I put a hand to the dagger I wore at my waist. My father's dagger. With Souboscq's fields so stunted and withered, it might prove my only legacy. I fingered the jewels set into its hasp. The dagger was cruciform in shape, and its short, slender blade was designed to finish off the mortally wounded, to offer a sort of mercy to those not expected to survive. There had only ever been one other like it.

Find its match, fiston. Therein lies your destiny.

Those were the words my father had babbled toward the end of his life. That I had been able to decipher them at all had been a miracle, for the disease had eaten away at his lips as well as his tongue. Those words had often been in my thoughts of late, but they were a cryptic and useless legacy. To admit to the dagger's ownership, I would have to admit also to my paternity. Find its match? I only hoped it would never find me.

The estate was my only chance at respectability.

But not only for myself did I despise the Count of Montreau. It was for Lisette's sake, as well. All that was carefree and innocent and childlike had left the girl that night when she was seven. And nothing but misery had come to replace it. She was compliant to a fault, never questioning, never contradicting. She only ever did exactly as she was bid, and then she retreated. She was ever and always retreating, as if she could not believe any would want her present. More than extorting the viscount's money, the Count of Montreau had extracted my cousin's heart.

The viscount of Souboscq had always been modest and unpretentious, preferring the simple pleasures of his country estate to all of the pomp at court. He had never been comfortable with the subtle repartee or obsequious gallantries upon which reputations rose and fell in the King's inner circle. That he should be impoverished to pay for another's extravagance was unjust. But whenever I chafed at the count's unreasonable demands, my cousin only paled and said, "Better to meet with misfortune than to meet with Richelieu's executioner."

Had I foreseen the disrepair the estate would fall into, I might have married for a generous dowry and saved us all. But back then, just five years ago at the age of twenty, I had too much of the leper's son left in me and too little of the viscount's heir. I didn't understand how problems that seemed so enormous could be solved through genteel means in salons or at the altars of churches. I had also nursed an impossible, yet undying, hope. I had measured all the maids of my acquaintance by the standard of my cousin, Lisette. And I had foresworn them all for the possibility of winning her love. Now, at the age of twenty-five, when the viscount desperately needed the money a dowry could bring, it was too late to reconsider. The promise of a fortune, which might have attracted a bride, had withered with the crops. Though I suspect nothing would have pleased the viscount more, the flower of love I had hoped would bloom between Lisette and I had never blossomed.

And so we lived together in uneasy proximity. The three of us nursing the flame of a single hope: that the Count of Montreau would die. And soon. Whenever I visited the estate's chapel, I knelt on the prie-dieu and made an earnest petition for his immediate death, even though I had no reason to think God would listen to my prayers.

I gave one last glance at those rounded hills, which looked for all the world like a cluster of grapes emerging from the cradle of the earth. Imagined the brooks and streams that splayed across the land like fingers, their muddy depths glinting silver and gold. The land must be saved. Souboscq was the only home I had ever had.

If we had to pay the count by selling off what few treasures we still had, we would do it. But I would not-could not-allow the selling of the land.

"Bonne anniversaire, ma biche." The viscount fairly sung the words as Lisette walked toward the table at dinner. He gestured furiously toward the door, and a retinue of servants advanced toward him. Though our fields had withered, the hills still provided. Wild dove was served alongside a tart that was surely stuffed with mushrooms. And there was a confit of pears and a conserve of apples.

Lisette looked startled, as if she had forgotten it was her own birthday. Her cheeks reddened as she looked around. "Non, Papa." I derived the words from the movement of her lips, not from the sound of her voice. She shrunk from the table toward the shadows, as if she could not bear to be remarked upon.

"Please, ma cherie. There is so little to celebrate these days. You must grant me this one pleasure."

I pulled a chair out for her.

She bowed her head for the briefest moment, and then she raised it and looked at me.

I nodded.

Her gown may have been turned to hide the wear on its fabric, and the hems of her skirts might have been frayed, but she lowered herself into the chair as gracefully as any duchess as I pushed it toward the table.

The viscount rose and put a hand into his coat's pocket. "I have something I wish to give you."

She made as if to rise. "No, Papa. Please. No gifts."

"Ah! But it is not from me. This gift is one I have been keeping for some years. It's a present from your mother."

He passed a small ebony box across the table toward her.

When she did not move to take it, I picked it up and placed it before her.

"Merci, Alexandre."

He settled back into his chair, as if watching her open the box was an event not to be missed. "It's your mother's chain of pearls. She wore them on the day of our marriage, and she never looked more beautiful. Try them on."

Regret and pleasure warred in her eyes. She opened the lid and reached inside. When her hand came out, it was clutching a string of beautifully matched pearls. She gazed at them for a long moment before placing them onto the table. And even then she did not relinquish them completely. She drew a finger across first one glowing orb and then another. Moved to cup her hand around them and then stopped and placed it into her lap. She shook her head. "You must give these to the count, Papa. To pay down our debt."

"No!" His voice echoed in that vaulted chamber like a clap of thunder. We both fell back before it. "I will not allow the memory of your mother to be profaned by that vile and detestable man."

Her hand closed about them. "Then I shall give them to him."

"You will do no such thing!" His jowls trembled as fire lit his cheeks. "I would throw them into the well myself before I would watch you give them to him." But as he looked at his daughter, his face softened, and he put a hand out to cover hers. "I appreciate all you have sacrificed these years past, ma cherie. I know how much this debt has cost you. But these...I have saved these for you. Please, receive them."

"Cost me? But I...I can't..." She bolted from the table, leaving behind an astonished father gaping in dismay.

I sought her where I had always been able to find her: at the top of a ridge from which the estate spilled down and spread out toward the wood below. The mists, clinging to the lowest of dales beneath us, wound like a river through the valley, making islands of even the highest hills.

"It's not safe to be about like this, at night's fall." A bat flitted past us, and a wolf howled as if to help persuade her of the sense in my argument.

"It's the most beautiful time of day." There was wistfulness to her tone. She nodded toward the gathered mists. "It looks like a pathway to heaven."

It did. The mists trailed out toward the gilt-edged horizon, where they seemed to vault up into the sky.

"I used to think if I could be here at just the right moment, and if I could jump far enough to make it to that mist, then I could walk up into heaven and visit Maman."

We watched in silence as the mist seemed to stir itself, to gather and thicken. It reached out to grasp at the forest. And then, it started to rise.

I slid a glance toward her. "Did you ever do it? Did you ever jump?"

Her lips curved in a sad, self-mocking smile. "I tried. But I could not jump far enough...and I was never quick enough." She voiced the words with the profoundest regret.

We stayed there watching until the sun blazed out in one last protest. It touched the mist, singeing holes in its fabric, and the white vapor was soon consumed in a purple smoke. A cloud crossed Lisette's face, and the glow that had seemed to light her from within dissipated.

I held out my hand to her, palm up, the chain of pearls curled into a mound within it. "You forgot these."

She did not even look at them. "If you insist upon giving them to me, I shall sell them."

"Your father saved them. For you."

Her eyes, gone dusky with twilight's falling, sought mine. "I don't deserve them. My father has sacrificed everything for me. And my mother...I've tried to reach her since she died, since I was four years old, and I could never do it. But even if I could, even if I could walk that mist straight up into heaven, why would she want to see me?"

"She would have wanted you to have these."

"You aren't listening to me! I've destroyed everything she once loved. Better to give them to the count and try to preserve what's left."

"You cannot think that."

"What else can I think?"

"That this is not a judgment of your worth. It's an indictment of his!"

"Why can't you just see me as I am? Why do you have to be so kind...and so...so good?" That last she accused me of as if it were one sin too many.

God grant she would never discover just how wretched I was. I seized her hand and tried to press the pearls into them. "Because I care for you too much to let you pretend anything different." Care! Care was contemptible. Care was cowardly. I wanted more than fondness and friendship. I put my other hand atop hers. "Don't you know? I love you." A miserable and unwanted confession, perhaps, but it was true.

Tearing her hand from my grip, she took a step back. "You love me! God, why-?" Her appeal was directed toward heaven. But then her face seemed to crumple, and she looked at me. "I loved you. I love you still! But my love is a curse. Why can't you just see that? How could you gain anything but pain from loving me?" There was a note of regret in her whispered words, though it was masked by despair.

I didn't hope to gain anything. I never meant to press my suit at all. I wanted only that she would shed that mantle of guilt she kept fastened about her shoulders. But my wish was as hopeless as her trying to walk on the evening's mist. We were but mortals, and we were bound, the both of us it seemed, to fail at what our hearts wanted most.

My confession must have meant nothing; she moved to leave.

"When did you stop trying to jump?" I raised my voice to reach her ears.

She shot me a look over her shoulder. "I did not say I had."

I was desperate she stay. To lose her to the twilight and her mists would have been one loss too many to bear. "But what would you say if you reached her? And why would you do it? Why would you give yourself to such a useless, hopeless task?" Even as child she must have known she would not succeed.

"Because she knew me before." Before: before the count and his lace had come. "She knew me, and she had no reason not to love me. I just want someone..." Her words trailed off as she took up her skirts and ran into the fast-falling gloom.

I could finish her thought. I knew it as my own. I just wanted someone to love me as I was. Regardless of anything I had done or failed to do. I wanted to know that at some time, at some point, I had been worthy of someone's love.

I rose the next morning when I heard the maid knocking about, opening the shutters to the day. I pulled on my hose and breeches and opened the door, expecting to find a bucket of water waiting for me.

It was not there.

Putting on a shirt and tucking it into my breeches, I went down to find the maid. She was stirring the ashes in the hearth.

"I need some water."

She turned and then straightened, putting a fist to her hip.

Now I knew the reason for my missing bucket: this maid was new to Souboscq.

"Why?"

"Now." The old maid had always placed a bucket outside my chamber door. I couldn't wait any longer for it. My skin was already crawling, itching with an urgency that had set my heart to pounding and my fingers to scratching. Already I had nearly torn a hole in my shirt, trying to dig through it to my skin. I had to get away from my skin. "And be quick about it!"

She clomped from the room, muttering beneath her breath, though she was back a few minutes later, lugging a bucket. Water sloshed onto her skirts with every step.

I took the bucket back to my chamber and stripped off my shirt, breeches, and hose. I took up a brush and squatted on the floor. Examined my arms, my legs. Scooped up a handful of water and cupped it to my chest. Once. Twice. Took up the brush and scrubbed myself nearly raw, trying to exorcise all the terrible memories.

"You'll catch your death."

I looked up to find the maid staring at me from the door. "Degage!" I might have shut the door on her, blocking her view, but my task was too important. And, more than that, it was almost complete. I turned my back toward her, took up the brush, and began to scrub once more. I closed my eyes as I scoured my cheeks and forehead, and I could see him reflected in my memories.

My father.

I saw him once more sitting in his cave beside the River Saleys in Bearn, wrapped in rags. I saw myself there, as a boy, cringing at the horror of seeing my father's skin melt from his bones. Watching the leprosy consume his fingers and toes, his nose and his ears. The disease stole both his voice and his sight. I hadn't come within ten feet of him all those years of my childhood, though I slept each night just outside the entrance to that cave. And each morning, after I had begged bread for our day's meals, I ran down to the stream and scrubbed at my skin with a stick. Sloughed off even the possibility of that wasting disease, shedding it into the river. Letting the water carry it away.

Hurry, hurry, hurry!

Before the disease could corrupt me. Before it could take root and spread forth its destructive tendrils.

I scrubbed behind my ears, beneath my fingernails, between my toes. I had done so each morning for years, examining my skin for lesions and then scrubbing at my flesh. Sometimes...sometimes I was too zealous. It could take days for the wounds to heal. And when I smelled a particularly ripe chevre cheese or passed a herd of goats, it could take days for my nostrils to rid themselves of the scent. Of the odor that smelled like rotting flesh.

I was marked-I was tormented-by memories.

My father had wasted away over the years, in both mind and body, and then one morning, he simply failed to stir at all. It was the summer of my twelfth year.

"Papa?"

I poked him with a stick. Poked him again. Harder and harder, until the sharp tip broke right through his disease-eaten skin. I pulled it out and then flung it away.

"Papa!"

I found another stick and used it to draw the cowl off his face. I hadn't seen him, not clearly, in over a year. He'd taken the habit of keeping his face shadowed beneath the folds of black cloth. Had I seen him before that morning, I might have believed him already dead. Worms could not have corrupted his flesh as thoroughly as the disease had done. Surely they would not have devoured it with such complete ruthlessness.

His eyes were not closed. The lids had been eaten away long before, consigning him to blindness soon thereafter. But there was dullness to them that morning I could credit to nothing but death.

Where could I bury a man who had already, long ago, been declared dead by the village priest?

And how could a boy inter a man he was not supposed to touch?

I solved the problem by using a fallen branch to roll him farther back into the cave, and then I walled him in behind a fortress of stones. It took me the whole day to haul them up from the river. But by the time I was done, no man or beast would ever be able to reach him. Yet the goatlike odor of his decaying flesh haunted me. It seeped out of the cave in the spaces between the rocks. I spent the next day fortifying the walls I had constructed the day before. Someone must have spied me at my work, from the far side of the river. Before the sun had abandoned the day, a voice hailed me from the forest. "Is he gone, then?"

I climbed up the wall I had built and shoved a last stone into its place. Slid back down, shredding my hands in the doing of it. "He's dead."

"Come into town." It was the sheriff standing there holding onto the reins of his horse.

I considered the invitation. "You mean...I can go back to the house?"

"Non. It's been occupied."

"Not by me. Nor my father."

"It's no longer his. He was declared dead, lad. Remember?"

And me along with him. By the priest. "What would I do there? In town?"

"Beg. Just the way you've been doing."

I looked at the cave I had just finished sealing. Looked back at the man who was standing there at the edge of the wood in his fine clothes and handsome hat. Town. There was nothing there for me. Nothing but disapproving wives and their surly husbands. Little girls who screamed in terror whenever they saw me, and boys who spat on me and kicked at me whenever they were given the chance. There was nothing worse than being a leper...but being a leper's son was close. "I'll stay here."

The man lifted his hat, scratching at his head. "What will you do?"

Did it matter?

"Do you have any kin?"