Chapter 17
M y balance wavers, and I clutch at the stool, nearly losing my grip on the salve tin. Behind my breastbone, my heart careens wildly, heedless as a spooked equus. The Lupa Nox pins me with the weight of her dark gaze as surely as if she has driven daggers into my hems and sleeves. Catechisma verses float into my head but cannot take root; everything in me that should’ve been fertile soil for my God to plant His seed is instead a vast and endless ocean with no land in sight.
“I’m sorry,” the knight says, the intensity in her features waning, the eye in a storm. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I am angry that someone did this to you. I’m not angry at you .”
Even the soft-boned corset of my work dress is too tight for my heaving gasps of damp, blood-tinged air as I try to understand.
“Easy,” the knight murmurs, raising one long-fingered hand as far as her shackles will allow her. “Easy, little dove.”
Her voice wraps around me like a warm woolen on a cold winter day—entirely too familiar, entirely too comfortable. I grit my teeth and steel myself. “You just startled me. I thought you were asleep,” I manage, not as convincingly as I’d hoped. I pull my bodice back up around my shoulders, though I’m too unbalanced to begin closing the laces.
“Who?” the knight repeats, gesturing to my back with a clink of her chains. Her voice stays soft as down, eyes searching me in a way I’ve never experienced before. She is seeking, yes, but not prying, not forcing.
“I did,” I say after too many moments tick by, the words strangled. “Can’t you tell? Purifying blows dealt by one’s own hand look far different from other injuries. Or are you too well-versed in meaningless violence to recognize godly suffering when you see it?”
My tone is sharper than I intended; in fact, I hardly intended any of those words to come out. By the time I manage to still my tongue, the Lupa Nox has gone pale. A strange thing to watch, the pallor spreading across her rich skin. Her eyes widen, too, her lips parting.
“ You ?” she demands, her beautiful face ghosted with a faint green. “You did that to yourself? For fuck’s sake, why ?”
Her reaction conjures a wild flash of gratification from deep within me, but then I’m speaking, thoughtless, rote. “That is between myself, my God, and my betrothed,” I retort, still fumbling for balance, attempting to drag my cane closer with the heel of my good leg.
Understanding seems to dawn on the knight’s face; surely they have such customs within the Sepulchyre. Or perhaps they think spilling the blood of others is the only way to purify themselves in the eyes of their Creatrixes.
“That is horrific,” she says in a hoarse whisper, still wide-eyed, her gaze never leaving mine.
I swallow hard, trying to clear my mind. Her compassion is false; she is playing me as surely as we are attempting to play her. I’ve almost steadied myself when she speaks again.
“Do you need help?” the Lupa Nox asks, the low, slinking tone of her voice undoing me again. “With the salve, I mean.”
Temptation arches through me, needing and throbbing. “Do not be absurd,” I say, finally dragging my cane closer. I slide the salve tin into my pocket and then lean one palm on the seat of the stool, stretching down to retrieve my cane. Sweat breaks out all over my body, nausea rearing in my stomach as black spots crawl across my vision. With a strangled scream, I manage to pull myself upright, my right hand curled around the top of my cane. I feel feverish and raw, the pain of such a simple movement reducing me to nothing.
I cannot flee from the Lupa Nox’s cell for a second time any more than I can be found half-mad and sweat-drenched, my bodice undone, on the floor at her feet. So I run my gaze along her restraints, noting the hobbles at her ankles and short lengths of chain by her hands that should prevent her from strangling me.
“Perhaps I should accept your offer,” I say in a weak voice, fervently telling myself it is simply the best option and has nothing to do with the perverse desire to feel her fingers on my bare skin. I could hardly ask a guard—a man who is not my betrothed—to do such a thing, and even if I could, I don’t want anyone seeing what I’ve been forced to do to myself.
Leaning so hard on my cane that I fear the wood may crack down the middle, I take the final steps toward the Lupa Nox. Then, without another word, I turn and offer up my body to the Sepulchyre knight.
It is a thing of madness, but the endless pain wracking my body is madder, much madder, with teeth so sharp her storied skill with a blade pales in comparison. Besides—the worst thing that could happen is she kills me. Death does not seem a particularly terrible option, not any longer. Better her than the stake.
I’ve barely prepared myself for anything at all, too lost in the pain and the guilt, when fingertips brush the nape of my neck. Shivers break out like a trail of butterflies across my shoulders as the knight gently gathers my long waves and brushes them aside. Her shackles clink as I pull the tin of salve from my pocket with shaking fingers, holding it out at my side. The restraints prevent her from bringing her hands together, so I hold my position, allowing her to gather up a scoop of the green-tinged jelly substance.
“Some of these need bandages,” she murmurs, her breath ghosting the delicate skin below my ear.
To my mortification, I shiver, the movement traveling down my entire body like a monument to my sinful inclinations. I freeze, shame heating my face.
At my back, the knight lets out a low laugh, the sound hoarse around the edges. “No need to fret, little dove,” the Lupa Nox says, her voice like black silk. “You’re hardly the first woman to tremble under my touch.”
Fire scorches me, the tips of my ears burning. “Speak no more of your blasphemy,” I manage, fisting my free hand into my skirts. “I accepted your offer of help because I was foolish enough to think it was in good faith.” Tears bristle in my eyes. I am a worn-out husk of a person, more corn dolly than woman, trembling in the faintest of breezes. The pain is devouring me whole, gnawing at my bones, and whatever scraps it leaves behind, surely the shame and humiliation will gobble up in their endless jaws.
“I’m sorry,” the Sepulchyre knight replies. “A bit of flirtation always helps take my mind off the pain, but I shouldn’t have assumed it was the same for you. Now—I’m going to start at the top of your back and work my way down, all right?”
“Fine,” I say through gritted teeth, sweat dripping down from my hairline. For a heartbeat, I think I am about to faint, to be found crumpled in a lascivious heap at the knight’s feet by the Holy Guard or, worse, my betrothed. Instead, cool relief spreads wings across my skin. I let out a ragged gasp as the Lupa Nox skillfully packs the salve into my open wounds instead of just smearing it on top. The relief is immediate, and my knees wobble, all my weight held up by the slim length of my cane. My mind goes soft and hazy.
“Why did you do this to yourself?” the knight inquires, reaching to dig more salve from the tin in my outstretched hand. Any resistance I harbored falls away beneath the siege of her help and the smell of asphodels and the feeling of her breath on the back of my neck.
“I needed to purify myself of unclean thoughts,” I reply without thinking, so at ease I could probably curl up on the dirt floor and drift to sleep without a second thought.
“Oh,” is all she offers, making her way to my mid-back. “I see.”
“My betrothed guided me, of course,” I add, my tongue loose with the sheer euphoria of fading pain.
“He told you to do this to yourself?” the knight asks, her tone short and clipped.
I stare at the far wall, at one chipped stone in the cell’s hulking construction. That is me, I suppose—the one flawed thing in a city of orderly, proper people, my sin so obvious when lined up beside my congregation. “Yes,” I reply. “He guided me through my wickedness.”
The Lupa Nox’s fingers reach the small of my back, the effect of the potent salve intensifying the longer it sits on my broken skin. “So he watched while you did this to yourself?” she asks, a catch in her voice I cannot identify.
“Typically we take the purification alone,” I tell her. “But he remained, generously, to guide me.” Memories dig claws into my mind—my humiliation, my scorned modesty, my vast sorrow.
“And he did what, exactly?” she asks.
I hesitate for some reason, even though I am here to speak to her of the Host, am I not? And what is more convincing than my betrothed’s ceaseless love?
“He stayed with me in my darkest moment,” I answer, though the words sound overly saccharine. The only reason I can reply to her at all, I think, is because I am turned away from those thunderstorm eyes, that cunning mouth. Renault was harsh with me, yes—but of course he was. He’s been my friend all these anni, and now he’s preparing to be my husband. An entirely different role with many more burdens to bear.
“Of course,” she murmurs, covering the final flog marks.
“Though there was a strange thing,” I admit, the intimacy of this act, of someone providing care to me, bringing all my defenses crumbling down.
I explain the odd straining near his core, how he stripped me bare, the way he touched me as I thought he only should after our nuptials, not before, to the Lupa Nox. For a moment, her fingers freeze, and a charge runs through the air, thick and foreboding.
But then she’s rebuttoning my linen shift—one-handed, at that—and pulling my bodice back over my shoulder, utterly silent. I step away from her, lacing my corset back up before setting my jaw. Then I turn, meeting her gaze, words of gratitude prepared.
“What is your name?” the Lupa Nox asks. Her eyes burn with something I do not understand, her features gone feral, the muscles in her forearms flexed, hands turned to fists. She asked me before, and I refused her. But that was before—before she put herself between the High Ecclesia and me, before she dressed my wounds and listened to me without a single interruption.
“Ophelia,” I say on an exhale, my heart hammering at the inside of my chest. I’m standing just close enough that the knight can take my hand in one of her larger ones, bringing my fingers to her mouth for the barest ghost of a kiss. “Thank you for helping me.”
“Lady Ophelia,” she murmurs. “The pleasure is entirely mine.”