Unicorn Vengeance Read Free Page B

own making before half a dozen heartbeats had passed. Alzeu and his murderer were forgotten. Genevieve rocked as the lute sang its haunting tune, her fingers plucking at the familiar strings to coax sweeter and yet sweeter sounds from them.
    â€˜Twas this she had been born to do, and naught else could trouble her when she played.
    * * *
    The familiar stench of Paris beckoned Wolfram across the last few miles. He spied the walls of the city that came closest to home for him these days with no small measure of relief. Its pungency assaulted him as he rode beneath the gate and he inhaled deeply of its welcome odor, glad to be within the city’s embrace once more. A sense of urgency assailed him, as it always did when he first entered the city’s gates, and that old desire to be secure within the heavy walls of the Temple itself set his heels digging into his tired beast’s side.
    â€˜Twas there alone that he was safe, fed and clothed, secure from the fear of pursuit. ‘Twas for that sense of safety alone that he did what he did and fulfilled his orders.
    Indeed, there was naught else he could do to earn his place within those walls.
    Mere moments passed before Wolfram spied the great double donjon of the Temple towering over the walls of the Ville Neuve du Temple, as solidly reassuring as anything he had ever known. He permitted himself a silent sigh of relief.
    Safe again.
    A pair of brother knights in full habit rode out from the gate as Wolfram approached. Their appearance, so different from his own, served to give Wolfram his usual pang of jealousy, though he stifled it with a speed born of habit. No right had Wolfram to wear the distinctive white habit of the Order, with its blazing red cross. He was not knighted, a legacy of his illegitimate past, though he had wanted to be knighted with every fiber of his being as long as he could recall.
    Still, he had joined the chivalric Order that possessed his dreams, though he had been welcome only as a sergeant.
    As ‘twas, he could not risk donning even the plain brown mantle of a sergeant brother for fear his presence might be noted. Dressed like any other traveler he was, for ‘twas part of his task to blend into the secular world. He checked about himself, though he knew what he would find before he ever looked.
    None appeared to have even noted his presence.
    Wolfram stood out in no crowd. Anonymity was the key not only to Wolfram’s success, but also to his very survival.
    â€˜Twas no more than his due to be alone, though increasingly he found that burden difficult to bear. Aging he was, and the solitude of his life chafed within him more and more with each passing day.
    Wolfram’s gaze rose reluctantly to the gates of that place he called home. His vow to obey had Wolfram granted, and he supposed he was no more lonely than anyone else within this world. Traffic passed through the gates, those sworn to the Templars readily distinguishable from their secular guests.
    A twinge of dissatisfaction coursed unexpectedly through Wolfram that he could not openly confess his allegiance. ‘Twas an irony of his task that outside the Temple he disappeared into the populace, but here, in the place that came closest to his home, Wolfram appeared as an outsider.
    He blended into the crowd everywhere but belonged nowhere. The thought had not occurred to Wolfram before and he found it did not sit comfortably. Like the wolf he was named for was he, he realized, for his life was solitary above all else. He belonged nowhere and none belonged with him. His loyalty was to the Order alone.
    Wolfram shook the whimsy that clung to his mind like Montsalvat’s fog. A cluster of travelers approached the Temple gates from the other direction, their steeds clearly tired after a day of riding, their riders spattered with mud and no less tired themselves. Neither mud nor muted garb could conceal that these were nobles, for their posture and their retinue revealed