Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2) Read Free Page A

smiling when Elizabeth is locked in a cathedral. Mea maxima culpa .
    “I’m not here to kill you.” I rise to my feet and help him stand. “I’m sorry I spooked your meal.”
    He stares at me and cocks his head.
    “The squirrel. I scared it off.” I set Tristan’s great helm down and reach past the hand cannon into the sack that hangs from my shoulder. “I’ll break bread with you to make amends.”
    He looks horrified. “I was not going to eat the squirrel! I would never have eaten it! Not ever!”
    “Weren’t you trying to catch it?”
    “Yes,” he says. “Our Heavenly Father instructed me to catch it.”
     “God wants you to catch a squirrel?”
    “Two squirrels,” he says. “And two deer. And two badgers. And two magpies. And two hedgehogs. Two of every animal. A male and a female.”
    “I see.” I clear my throat. This man is not a clever chicken. “Have you built your ark yet?”
    He wrinkles his nose and looks at me with mild disgust. “What a ridiculous thing to say.”
    His name is Peter and he was a clerk in St. Edmund’s Bury. He tells me that he has lived in the stable for the last two months.
    “The Lord led me here,” he says. “And Osbert found me a few days after I arrived.”
    “Osbert?”
    “Osbert is God’s messenger,” he says. “God speaks to him. And Osbert tells me what Our Heavenly Father wishes of us.”
    God speaks to many people these days. If He had spoken to us earlier, perhaps there would not have been a need for this scourge that has afflicted us.
    “So the barn is full of your animals?” I ask.
    Peter licks at his lips, and his brows twist with anxiety. “Animals…they are difficult to catch. We have captured two rabbits.”
    “Two rabbits?” I say. “That seems like a slow start, Peter.”
    He shakes his head vigorously. “That is not all! We have also found a lark.”
    “You caught a lark?” I ask.
    “We found it. It fluttered on the grass. Something was wrong with its wing. But God did not say the animals had to be in perfect health.”
    “No, I imagine he didn’t,” I say.
    “We have a hedgehog.”
    “Healthy?”
    Peter looks as if he might cry. “I do not know what is wrong with it. Osbert says it may be plagued.” He wrings his hands, then holds up his forefinger and brightens. “But we caught a healthy chicken once.”
     “A chicken?” I ask. “Does it dream?”
    “Dream?”
    “Yes,” I say. “Chickens are clever, Peter. They dream.”
    I wonder if chickens can sense that something has gone catastrophically wrong with the world. I hope their cleverness does not extend that far. I pray the chickens live in blissful ignorance and that their dreams are full of grain and sunshine.
    Peter is talking. His words soak through the veil of my thoughts.
    “…will never stop, no matter how difficult the challenge becomes. God wishes to purge the world once more. Osbert and I will be the caretakers when the slate is washed clean.”
    “Is this the new Flood, then?” I ask. “Does God want a fresh start?”
    He raises his hands and closes his eyes. “Thus says the Lord of Hosts: ‘Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
    I have never heard of Amalek, but I wonder what they did to deserve such a fate. Even the donkeys must suffer. This would upset Tristan.
    I glance at my wrist. Just a line of red among the hair, filthy with muck from the tunnel. Is this wound God’s Fury as well? Am I to be purged?
    “And what does Amalek have to do with the plague, Peter?”
    “Amalek shows us the strength of the Lord’s intolerance for iniquity. Those who do not yield to our Almighty Father will suffer, as those of Amalek did. For this is the End of Days! The seas will turn to blood! The earth will shake! The stars will fade from the sky!”
    I scratch at my neck. “Do you or Osbert know of any horses in the