He said he had lived for more than a thousand years. That he had been a carpenter and a mason, a soldier and a spy, a poet, a doctor, a lawyer.
De Clermont spoke of some of the men he had killed. Someone in Jerusalem, and others in France and Germany and Italy. And he mentioned a woman, too, someone named Eleanor.
There were frightening parts to the story, elements that made Marcus think he was indeed in hell. The chevalier talked about his taste for blood, and how he drank from living creatures and tried not to kill them. Surely such a thing was impossible.
“Would you drink from a man’s veins to survive?” Even in the midst of his story, the chevalier de Clermont kept asking questions.
Marcus was burning up with fever, his mind addled with the heat and the pressure in his veins.
“If I did, would the pain stop?” Marcus asked.
“Yes,” de Clermont replied.
“Then I would,” Marcus confessed.
* * *
—
MARCUS DREAMED HE WAS FLYING, high and fast above the hospital. The floor below was stained with vomit and worse, and mice foraged for scraps to eat.
Then everything turned green as the hospital tent vanished and the filthy floor became grass, and the grass turned to forest. The forest grew deeper, greener. Marcus moved faster and faster. He never climbed higher, but his rapid progress turned the whole world to a blur of green and brown and black. Marcus felt the air, cold against his fevered body. His teeth chattered like the skeleton in Gerty’s front room in Philadelphia.
Day became night, and he was flying on a horse. Someone slapped him. Hard.
“Don’t die.” A man with dark eyes and pale skin stared down at him. “Not yet. You have to be alive when I do this.”
The chevalier de Clermont was in his dream now, and so was Russell. They were in a sheltered glade, surrounded by trees. With them was a band of Indian warriors who obeyed de Clermont’s orders.
“What are you doing?” Russell asked de Clermont.