Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Vagabond Paladin
I would be the first to admit that my education was slapdash at best.
Well, yes, do excuse me for that, my girl.
There was just so much to show you, and the things people think of as education are …
well, sometimes they don’t seem like a real priority when you can be looking at how a blue jay puffs in the cold or how to best make a fire draft well.
I mean, seriously, one must enjoy life a little.
One must. In fact, could I suggest enjoying it right now? Maybe find a nice treasure to steal and break all your vows, hmm?
While I knew one hundred and forty prayers by heart …
See? I did teach you some things. Though, most of the rote prayers came from your dearly departed mother.
And while I could sing both the melodies and harmonies of the Hymnal Vox, and could recite the thirty-seven ways to ceremonially cleanse a site of demonic influence and the twelve great castings for the removal of a demon, along with the four ways of discerning between spirits, and the smoke rites of the dead and dying …
I did better than I thought. That’s a prodigious list. I wonder if I could be awarded a posthumous medal of some type …
I knew all that, but I knew very little of ancient architecture and geography.
Stuffy nonsense, anyway. Which Vagabond Paladin need know those things? Tell me the name of the puffed-up fool.
Me. I was the puffed-up fool.
The geography of the current world is enough to keep our feet on the path and the quick reading of other humans tells us whom to help and whom to fear. You may yet thank me that you learned those lessons well.
When I pushed my way out of the tent, it had snowed in the night. I bit my lip so hard in my effort to control my frustration that I drew blood.
Not confident of your ability to track in the snow?
There was a mocking note to that.
It was not tracking in the snow that was the challenge. It was following tracks under the snow that was problematic.
This close to the Rim, it was still winter, though south of here it was deep into spring.
The sun rose in that strange way it sometimes does in a snowstorm, where a snow mist has risen up, cloaking the world around you in a fog of ice particles thick as milk, but glowing so brightly in the area close to you that it seems nearly as golden as the heart of an egg.
It was almost heavenly. Almost divine.
Hardly. Your theology knows perfectly well that heaven is not merely a golden haze but the next adventure for the righteous.
That was certainly Sir Branson. He had lectured me on the same often in life, since the day I found him in the village square and begged to be made his squire supplicant.
I had eleven years to me at that time. My parents were taken by the grippe quite suddenly.
I was lucky to have survived it. When I came to Sir Branson with my request to join him as squire, he sold his second pair of boots to buy me a teddy bear.
I was far too old for it. But I kept it anyway until I gave it to another child just last year.
I wished now that I’d not gifted it away.
That’s not a sniffle I hear in my mind, is it?
It’s harder when you’re distilled to just your heart. You lose the outer shell. Defenseless as a newborn babe. Don’t look. It’s embarrassing.
There was nothing to look at but Brindle, who was occupied with cleaning his underside with a thick pink tongue.
Ha! Don’t lie, old knight. You’re hardly defenseless or you would have caved to me by now and relinquished this agonizing stalemate. Tell me then, where is this soft point? Where ought I to send my next barb? What pity shall I twist and ply you with until you beg for merciful relief?
Well. I guess that explained a few things. Their battle was not settled. At any moment, I might find I had only my former paladin superior following beside me … or I might find I must contend with a newly escaped demon. He’d made vows to me … but I couldn’t rely on that.
Have no fear of my valor. I will stay the course.
I wanted to sigh. But what would be the point?
Instead, I packed camp, tended poor Halberd, who liked the snow no better than I, ate a meager breakfast of a small handful of oats, and offered a piece of jerky to Brindle, who snapped it up in a bite and nuzzled my hand for more.
“You’ll have to hunt on the way,” I told him sternly while I rubbed behind his ears. “I’m low on supplies and have no way to get more.”
Brindle put his nose to the ground and made a solid job of sniffing anything available before making his mark on a fallen tree. It was hard to believe that such a very doggy dog could be anything else.
My side ached, and I possibly should tend it, but I hadn’t been warm in days, not even with the tiny cook fires I was kindling, or the quilt, or the cloak, and I didn’t want to take off even one layer of clothing if I didn’t really have to. Besides, my orders said no delays.
By the time I had everything packed, Brindle was dancing back and forth across what I could only guess was the trail. I hoped he was right. It would be enormously embarrassing to have to confess to my superiors that I had been misled by a demon.
I rested one hand on the head of my dog as the wind tore at my long, loose hair and my tattered cloak and tabard. The land behind me was all I’d ever known. The land ahead, a crooning mystery.
It was maybe an hour after we set out that the fog began to lift, and by the time it was clear enough to see, I drew Halberd up in shock.
We were moving through a forest, alright, but not a forest of trees. The land here was strewn with ancient grave markers — the type I’d only ever seen when Sir Branson drew them in the dirt for me during a lesson.
Yes. Gravebars, he said now in my mind as I swallowed. They used to decorate them with dangling strings of bones sometimes.
The uprights were tall and carved precisely of stone that was probably older than anything I’d ever seen, barring the bones of the earth herself.
At least two-thirds of the lichen-etched markers had been pushed over — all in the same direction, I noted — and some crumbled to chunks of rock or even nothing more than a depression filled with broken debris.
As if the ice slid across them and tumbled them. Which, obviously, it did.
But then why were any still standing?
Let some things be a mystery.
I didn’t like unsolved mysteries.
Then life will be difficult for you. How grand.
I rode between the denuded grave markers, Halberd’s hooves squishing into pale sod as the snow quickly melted to rubble-strewn pools. Everything had gone grey. Sky. Markers. Path. I misliked it. It made this place feel dead.
I almost felt relief when I stirred up a flight of crows. They screamed their annoyance as they launched into the sky. Something lived, at least, though they’d find little carrion here so soon after the Rim moved.
I looked around me nervously. This world had been thickly encased in blue ice not a turning of the moon ago.
Did that mean that even now, the Rim was moving somewhere to the south, eating up lands we would not hear were gone for many months and — possibly — trapping the people of those lands in place, dead, yet preserved in grisly perfection?
It’s not our problem one way or another. The sun rises and sets over the plane of the earth. Beneath us, the great depths of hell lie cold and uncomprehending in the darkness beneath the earth.
I waited to see if there would be more “wisdom.” There was not.
Blessedly, the fog cleared quickly, revealing a trail beat into the long, damp grass where about a dozen horses had recently passed, and since it was well-trampled and clear, I kicked Halberd into a solid pace and called to Brindle to follow.
We covered ground as quickly as it was possible to cover it.
The graveyard was dotted with pools of standing water and it was not long before Brindle was dripping with it, shaking it from his coat and running impatient loops around me.
Was it possible that the ice rim had melted rather than withdrawn?
It doesn’t melt. It doesn’t scrape the land either. It simply moves in ways known only to those not mortal. Fancy you thinking otherwise. Magic is magic, girl. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you can use it.
I made a sound of annoyance at the back of my throat. I was not fond of mysteries.
I wouldn’t take a devil’s explanations too seriously anyway.
I peered into one of the ponds for clues. It was simply the yellowish color of snowmelt, bits of surrounding foliage floating in the otherwise glass-smooth surface. My reflection looked back at me. What a sight.
I looked exactly as I was — a woman who had only barely won a battle against her own paladin superior and a demon, and then ridden for days on end without stopping anywhere that possessed a bath.
If there was one thing I knew about appearances from my travels, it was that first impressions were important. Arrive at the meeting point looking unkempt, and the other paladin aspects would immediately disregard me, or worse, pity me. I was too young to afford that.
I chewed my lip in thought.
There was no way to clean up properly. But what if I chose to purposefully mark myself?
They’d think I was crazy. Unpredictable.
That could work. It’s hard to bully people who make you nervous.
At the next puddle, I grabbed a handful of grey clay from the edge of the pool and spread it thick through my hair where it sprang at my forehead, and then carefully swiped it into wings at either side.
Without washing my hands, I plaited my hair to one side, letting the clay form around the strands of the braid.
I rubbed my fingers in the clay again and then spread them like a fan across my chin and swiped downward.
There.
Saints and Angels, but I looked hideous now. Exactly as I intended. I looked fearsome and worthy of respect rather than lost and forlorn.
Are you forlorn? Sir Branson asked me.