Dark Heart by Margaret Weis;David Baldwin Page A

serenity eased his troubled heart.
    “From the first moment I saw you,” Justin whispered, “I hoped that you would someday look at me with that gaze in your eyes.” He smiled. “Your love gives me the strength to go on.”
    She took his hand in her own and pressed it against her heart. Soot from his clothes rubbed off on her white dress.
    “My love,” she said, “my heart pains me some days, so full it is with all that I feel for you.”
    “And you will stay here, won’t you? You won’t go into the village? You’ll keep yourself safe for me?”
    “I will be by your side, my lord, no matter what should befall us.”
    Justin looked into her deep brown eyes. He slipped one hand into her silky hair and smoothed it. “I am afraid for us all, you know. I don’t want to die, my beloved Gwendolyne. I don’t want any of the people I love, or any of the people who depend on me and whose work provides the wealth of this estate to die, either. Surely there must be something more I can do…”
    “Some things, my lord, are in the hands of God, not man. And you have done enough for today.” Gwendolyne pushed him back against the pillows. Her lips pressed onto his. Her hair, the scent of her warm body, surrounded and caressed him. No matter what hell he had tromped through each day, no matter what unspeakable miasma clung to his skin after his travels and adventures, she always welcomed him into her arms. She smelled like flowers on a spring day. He clung to the familiar comfort of her embrace, let it take him far away from the smoke, the flames, the dead and dying he’d purged from his lands with fire.
    But as he closed his eyes and pulled her even closer, finally at peace, the moment was snatched from his grasp, even as one nightmare was ripped away from him and a new, though ancient, horror seared into his thoughts.
    He knew what was coming next; this vision from his past was far too familiar, and the hell that followed a frequent, if unwelcome, visitor to his mental gallery of guilt. He felt time sliding by, running through his ineffectual grip like a catapult’s rope through ungloved hands, burning him unbearably.
    He screamed, begged the fates to release him, but when he opened his eyes again it was too late. His wife was still before him, but horribly changed. Her face was drawn, her brown eyes cloudy. Even the soft scent of flowers that had surrounded her ever since he’d met her was gone, replaced by the acrid scent of disease and despair.
    He was dying.
    I am afraid it is necessary that you die…
    “No!” Justin refused to believe it. He looked down at the fine linen sheet that covered him, hiding underneath its snowy expanse the strange and alien thing his body had become. He threw the bedclothes aside. As he’d suspected, the black spots were spreading. They dotted his shins, his thighs, his chest, and his arms like rot on a decayed fruit. Lumps the size of his fist, the swollen glands called buboes that gave bubonic plague its name, pushed up against the tight, bruised skin of his groin. His breath came in short, painful gasps—each lungful of air a burden dragged with great effort past the enlarged glands in his neck. His arms lay stiffly on the mattress, far away from his sides, pushed out from their accustomed positions by massive lumps in his armpits.
    And he hurt, he hurt everywhere. The pain was unbearable, and it made him crazy. When the spots had first appeared, Justin had refused to believe he could be in the grip of the illness. The plague was for peasants. Surely his exalted position in society would protect him. He’d been blessed by God through the whole of his life, been given talent, beauty of form and face, the means to provide himself and his family with everything they could ever want. How could God desert him now?
    But the Black Plague spared no one, king or commoner. It seemed to be God’s own curse, and, as such, did not respect the order that He Himself had established.
    When