Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
Ashara
The Confession
My laugh, small but true, whittled to nothing as the doors reopened a breath later, the hulking mass of a druid wrenching them apart.
“Kneel for His Holiness, Drui—”
“Her.”
Framed in the maw of the hallway, the Butcher stood with his back to the darkness.
Light from the torches glinted off his blackened armour, haloing him in fire.
A gloved finger pointed to my chest, slightly to the left, as if mindful of where my heart pealed like a chappellum bell.
I glanced over my shoulder, finding only crumpled pillows, empty chalices, and the tall, arched windows.
I blinked once, twice, thrice, and the world narrowed to a needle point.
Unable to cajole my feet, the vice-like grip of a paxiam banded my upper arms. Manhandled through the maze of cushions, they shoved me towards the shadow of the Butcher, his veil of chain honed to every clumsy step. Laurels—the ones who weren’t weeping or asleep—eyed me through slitted lids.
“Blood Demands Blood,” the acorn-haired woman mouthed when I passed her, cupping both hands before lowering to her knees, head bent in prayer.
I had an urge to kick her in the stomach.
Five paces or so from the Butcher, I shook off the paxiam’s hold, feet now steady on the parquet.
I thought of Demetri, wrestled and pushed, and Esioul, dragged out by her hair.
Tilting my chin, I met the cool glaze of his veil and bored into the links guarding his eyes.
Guilty or no, I would march to my fate without the hounding touch of a paxiam pushing me towards it.
For a breath we stood motionless, toe to toe, slipper to boot, head to helm, neither deigning to give but an inch.
“When I say follow, you follow.” A groan of metal heralded his step towards me, helm lowering until the sway of his chain mesh ghosted my sternum.
“When I command you to stay, you stay. When I ask you a question, you answer.” His quiet voice rolled over me like Ovidian smoke, cloying the air.
“If I tell you to bark, you bark. Or else know nought but agony for every meagre turn you have left. Understood?”
“Yes, Your Holiness,” I whispered, eyes fixed on the hem of his chainmail where it draped to his chest.
Oh, to be a dog, or wolf, with teeth fit for a throat. I ran my tongue over my own, blunted and flat and useless.
Better yet a bear, then, with claws sharp enough to shred metal.
“Follow.”
Turning, the swish of his cloak clipped at my ankles.
Paxiams to my back, I followed its trail, onwards to whatever awaited at the end of the turnpike he led us down.
Every step I hunted for it, from my chill-tipped toes to the peak of my skull, scouring the deepest parts of me…
searching for that quaking fear that took hold of my limbs whenever a due was about to be rendered.
Instead, I stumbled on something else entirely: something new, something heavier, something hotter.
Around the fiftieth stair, I jolted, near breaking my nose against the Butcher’s cuirass. He’d halted, reaching for an unlit sconce on the wall to our right. Cranking it down, a cluster of stones pushed forward and swung open, revealing a small hidden corridor.
Ushered into its gape, stone gave way to redwood panelling, scratches marring the ceiling where the tips of his helm must have snagged and scraped.
The passage tightened, winding into a spiral staircase dotted with slitted windows.
Outside, only inky blackness pressed against the embrasures, Dendra lost to the nothingness of a cloudy night sky.
Ascending the final steps, we approached an arched door of indented metal, a small hatch of chain cut from its middle.
“May the Other have mercy upon ye, laurel.” The paxiam’s stale breath wafted over my shoulder. With one last spiteful nudge, I breached the threshold to cross into the abattoir within, certain I was no bear, wolf, or even a dog, but a lamb. A lamb who’d scented the sweet tang of blood.
***
What little drachmae I had, I would have gambled it all on the certainty that tongs, blades, whips, scorchers, all manner of penancer would line every wall. What I didn’t expect was paper.
The space curved like an apple split in two, small cubbies packed with hundreds upon hundreds of rolled parchments on every side, from the flagstone to the beamed ceiling.
Before me stood the back of a simple chair tucked beneath a polished wooden desk, its surface buffed to a lacquered gleam.
Candles of blackened wax, likely made from the ash-bees of Mount Garnet, dripped like droplets of ink across the gloss, staining the embellished map in puddles of shadow.
To the side, bound in another chair by heavy, rusting chains, was a laurel. A laurel who, despite the split lip and leaking wound slashed down his brow, I recognised.
“I’ll ask it but once.” The Butcher unclasped his pauldrons, hanging his cloak on a hook to his left, though his helm remained firmly in place.
The gauntlets and breastplate came next, both clattering to the floor before he kicked them under the desk, the room too modest for them to go anyplace else. “Do you know this laurel?”
I glanced at Osric, to the tangle of sandy blonde hair now matted with blood, his tent of a shirt more red than off-white, and those empty, grey eyes, tracking the Butcher without so much as a flicker to where I stood by the hearth.
Rounding the desk, the druid splayed his hand over the carving of Thromarra, fingers clawing over the southern swell of its teardrop shape. “Have you so soon forgotten what I warned you in the chamber? Speak, laurel, or bark.”
“No,” I answered as whatever I felt in the stairwell melted to something stickier. If they suspected Osric, then Demetri might be inquisitioned, too.
Perhaps he already had been. Perhaps he was dead.
“Lie!” A crack resounded as his fist collided with the side of Osric’s nose, the clack of bone turning my stomach. Blood showered over the side of the desk, splatters absorbing into the patterned rug underneath, staining its weave.
His elbow bent, readying for another.
“I swear it, I do not!” I grasped the wooden nubs of the chair until my knuckles strained white. “We exchanged a few words in the atrium after the Last Rite, but I have never laid eyes on him before this day.”
His fist hovered, still as stone in the air. “And pray tell, what did you speak of? The weather?”
I wrung my hands, palms near bruised from where I’d been gripping the wood. A glob of jellied blood landed between Osric’s boots, trailing from his mouth. “I don’t reca—”
The strike sent Osric’s neck snapping backwards, his nose now little more than a lump of ruined flesh and mulched bone. I’d squeezed my lids shut, though not fast enough.
“Eyes. Eyes!” Throat dry and tongue heavy, I twirled my buttons on either wrist in small, slow circles. “H-he told me I had troublesome greens, and I told him he’d presumptuous greys.”
The Butcher’s glove, tacky with blood, cradled Osric’s jaw, forcing his gaze up.
“Presumptuous, indeed. Presumptuous to assume he’d leave this templum unscathed, after such a lackwit attempt to conceal his tracks.
” He latched his hand from Osric’s jaw and lowered to his knees, armour gaping over their caps.
“But brother, blood always demands blood.” Two large fingers clicked, prompting the laurel to meet his helm.
“You have not looked upon her until this day? Or spoke to her before the pledge?”
“No.” Osric hacked another glob of congealed blood onto the floor, its edge catching the black leather of the Butcher’s boot.
“Very well.”
The curved dagger—the same one he’d toyed with in the chamber—flashed in the light of the tapers and hearth.
I didn’t notice the thin, neat line cut across the sphere of Osric’s throat at first. Not until the blood welled like a plague, slowly seeping from that narrow line, did the truth fully settle.
The wound swelled into a bubbling brook, then a stream, then a river, until at last, an ocean, drenching his shirt, his breeches, and the rug beneath him.
Gormless I stood, as the last ember of life drained from his grey, hollowed eyes, until there was truly nothing left, the marbles of them open and glassy.
“He’s dead,” I breathed, unable to blink.
“A natural conclusion from slitting a throat,” the Butcher replied, wiping the curve of his dagger with the edge of his cloak.
Two chalices worth of pomegranate wine emptied to join Osric’s blood pooling on the anatolian. Stomach emptied, a crackling heat stirred in its depths, like the beginnings of a fire rising from tinder and flint.
“You are monstrous.” I heard myself say, the words spilling from my lips unbidden as I dabbed at them with my cuff.
Stilling his hands, his helm turned to me, a slight tilt to it.
“A butcher, laurel, is that not what they call me? What did you expect? That I would collar his throat instead of slit it? Pat his head, call him a good boy, and feed him scraps from the table? Butchers make poor owners; laurels poorer pets, especially when they prove themselves dolts beyond one’s wildest imagination.
” Rotating the blade in the gleam of the sconce, he inspected its curve, its wicked edge shining silver again.
“Be thankful I went for the merciful kill. Other knows he’ll be thanking me in the pits. ”
“Oh, yes.” I finally blinked, a tear lining my cheek, the warmth within me smoking hotter. “I have witnessed what it is you call mercy.”
“Ah.” Sliding the dagger into his belt, he stalked to the desk. “Do you enjoy watching me penance, laurel?”
“No. No, I do not.” Another tear.