Chapter 27 #2
One of her arms wraps around me instinctually.
The other must catch us against the rail and turn us, because we do not fall over the side.
Instead, she bends our momentum into a spin and we wheel away from the rail, bodies forced together in a clinch.
We tumble to the ground to land on a bed of books.
She has spun us so that she lands under me.
And her chest heaves as violently as my own.
Her look of shock mirrors mine. And when shock twists into relief within me, I see it twisting within her, too.
“It seems the God will not permit me to slay you,” I say slowly, wonderingly, and my voice is breathier than I expected it to be.
“It seems so,” she agrees, panting. “And that is a problem since he has done nothing to prevent me from turning the course of my heart toward you.”
Is it braver to admit that now — to me, her would-be murderer — or to have spread her arms to receive my killing blow?
This seals it. She will be my undoing. She is more of a trap than this place ever could be.
I can bear it no longer.
I kiss her.
It is not a soft, hesitant kiss, as perhaps it should be. It is not sweet and savoring as I might have dreamed of in the dark of the night. It is violent and immediate. A confession and an anguished plea all in one. And when I break away from her lips, my eyes smart.
My voice sounds half like a snarl. “If he will not permit me to kill you, then he must suffer me to love you.”
“Must he?” she asks, pushing a hand against my armored chest. My heart seems to thump against my breastplate, my breath trapped between my lips as her tongue had been only a moment before.
The whole world is too hot. Her wicked lips curve into a wry smile.
“That seems a terribly twisty way to look at things.”
I let out a huff of air as I fight desperately for control, to regain mastery of mind and body from this drunken moment that snatches and claws at both.
“It is the only way I have,” I confess, and then I place my forehead against hers with slow deliberation — a chaste choice amid a sea of lustful ones — and I shudder a gasp when I feel her fingers twist into my hair, tugging lightly.
But she is not content to let things lie.
“And what of my evil deeds? What of the demon I permitted to live?”
I groan in misery.
But I kiss her again before I answer, and this time I am tender about it, mindful, gathering her into my arms as something precious, and sitting us both upright.
I am also thorough. And it is only when we are both breathless and gasping that we break apart and meet each other’s eyes.
It’s a moment of such painful cherishing.
A tiny stolen snatch of life as a drowning man snatches a last breath.
I think I’ve put my whole heart into this moment.
It’s a pitiful heart, guilt-stained, broken, and rotting in some places, but hot with desire, tremulous with hope.
“What have you done?” she asks me, a little shakily. “Are you not forsworn against affection? First, you fail to kill me, then you confess love to me, and now you do as you have vowed not to?”
I clear my throat, draw back a little farther, though one hand remains on her waist, unwilling to leave her. “Yes.”
“You have kissed me. And you have done it with aching sweetness.”
I feel raw and open as her words drag my actions into the light. Anyone on the outside would judge me a fool for falling so hard, so fast, and in such circumstances. I hardly understand it myself, but I have learned not to question what is plainly true.
“What does this mean for you?” she pushes.
I open my hands wide. “I have lost all the focus I have built up to heal others — which was little after expending myself as I have these past days and nights. If someone needs healing, I will not be able to help.”
She looks at my hand, and is that wistfulness I see when she takes it gently in her own and removes it from her waist and hands it back to me? It is not rejection. She has told me her heart is mine for the treasuring.
“Then I think we dare not do that again.”
And I should be glad she is sensible and has saved us both. But I do not feel glad. I feel as though I have been left for dead upon the battlefield. I am bereft.
I pull myself to my feet and turn my back to her.
I do not know what to say. It feels like lying to agree to that.
I busy myself with pretending to flip through one of the books on the altar.
What is this rubbish? One look at one of the woodcuts within and I toss it from our perch.
I don’t care if we need it later. No one should ever look at a book such as this.
“Adalbrand?”
My name on her tongue seizes my breath in my chest.
“Mmm?” I dare not permit myself words. They will only trip me.
“Will it come back?” She pauses. She sounds concerned. “Your power? Have I damaged you forever?”
I turn abruptly, startled by the choke in her voice.
“No.” The word gasps out of me instinctively and I nearly touch her again, my hand rising to cup her face, only to fall away again.
Her hair is tousled from my kisses. And her cheeks are flushed in the candlelight. I realize, as I had not in my passion, that her lip is swollen and the skin just under the corner of it is purpled with a bruise. I cannot heal it.
“Not forever,” I say distractedly. “Has someone hurt you?”
She reaches two fingers up to gingerly prod at the bruise.
“Hefertus,” she says a little wryly. I don’t know what my face does to show my vitriol, but she hurries to add, “The Engineers told him about the demon. It would seem all good men of faith want me dead once they hear that.”
I swallow and lower my hand and say very carefully, “I think now would be a good time to try explaining it to me.”
A spark of fear shoots into her eyes and her gaze flicks to our swords still lying on the floor, unclaimed.
“I told you we were casting out a demon when it jumped into Sir Branson.”
“You did,” I agree gravely.
She bites her lip. “I had to kill him. He was trying to kill me and I couldn’t get the demon out and I would have died. And then the demon could have rampaged anywhere, hurt anyone.”
I nod. That part is all understandable. It is the other part that doesn’t sit well. The part where she didn’t also kill the dog.
“But when the demon jumped into the dog, I was able to subdue Brindle.”
“But you didn’t cast the demon out,” I say carefully, trying not to accuse. It is an effort so great that I should be Sainted on the spot.
“I couldn’t.”
I wait. If the God did not want her dead for her misdeeds, then he must have a reason. This time it is she who turns her back and drifts to the rail.
“And then Sir Branson’s soul was in the dog, too. And I didn’t have the heart to kill poor Brindle when that meant saying goodbye to Sir Branson forever.”
I feel myself soften with understanding. The old man I’d seen with the dog and the demon. I’d almost forgotten about him.
“Goodbye?” I echo, not sure what else to say.
She spins and looks at me and she swallows hard. “They speak to me. Both of them. All day long.”
“Saints.” I run a hand over my face. What must that be like?
“Yes.” She twists her fingers through her disheveled hair and looks at the ceiling.
She is beautiful, this mess of a woman. Beautiful and clever and terribly troublesome, and my fingers itch to hold her again. Her kiss still burns my lips. I want the taste of her back in my mouth. I want the feel of her back in my arms. What shall I do? I am ruined by her.
“His insights are true sometimes. But he lies to me, too. The demon, I mean.”
“He’s why you can read Ancient Indul,” I say, finally understanding.
“He lied about this place. He calls it an arcanery now. A monastery — but for those who worship demons.”
I inhale sharply through my nose.
Her wry smile twists even more. “Exactly. What do you think we’re building as we go through each step of this carefully laid out puzzle?”
“I dare not guess.”
She takes a step forward and I inhale again, and this time I draw in her musk and sage scent. “Do you believe that men make their own demons, Sir Adalbrand?”
I pause, and when I speak it’s with deliberate care. “In war, sometimes. In life, also. We terrorize ourselves.”
“I don’t mean, do people bring their own downfall. I don’t mean it figuratively. I mean in actual living breathing certainty. Do men form and shape and hammer out demons in their likenesses and then unleash them on the world?”
It’s a thought worthy of consideration.
My mind is racing through texts I have read, through accounts.
There was a war in Ghentav years ago. Before my time.
They ran out of food. When they finally were overrun and the attackers found what was behind the walls …
well. One of the scribes who had written the chronicles had died at his own hands.
Another had killed and eaten a third scribe even though there was plentiful food by then.
After that the records had grown … murky.
Our aspect had buried the records in clay pots in a church cemetery, deeming them unsafe for a regular library.
Had they made a demon on those fields? Had it fought for them and turned on their attackers? Had it turned on them?
“Perhaps,” I say, still thinking.
“I think we do,” she says in a small voice. “And a place like this makes me wonder if we made all of them.”
“All of … what?”
She speaks slowly, her marigold eyes sober and liquid in the candlelight.
“I think that we — humans — we made every demon that ever was. We manufactured them as a bowyer carves out the shape of a bow. We sculpted them as an artist sculpts a bust, with careful attention to every detail. We breathed life into our sins and hates as the Engineers breathe life into their golems.”
I inhale sharply at that, too. I do not hold with golems. And what she is saying troubles me.
“Is this why you are still sitting on this platform when the others are gone?”