CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT #3
Galahad was standing beside his plank bed with his arms loose at his sides and his gray eyes on me with an expression I’d learned to read. He wasn’t angry. No, this was something more controlled than anger. It was a door closing over something he needed contained.
“You closed your eyes.”
“I stumbled in the litany. I corrected—”
“—you closed your eyes, and you succumbed to sleep during Kaelthar’s Hour.”
He said the accusation again as if repetition gave it more weight.
“During the Watcher’s vigil. The Watcher commands: do not avert your gaze. The Book of Abominations is explicit. To close one’s eyes during Kaelthar’s Hour is to open a gap in vigilance. And through a gap—”
“—corruption enters.” I finished for him, hoping it would earn me some reprieve. But I could tell by his expression that it hadn’t.
Something moved across his face then, and his lips went tight as his eyes narrowed.
“This cannot go uncorrected.”
I held very still on my knees while he sat on the edge of his plank bed.
He folded his hands in his lap as he looked at me and said nothing more, but I could see the thoughts playing out in his mind.
He was planning something. When he spoke again, a few seconds later, his voice had settled into the pastoral register.
It was the same tone he used for doctrine when he read from the Book of Bindings, for the careful explanations he gave of why the things he did to me were necessary.
“This is not punishment,” he said. “Drenath teaches that the flesh must learn what the spirit already knows. A father corrects a child. A shepherd corrects a lamb.” He paused. “Lie across my lap.”
The calculation occurred to me in the space between two heartbeats.
And it was a sickening calculation. The thing that made it sickening was how practiced I’d become at it, how I instantly reminded myself that fighting him was futile.
Refusal simply meant he forced me. It was easier not to fight him, just to do as he said.
Voluntary submission meant I retained a measure of control over how my punishment began, which meant I might retain a measure of control over how it ended.
I hated that I knew this. What was more, I hated that I’d filed this particular realization under the title of: useful.
I stood and walked to where he sat. Then I lay across his lap with my arms folded, my face turned toward the wall, and my entire body constructed around a single central stillness the way you build a wall around a flame to keep the wind from taking it.
The first strike against me was open-palmed and hard. He smacked my ass through the thin linen of my tunic. It registered as heat before pain: a sharp, spreading warmth across my left cheek.
“One for Aethon.”
The second landed before I’d mapped the first.
“Two for Verath.”
He moved through the pantheon of the gods, and as he did so, his voice was steady.
It was the tone of a man reading aloud from a text he’d committed to memory.
Each word was unhurried and placed with care, his left hand resting on my lower back in between blows.
It was warm, heavy, and still. Strangely, the stillness of it was almost worse than the strikes because it was the touch of a man who wasn’t yet doing what he intended to do and was waiting for the permission his theology was still constructing in his mind.
Another four gods called out and another four blows landed.
On the seventh strike, something changed. The blow landed lower on my ass. It was just a matter of inches, but I’d noticed the pattern and the deviation was obvious and intended. The impact was softer this time, and his hand didn’t lift immediately.
Instead, it rested there as if it hadn’t made up its mind on what it was going to do next. Soon, I felt his fingers spreading against the back of my thigh, pressing lightly, as if he were measuring something, as if he were taking stock of my warmth through the fabric.
He’d stopped counting gods. In fact, he’d stopped speaking entirely.
I heard his breathing shift into the shallow quickening that came when he was losing the argument with himself. His breath now was the sound of a man whose body had moved ahead of his convictions and was pulling them along on a leash.
His hand struck again. This time even lower and slower.
His fingers didn’t lift. They drifted.
Inward. Downward. They weren’t aggressive; nothing about Galahad was ever overtly aggressive; that was the particular horror of him.
But they were tentative in a way that was somehow worse.
His fingers pressed against the inside of my thigh.
Then they stilled once more as every muscle in my body locked.
The river in my head went flat and silent.
Corvin’s voice, which I’d kept there like a held torch went out.
There was only the thin linen between Galahad’s fingers, my skin, and the absolute crystalline arithmetic of the moment.
If I moved, it either stopped or got worse, and I didn’t know which was more likely to happen.
Galahad’s breathing was audible now, shallow and quick. His fingers pressed harder against my inner thigh, and his voice came back to me in fragments.
“The corruption... breathes outward.” He stopped. Started again. “It lives in the flesh. Kaelthar demands we do not look away. The source must be... known. To witness is to serve. To see is to stand—”
He was building his reasons why he needed to do this to me. The theology wasn’t preceding the act; it was chasing it. His hand had moved first, and his faith was running behind, trying to catch up, scrambling to throw a cathedral over something that was already happening under his palm.
I lay still and listened to a man constructing the justification for a violation that his fingers were already enacting, and the thing that settled through me was something colder than fear.
It was the recognition that I had one thing available to me, and I didn’t know how many times I could use it before he built an immunity.
“Orath,” I said.
Quietly. Without turning my head. Just the word, dropped into the charged air between us.
The seventh god. The Silence. The Untouchable.
The god Galahad had most likely abandoned, because Orath was the name he never spoke.
Orath’s was the god whose chapter in the Book of the Boundless Galahad had literally torn out because ‘Orath is not doctrine, Orath is the absence of doctrine, the gap the faithless fall through.’