Chapter 24 #3
“You healed me. That means you were me for a moment. Surely, you saw. Surely, you understand. I’m tainted, Poisoned One. I’m misshapen right through the marrow. You should have left me dead.”
“I did not,” I say through gritted teeth.
His eyes look into mine, hollow and furious. “My life wasn’t yours to preserve. It wasn’t yours. He told me to kill. Don’t you see that? Did you see it when you were me?”
He sounds almost like a child pleading with me, and I don’t know why I feel tears so close. It makes no sense. I feel no pity for him. I feel no harmony with a cold-blooded murderer — no longer a knight, holy or otherwise. Not now.
And yet I have to blink very hard to hold them back when he pleads, “He told me.”
And then he’s gone, back turned to me, and hurrying to rejoin the prayers of the others, and I’m left gaping.
I tuck the map into a pocket.
With my heart open and my chest constricted, I look to the Vagabond Paladin.
I wasted all the healing on the Majester — insane now, perhaps, or so guilt-ridden he’s of no use to anyone.
It should never have been for him. I should have swept down to that platform and lifted her beloved dog and healed him right there.
Mayhap that is why she resents me now.
When she bends her head and bows in morning prayer, I can hardly hold my feet back as they move me slowly, obliquely toward her.
She has told me she rejects my healing for her dog.
But that is not up to her. I will show compassion on whom I will show compassion and if that is a dog, well then, so be it.
And I know this is unwise. If Hefertus were here, he would hold me back and raise a very distinct eyebrow. If we are to fight again, I should be fit to fight, and I won’t be if I do this.
But Hefertus is not here. And within me, something tugs me forward and will not let me go. Something good, I hope.
Because as her sweet voice recites the Prima Dolce morning prayer, I kneel beside heavy paws, and lay my hand on a brindled head, and I feel where the skull is fractured, feel the butterfly breath threading through a doggy nose. And I close my eyes and pray.
God grant your healing to this dog. Let me take upon me his woes, let me take upon me his pain. Knit him together as you have from the first.
Like always, it starts as warmth in my heart and spreads out to my fingertips, and then — for one ghastly moment — we are woven together, dog and man and — God forfend, what is that?
My eyes pop open. I’m staring into wide-open, golden doggy eyes.
But that’s not what I’m seeing. I’m seeing distinctly three different beings.
The dog, yes, with the scent of warm grass in his nose and a deep affection for Victoriana in his heart — you and me both, canine.
But also the specter of a barrel-chested knight with sharp eyes and surprise highest in his emotions.
He opens his mouth in wonder at the same time that I gasp at the third thing.
A dark, twisted, painful presence. It bites my mind and heart like molten lead droplets hitting the skin.
I cannot think. I cannot reason. Fear floods my bowels and chases up into my throat and I’m choked by it, I’m gasping with it. I violently throw it away from me. No.
But for that moment — that bare moment — I am the dog who wants nothing more than to run in the grass with the wind in his face.
I am the old paladin with pain in my bones, pain in my heart, and a fierce, protective love for the girl with the brown eyes — a love so strong that he cannot simply walk away.
And I am the demon with a heart full of wickedness and it bubbles up and it boils over, and my mind begins to scream at the terrors it teases out and the horrors it suggests as it whispers and calls to me by name.
I’ll flay you alive and eat you, my treasure. I’ll gobble you up and smack my lips.
“What have you done?” I whisper.
Her eyes snap open and meet mine, and the faint glow that surrounded her as she prayed bursts like a soap bubble. She looks down at the dog, up at me, and for a moment our faces match.
We wear twin expressions of betrayal.
“What have you done?” she asks, and she sounds as if her heart is rent in two.
And then the floor lurches and the walls around us turn.
Her dog leaps to his feet and barks, one sharp yap.
Down the hall somewhere there is shouting, but I hardly care.
She is no Vagabond Paladin. Just as I feared. She is no paladin at all, for no holy knight would permit a demon to live. No servant of God would dwell with it — let it sleep at the foot of her bedroll, feed it from her hand, hold its broken body on her lap and shed tears.
I turn to the side, go down on all fours and heave, and then the room stops turning.
The darkness of the bas-relief carved picture is gone, facing the dormitories now, the former arrow-slit windows face the corridor to our first trial, and in both their places are long stone slit windows that run from floor to ceiling and are filled with stained glass in yellow and red and blue and green.
The thick base of the stairs blocks some of the space that should have been window, but the ones left make up for it.
They flood the room with beams of colored light.
I crane to look and see the edge of the fountain around the bulk of the stairs, now twinkling with rainbow colors.
And when I look back, a golden beam washes over the Vagabond as she beholds me with terrible hurt in her eyes.
“I’ve seen what’s at the heart of you now,” I growl. Whatever affection flamed in me before is morphing into horror. Early flickers that I thought were love are now abhorrence. I can’t stand the sight of her.
She juts her chin out. “And you’ve found one more thing that you can’t forgive?”
Her tone tests me as if she thinks can challenge me into forgiveness. As if she thinks she can make me bend by declaring the opposite of the truth.
She is wrong.
Beside her, that terrible demon disguised as a dog sinks low, tongue out and lolling, butting her thigh with his head as though demanding affection.
“I will not forgive this,” I snarl back, and the hurt in her eyes is no less than the agony in my heart. The way she pales is no less than the way I do.
And then the result of what I have just done washes over me and I collapse onto the floor. My last thought is that I hope I do not land in my own sick.