Chapter 22 #3
Good luck to them getting help the next time they needed it. Now that I knew what they did to the defenseless, you wouldn’t see me offering any.
“Bring your cups,” Sir Coriand commanded. “If we went to this trouble to earn them, we shouldn’t leave them here. I think I saw slots for them in the base of the clock.”
I turned my eyes back to Brindle. I didn’t care about the Cup of Tears. Not anymore. Losing Sir Branson now in finality hurt more than I’d expected it to. And I was worried about the demon. And I was so angry that I wasn’t sure I could hold all that anger inside my one measly heart.
I bit my lip hard and held on to my dog. I tried not to see how weak his breathing was, tried not to cry at how soft and furry and vulnerable he looked like this, and I tried not to think about what it would mean if Sir Branson was really gone after everything we’d been through.
Or worse … if Adalbrand offered to heal Brindle.
He’d told me he’d been one with me when he healed me, hadn’t he? He’d known me inside and out at that moment. What would that mean if he touched Brindle? Would he know what I’d allowed in the dog?
Fear spiked hard, and when something touched my shoulder, my eyes shot open and I jumped, my sword arm reaching for my hilt.
“Easy. Easy now.”
Adalbrand squatted in front of me, hands held up like I was a dangerous animal. Beside him, his friend Hefertus squatted, too, one eyebrow lifted, one finger tracing his pearls mindlessly.
“You’ve been through a lot,” Adalbrand said carefully. He was drawn and pale again. And why not? He’d nearly taken death from the Majester — who I saw out of the corner of my eye striding jauntily to the door as if he owed no man anything. There was a paladin I could stab in his sleep. No regrets.
“If you’re thinking of murdering the Majester,” Hefertus said in an undertone, his eyes finding mine and locking on, “I have prior claim. He attempted to kill me while I did nothing more violent than play a heartbreaking tune.”
“I was thinking that,” I admitted, as the heels of the Engineers vanished. There was no one left but us three. Four. I wouldn’t give up on Brindle yet.
Adalbrand ran a tired hand over his face. “I just healed the man and now my friends are fighting over who will try to kill him again.”
“I did try to warn you not to, brother,” Hefertus said, smirking at me as if sharing a joke.
“Some men were born needing to die. Your heart is too soft to see it. The Vagabond sees, though. You can’t live destitute without knowing who people are at the core.
What they’ll forgive in the rich is never overlooked in the poor, and what’s praised in the stable is often persecuted in the outliers, right, Beggar? ”
“Yes,” I agreed fiercely.
Adalbrand looked back and forth between the two of us. “Must I remind you that the God forgives us as we forgive others? Must I remind you that we are commanded not to let hate and anger seethe within us?”
I should have felt chagrined. I knew that. He knew that. I did not feel at all as I should.
Hefertus merely laughed. “Preach all you like, Poisoned Saint. But give us some credit. The God demands forgiveness, yes, but he also demands wisdom, and it would be supreme folly to forget what we saw today.”
“I can heal your arm,” Adalbrand told me gently, ignoring Hefertus, who snickered at what he clearly considered a win. “I know it’s broken. You favor it still. Show me.”
I tried to remove my gauntlet and flinched.
“Set the dog down and —”
“No.” My denial was too fast and I knew it.
He raised his calming hand again and he kept his voice carefully neutral.
“I will remove your gauntlet for you.”
So I sat with a heavy doggy on my lap as a beautiful, disheveled knight gently drew a metal glove from my hand and checked my knuckles one by one with the smooth pads of his fingers while an even prettier knight looked on and snickered.
This was possibly the most storybook-like moment of my life.
And it was drenched all through with pain and blood and awkwardness.
“Your hand is unbroken,” Adalbrand said almost sternly, as if rebuking us both for our unforgiving hearts and silent innuendo. “Let us see to the arm.”
My sleeve would not move without me hissing in pain, and eventually, it had to be cut.
“You can have one of mine to replace it when we get up top,” Hefertus said easily. “I have a silk blouse the color of a blooming lilac that would look very fine on you indeed.”
Adalbrand shot him a poisonous look that I might have liked.
It did not slow his work. He cut my sleeve slowly, inch by inch, with his knife.
His eyes flicked up to mine every few seconds as he worked, one hand cradling my arm at the elbow, the other cutting my sleeve.
His expression was open and sure. And I found I wanted to give myself over to him entirely — let him tell me what to do, who to fear, who to forgive.
Surely he could do a better job of it than I.
“I should charge for admission,” Hefertus snorted from the sidelines. I blushed hot and looked away. “I could bottle this angst and sell it to elderly kings to use in their harem.”
“Don’t talk to me about elderly kings,” Adalbrand said with an edge to his voice.
“I always forget your father was one until you get prickly about it. Your loyalty is so very unearned, my friend.”
“Loyalty is a gift, not a reward.”
“From you it surely is.” Hefertus paused.
“Not to put too fine a point on things, but we need to talk. I think we must do it now while the others are out there fitting cups into clocks. Which means the pair of you must put your — whatever you are doing with one another — to the side so that we can deal with the business at hand.”
My cheeks heated, but he was not looking at me and neither was Adalbrand. Adalbrand had the corner of his tongue stuck out of his mouth as he carefully cut my sleeve and Hefertus swallowed hard, his eyes on the dead Inquisitor. I bet that if we checked, the poor man would still be warm.
“They killed him in cold blood and they turned on me and on the Beggar.” I didn’t care that Hefertus used the slur for me. I didn’t think he noticed when it happened. “Lines are being drawn.”
“I think it was panic, mostly,” Adalbrand said, wincing as he peeled back my sleeve and finally got a proper look at the place where my bone stuck through the flesh of my arm. I hissed and bit off a whine when he tried to touch the skin close by.
The Poisoned Saint’s eyes met mine, sharing the wince. He was so pale.
“I don’t think you should heal this,” I said, forcing firmness into my voice. “You’ve already taken too much from the Majester. Just …” I felt a bit ill to say it when relief was an option and my voice stung in my throat. “Just set it if you can and wrap it. I can endure it.”
If I breathed a little thinly after that, can you blame me?
He looked from me to the dog, his face twisting with indecision.
“Not Brindle,” I said quietly.
“Definitely not Brindle,” Hefertus agreed dryly.
“I swear to the God, Adalbrand, you take the martyr role too seriously. Do what the girl says and bind her arm, and when you have the strength to sit upright, you can heal her. That won’t be until morning at the earliest, and we both know it.
The second you’re safe, you’ll collapse.
Which is why we need to speak now. We’ve been working together loosely.
We slept in one tent without killing each other.
Can we speak words to this? Can we put our honor to an alliance until we get out of this cursed den? ”
Adalbrand said nothing. His hand hovered over Brindle and fear seized my heart.
I grabbed his wrist with my good hand and his eyes snapped up to meet mine.
I’ve never been much of a secret keeper and I was afraid he was seeing my last secret laid bare in my eyes — but fearing something and letting it happen were two different things.
“Not the dog.”
He looked at me for a long moment and I winced internally at the expression in his eyes. He was weighing what it meant that I didn’t want healing for my dog. Yes, Adalbrand, I’m a mystery. Can you live with that?
He drew his hand back and cold washed over me. I could feel that with it, he was withdrawing some of the trust he’d given me, and that hurt. Even if he was right. Even if there was absolutely no way I could give in on this point.
It was one thing to overlook that I’d killed my mentor when he was possessed by a demon. It was entirely something else to reveal that I had not killed the dog the demon leapt into. He would judge me. And knowing Adalbrand, he would carry out his judgment with grim determination.
“Alliance?” Hefertus asked again, an edge of warning in his voice.
“Have I ever denied you, old friend?” Adalbrand asked, but his eyes were still on me, frowning.
“And you, Vagabond?” Hefertus asked me.
I glanced at him, surprised. He was only the second person to ever ask this, and the first was staring at me like I might shape-shift into a snake if he looked away.
“I welcome such a union,” I said gravely.
Hefertus nodded. “The others will form their own alliances. The High Saint and the Majester will work together. The Engineers will stay a pair. The Penitent will have to land somewhere. Do you think the Majester killed the Seer, too?”
“What?” I asked, genuinely surprised. That was a strange leap of thought.
“She had the key in her hand, didn’t she?
The one Sir Owalan took when he thought no one was looking and then slotted into that lock the next morning.
The Majester might have been after that.
Or he might have just wanted to eliminate the competition.
Like he did with the Inquisitor. I don’t believe his pretense at repentance. ”
Adalbrand grunted, unwilling to commit.
Hefertus snorted. “You’re too trusting, Adalbrand. Someone knew what this place was. Someone who killed the Seer before she could stop us from being sealed in here. Someone who knew she had the key.”
“Wasn’t she going to use the key?” I asked. “She was right there by the door.”
“Unless she took it from the one who was going to use it,” Hefertus suggested. “Perhaps she saw it in a vision. Perhaps she was trying to stop it from coming true.”
“Perhaps this is all speculation,” Adalbrand said firmly. “And Victoriana still has a very bad fracture.”
There was a shuffling sound and we all turned to see Sir Owalan coming into the room from the hall. The broken cups crunched under his feet like shells upon a stretch of beach.
“I came to get your cups,” he said, eyes tight. “You don’t mind, do you? Only, there are slots in the clock for them.”
“Do as you must,” Adalbrand said, returning to my arm. He was swaying slightly.
“You shouldn’t heal me,” I reminded him. “Not now when you’re so weak. Wait until tomorrow when you’ve had time to rest.”
The arm hurt — like a burning rat was chewing right through my bone — but I could live with it until tomorrow.
“We should set it at least, just in case.”
I don’t know if you’ve had your arm set by two fretful paladins just strides away from a corpse.
It was not my finest hour. I had to bite down hard on the hood of my cloak to keep from screaming as they levered the bone back into place through the tear in my flesh.
By the time they were done, I was trembling, fighting tears hard, and yet spilling them silently anyway. I felt both freezing cold and sweaty.
“We need to talk about this place,” I gasped as the pain still made me shudder.
“Later,” Adalbrand suggested. His eyes were thick with sorrow and winced every time they strayed to my arm. I missed the lighthearted man I’d met days ago.
“Now,” I insisted, panting. “This is no holy monastery to the God. Or to any God, I think.”
“There is no God but the one God and the Saints are his servants,” Hefertus quoted immediately, crossing himself.
“Yes, that,” I agreed. “And this place is not his.”
“Then whose is it?” Hefertus asked, his somber paladin eyes deep with worry.
“A place of demons,” Adalbrand said in a low voice. “A place of evil.”
We nodded with him.
“And we’re trapped in it,” I said, forcing my shuddering voice to be firm, but my teeth betrayed me. They clattered together as my body dealt with the quick doctoring done to it.
Adalbrand was gentle, but his hands were winding my torn sleeve around my arm as a makeshift bandage and the way it made the bone rub on itself forced my eyes to smart and my brain to spin.
“We have a plan,” Hefertus reminded us. “We can watch each others’ backs. But what about the rest. The puzzles? The cup? If the monastery is not what it seems … are they what they seem?”
I shrugged and immediately regretted it.
“And if we are not becoming Saints, then what are we becoming?”
“Devils,” Adalbrand said, and it sounded like a curse.
“No,” Hefertus said, chopping his hand through the air. “Not me. Not you. Not the Beggar. And we’ll do what we can to hold the rest back from the brink.”
“How?” Adalbrand asked him, meeting his eyes. “We have to play through. There’s no turning back now.”
“There’s always a choice,” I said dully. “Even if it’s an impossible one.”
“We don’t know it’s impossible yet,” Hefertus said, quickly changing the subject. “We should carry her dog out with us. She won’t be able to carry him.”
Adalbrand’s eyes lingered on Brindle for a moment and he looked like he wanted to say more, but in the end, he merely nodded. After all, what more was there to say?
They had to take three trips.
One for Brindle. One for the dead Inquisitor. And then finally one for me. For some reason, my legs didn’t want to hold me properly and I needed to lean on someone to walk.
“Shock,” Adalbrand said calmly. “It happens to everyone. There’s no shame in it.”
But it felt shameful when he’d taken a chest wound from the Majester and was still on his feet. He wasn’t the one who was struggling to keep his head clear enough to stand.
“We’ll sleep — both of us — and in the morning I’ll heal you, too,” he said, and I thought the offer was as much to comfort himself as to comfort me.
I nodded grimly but I didn’t say much. I was starting to realize the inevitable truth that if Brindle didn’t pull through on his own, Adalbrand would certainly heal him.
And when he did, he would know our secret.
And what then? Would he think I planned this trap?
Would he — like the High Saint — blame me for the loose demon in the ceiling and whisper in the ears of others until they came to slay me for my sins?