Title: A Quarter South (7/7)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Pairing: pre-Kirk/Spock/McCoy
Summary: AU; there’s something strange about the prince’s new bodyguards.
Previous Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Or read at AO3

Leonard had no memory between the sword piercing his belly and the strange room he woke in, where light barely touched a tiny, high window carved into a stone wall. At first, so senseless was he, he would wake thinking he had been imprisoned in a lord’s dungeon for some grievance he knew nothing of; but a voice was always there to calm him. On occasion it held a different cadence but each time spoke with a similar gentleness that soothed his wild imagining as much as the cold cloth across his brow soothed his fever.

He hurt like there was a brand to his flesh, he tried to tell it, over and over, and he did not want to be alone. He was afraid he was dying.

When his periods of consciousness grew longer and more lucid, he began to recognize his caretakers by face. There were three altogether: women, dressed in long brown habits and white wimples. They took turns sitting with him day and night, perhaps so that someone might know immediately if he died. Two of them would not speak to him directly once he regained his mind; they prayed in low murmurs or read from a small book. The third, and the youngest, would hold his hand as she watched over him.

Her name, he learned, was Christine and she had been given to the Order as a small child.

It felt like forever that his weakness subsided enough to allow the return his voice, but when it did he introduced himself. “I am Leonard.”

“Leonard,” she tested it. “That is a fine name.” Then she thanked him for living: “When you came to us, you were as a man already marked by Death. The Mother said it was likely you would succumb during the night or that following day but I could not understand how God could place you in our hands for safe-keeping yet not allow us to save you. I prayed to Him for His Mercy—and you lived.”

Leonard weakly lifted a hand and let it hover over his stomach but could not bring himself to touch the sensitive area. “How… came I to be here?” he asked.

“A man brought you before the crowing hour and begged us to take you in. We are not…” She lowered her eyes a moment before she tried again, “We are not funded as a house for the sick, as it might seem, and thus were ill-prepared. Several of us did argue your cause, though.” Her voice went from gentle to softly fierce. “If we can give alms to the poor, could we not give comfort to the dying?”

“Thank you,” Leonard rasped.

She patted his hand. “You are tired, dearest Leonard. I see in you that your spirit has endured as much travail as your body. Fear not, you may rest safely here.”

Leonard closed his eyes, knowing that he could not disagree.

Christine gave him what details she could of his arrival, although she admitted she had not been present at the gate as he was carried through it to a sick room. The Mother herself had undressed and cleaned him, then turned him over to the care of the younger acolytes for vigil.

Only one man had accompanied him. He stayed three days at Leonard’s bedside, and on the third day after the Mother declared his chances of survival much improved, the unnamed stranger left.

“Mayhap he had news of you to bear,” Christine offered, looking as if she worried he would consider himself abandoned.

“Can you describe him to me?” he begged her.

She blushed and nodded. “We spoke not, for he never said a word in my presence, but I can tell you he was a small man, dark of hair and eyes, and older, I believe, then either you or me. Oh, and there was something distinguishing: his right eye. It was covered.” Color rose in her face again. “It was a curious thing.”

“Scotty,” Leonard whispered.

His voice hinted at surprise but he could not admit it out loud—nor the disappointment that his savior had not the person he hoped it to be.

He spent nearly two months recovering in the monastery under the watchful eyes of the nun Christine. The wound, healed over to an angry, twisting puff of skin on his lower stomach and his back, had given him complications at first when he tried to eat, with both blood from his stomach and his bowels. His innards, he had guessed, were not healing as quickly as the skin. He did not take solid food for almost a month and a half. Without his energy he laid in his small bed wishing for time to pass more swiftly.

Christine was intrigued by his knowledge of medicine, and because no one else knew as much as he did, she let him determine his own treatment and aided him in the gathering of the herbs and supplies he requested. It kept his mind occupied, sometimes, to chart out his own progress on a blank scroll.

The pain he was in, of course, they did not speak of. Leonard bore it as best he could but often it turned his temper foul. Christine never stopped coming back to see him, however, one particularly trying day saying that she had secured the Mother’s promise to let her become his sole caretaker.

He liked to think they had become friends during his convalescence. Truthfully, at times, he saw a look in her eyes which made him feel as if in accepting her kindness, he took advantage of her. She was innocent, for all that he could see, having grown up sheltered among only women and taught to dedicate herself to God.

Now it was to Leonard whom Christine dedicated herself.

He feared that when he grew strong enough to travel she would not be prepared to part with him.

The monastery sat at a height far above sea level but the sea was not so distant as the walled-in landscape and wheeling eagles made one believe. Red-roofed and precariously high at the summit, it seemed to have grown directly out of a single pinnacle of mountain rock. The main entrance to the abbey was a stone portal crowned by geometric borders and two grimacing Christian monsters in bas-relief whose lineage might have been bears, bats or griffins, or any impossible thing. Inside lay the tiny abbey church of the patron saint and its wonderfully delicate cloister, hedged in by rosebushes even at such a tremendous altitude.

Today Leonard was at liberty to enjoy all of it. Despite how thin he had grown, the residual weakness and his easy exhaustion, he stole from his room to breathe in freedom and to remind himself that he had lived through the worst experience of his life. He found a place where sunlight splashed onto the flagstones of an open courtyard, and blue sky arched overhead. There came the sound of trickling water, unexpected and lovely, from a fountain around which some of the religious would pace out their morning meditations. Leonard went to the edge of the cloisters and sat down on the low wall there, where he could look out over a drop of several thousand feet and see thin mountain waterfalls, white against a dark forest. At this distance the waterfalls plunged downward in silence, or appeared as mere mist, while the living fountain behind him trickled without pause. As he sat gazing across the gulf, something hung and glinted in the air beneath him: a bird of prey, hunting slowly along the pinnacle walls, no more than a flake of copper to the eye.

He had spent many weeks thinking on past events and re-tracing those ones which had ultimately led him to this place. He had thought of Jim, from the first easy grin to the sorrow in his face when they parted. He had also thought of Jim’s man, Spock, who remained a conundrum for being so hopelessly loyal to someone that may have at one time kept him enslaved.

And what did Leonard consider himself in that regard? Why had he no more hatred for the men who took him from his rich and simple life?

Even now he had no answers to his questions. He only knew his hard feelings were gone, as though Redjac’s sword had freed him of them at the same moment it had speared him.

Or maybe he had freed himself by choosing a side.

In all honesty he did not know.

He left the low wall and visited the other cloisters, the chapels, nave, and a wind-worn kitchen building. Wherever he happened upon a group of nuns talking amongst themselves or in the middle of prayer, he made certain to turn in a different direction, to retain his privacy as well as respect theirs. He did not know anyone in the abbey except Christine (and the Mother—a stern, aging woman—who had visited him twice to ascertain his good health), and he had the feeling he should stay the invisible stranger.

Christine found him late in the evening by the supper hall, studying a relief of a winged lion bearing an open book surrounded by angels who looked upon the lion and book with rapture. She did not speak his given name in public, and he could not falter her for her cautiousness. When she inquired if he preferred to dine with some of the abbey’s guests, he only shook his head. They walked in silence to his room.

There he stopped her entering and told her he was leaving soon.

The nun looked at him with a wide-eyed graveness that he had not seen from her before.

“This… is not my home,” he explained, “and your Mother’s tolerance for me grows thin—rightfully so. A man is a disturbance here.”

“But you are Leonard,” she argued in a low tone, “not just any man.”

He was fond of this woman, but not so fond as she likely wished him to be. “Christine,” he said gently, “my life is beyond this abbey.” He bit his lip, adding, “And not, I think, with God.”

Christine lifted a hand, then, like she wished to touch him. In the end she did not, tucking both hands out of sight in her sleeves and lowering her eyes.

“I am sorry, milady. You have been more than kind to me. You have been a friend.”

“I understand.”

Leonard lowered his eyes too in the face of her disappointment. He stepped backwards into his room and closed its wooden door as gently as he could.

After a moment he heard from the other side, “Fare thee well on thee’s journey.” Then no more.

They provisioned him with a horse, new clothes, and a few coins. It surprised Leonard when the entire congregation came to the entrance of the abbey to send him off. They all stood silent and staring, a sea of impassive faces, as he mounted. Then the Mother came forward.

“God has given you a second chance at life, Goodman,” she said. “If you are thankful, live with only goodwill in your heart. No man is closer to our Lord and Savior than he who embodies compassion and piety.”

“I will heed your words,” he promised and turned the horse toward the steep mountain road. He was nearly to the gate when he heard, “Wait!“

Heedless of propriety, Christine came towards him in swift fashion, her habit hitched up nearly to the ankles as she ran. “Leonard,” she cried, “I must tell you something!”

He waited for her and covered her hand with his own when she laid it against the saddle.

“I meant to tell you,” she said, almost crying. “I meant to! But then—”

“Tell me now,” he said, “and it will be as if no time has passed.”

She gave him a look of gratitude. Then she told him.

Leonard sat back. “He returned?”

The nun nodded. “Some weeks ago, though I only heard of it recently from a Sister. He was with two other men, and he asked if you yet lived. Then they argued among themselves.”

“What else?” Leonard questioned, staring at her.

“They left shortly thereafter. I am sorry, Leonard. I am so sorry that I did not want to tell you!”

Leonard grabbed her hand and kissed her knuckles, saying, “Thank you, milady.”

She retrieved her hand and curled it against her chest. The smile she gave him was beautiful. “I won’t forget you,” Christine promised him.

“Nor I you,” he promised back, and spurred his horse through the gate.

“I bid thee welcome!” cried an cheery innskeeper, coming out to the inn’s courtyard to greet a travel-weary Leonard.

Leonard nodded in turn and dismounted. He let a stable boy take the horse away.

“What brings you so far south?” asked the man. “Are you going to the sea?”

“I have enjoyed a long respite not far from here. As it stands, I travel north now on business.”

“Ah. You’ll be with us only a night, then?”

“Yes,” agreed Leonard. “Might you have something for supper… or some ale?”

“Both, of course!”

“Excellent, thank you.” Leonard took a seat at a table, though it mattered not where he sat because the common room was empty.

The innskeeper brought him back a tankard of a sweet brew.

Leonard dutifully tried it and complimented its taste. Then he said, “How many inns are on this road?”

“At this fork? None but mine,” replied the man with pride. “Why do you ask?”

Leonard put down his drink and faced the man with a thin smile. “I am looking for news, mayhap as long past as a fortnight.”

The man lifted his eyebrows and made a motion of go on.

“Have you heard word of bandits in this area?”

He gasped and crossed himself. “Surely not here!”

Leonard dipped his head slightly. “Then tell me,” he said, leaning forward on his elbows, “have you come across the name Jim Kirk or of a companion with him called Spock?”

“I cannot say that I have. But why are you looking for such men? They sound like trouble!”

“Oh, they are,” agreed the prince, smiling in earnest now. “They are my trouble, and that is why I must find them.”

The innskeeper only looked at Leonard as if he might be mad, and Leonard laughed a little, shook his head, and drank.

The End

Related Posts:

• A Quarter South (6/7) – from July 4, 2014
• A Quarter South (5/7) – from July 4, 2014
• A Quarter South (4/5) – from June 23, 2014
• A Quarter South (3/5) – from June 17, 2014
• A Quarter South (2/3) – from June 9, 2014