Chapter 43 Jude
Jude
Jude awoke in increments too small to catalogue. One moment, he was sleeping, dreaming, something dark and lingering on his tongue like overripe fruit; the next, he was awake. Salt flooded his nostrils. Sea air stung his lips and the tender flesh under his eyes.
He groaned. The muscles lining his throat ached. Slowly, he cracked open his eyelids. At first, he could only make out the faintest suggestion of daylight coming from somewhere to his left but as his vision came into focus, so did the reality of his situation.
He remembered bells. Saints, carved and staring, mouths opening to scream. A light, growing with a voracious hunger, so bright it ate him whole. A hand on his shoulder, a cloth between his teeth.
Elden.
Fuck. Fuck.
His closest friend, someone he’d slowly come to view as a brother. Someone he had trusted.
Had it been an easy decision for Elden to make? Or had he laboured over it, chewing on it like gristle? How Jude longed to ask him. To demand the reason he was so easy to hurt.
He scraped his hands over his face and unpicked the thought, one biting thorn at a time. A spot behind his left ear ached furiously. He probed it gently, wincing when his fingers came back sticky with blood. They must have knocked him out.
Wonderful.
He was in a bed, at least, though the room was barren and cold outside of the thin blanket – rough hand-spun linen in a washed-out blue that reminded him of the sky just before dawn.
A glass of water sat beside the bed. He sniffed it carefully before taking a long drink, washing some of the stale taste from his mouth.
A lone window faced the bed. The view – narrow, webbed with iron grating and showing little more than a smooth blanket of cloud – urged him to his feet. Gold spun in the furthest reaches of his vision as he fought to keep his trembling legs underneath him.
Outside, waves crept forward in a steady crawl. Thoughts of escape were little more than a half-realized idea, intangible and lurking too far to grasp. Somewhere in the distance, singing began.
Time passed in a steady trickle. Waves and singing; singing and waves.
He should have known better than to come back. He should have fucking known.
Had Elden been in contact with them since they had left ánhaga? Or, worse, had he always been in their clutches? Was that the reason he’d been sent to Jude in the first place? Not because he begged for company, not as a boon for his continued silence, but to watch him.
In the end, it didn’t matter. He’d been dragged back to the place of his unmaking and left to await the final toll of judgement. Letting in the past and all its concealed pain wouldn’t change anything, only taint the sweetness he left behind.
He should have stayed. She should have stayed.
He felt Maeve in his bones, between his ribs, and it throbbed like a bruise. Jude bit his lip until he tasted blood. He’d abandoned her; left her vulnerable and alone. Had they entered the inn after carting him off, searching for her next?
Maeve – their iconographer turned saint. He couldn’t protect her. Not here, not anymore.
Behind him, the door creaked open.
Jude braced himself. He didn’t turn from the window, though the back of his neck prickled in warning. Noises. Someone set a plate down, cutlery rattling together. The smell of charred meat turned his stomach despite his hunger.
‘Your dinner,’ an unfamiliar voice said, the accent as thick and rounded as Elden’s.
A middle-aged man stood by the door. His silver hair hung heavy on his brow, faded brown habit stretched over a portly stomach.
He regarded Jude with a flat smile. Jude studied him, unable to dismiss the prickle of familiarity sliding down his spine.
Something about the way his smile stopped short of his eyes pulled at a memory.
The man turned and uncovered the plate. A chunk of meat, a heap of potatoes. Jude’s stomach gave a hungry lurch. It felt like it had been days since he’d last eaten. Still, he kept his back to the wall. Hands pressed flat to the stone.
‘How long are you going to pretend, Jude?’ the man asked mildly, turning back to face him.
Pretend?
‘Ah, of course.’ He tilted his head, smile falling as he looked Jude up and down.
‘I had wondered if that would be the case. If you’d forget me…
it has been so many years, hasn’t it? At our last meeting, you shut me behind a door.
’ He chuckled. ‘Jammed in a piece of wood to keep it in place. But you don’t remember that either, do you? ’
Suddenly, Jude’s knees gave out, sliding him halfway down the wall before he righted himself.
The pain behind his ear intensified, throat seizing like a hand pressed upon it.
He caught a scream behind his teeth as the man’s features doubled, tripled, fracturing for the span of a breath before they reformed with a jolt of recognition.
Jude braced against the wall, panting and weak, as he stared up at the man before him.
The man who had made it his singular purpose to torture him in every way he could, to isolate him until he wasn’t even safe in his own mind, to make him hate himself and his magic. Jude remembered him.
Ezra.
Both his mentor and Maeve’s.
How had he not known? How hadn’t she? Had her memories of Ezra been taken from her just as Jude’s had?
Anger surged up, hot and consuming – had Ezra tortured her, too?
Had he taken a knife to her skin? Pressed words to her ear, telling her she was worthless, an embarrassment to both him and the Abbey?
‘Oh, there’s your memory returned, yes? Very good,’ Ezra said.
Before Jude could respond, before he could pull himself fully upright, Ezra was on him.
The pale blue eyes that had haunted his dreams were suddenly inches from his face.
Ezra’s hand pressed against his chest, fingers digging in hard enough to hurt.
‘Sainthood, memories… why, even the Goddenwood, hm? There are no more secrets between you and the Abbey. Between you and me.’
‘Where—’ Jude fought for breath ‘—is Maeve?’
At this, Ezra stepped back. His face melted back into that placid smile. He gestured towards the bed. ‘Why don’t you sit, and we can talk about the iconographer.’
Jude shook his head, barely resisting baring his teeth.
Ezra shrugged. He grunted as he sat on the edge of the mattress.
Underneath his habit, he wore ill-fitting wool trousers, too long on his short legs.
The hems were caked in a fine layer of sand.
‘Do you mind if I do? These knees aren’t what they used to be.
’ When Jude didn’t reply, he continued, ‘An interesting conundrum, isn’t the little iconographer?
She doesn’t quite have your… rebellion, does she? But my, my, isn’t she talented.’
Jude clenched his jaw so hard pain rattled his skull.
‘It wasn’t my choice to send her away so early. I thought I might have more time to prepare her. Years, even.’ Ezra’s gaze drifted towards the window, brows pulling together. ‘It was naive to expect anything different than exactly what happened.’
‘You knew she’d be exiled,’ Jude stated, studying his face intently. ‘You knew she has memory magic.’
‘Exiled… such an interesting way of putting it.’ Ezra smiled, shaking his head almost indulgently.
‘I suppose the elders’ holy vision is true in that regard.
We know what the gold dust means, at least. I knew your lovely iconographer was a saint long before she realized.
We know all iconographers have the memory magic, hence why they are chosen to pursue the art. ’
‘And the spying?’ Jude asked.
‘Ah, yes. Well.’ Ezra lifted a shoulder apologetically. ‘The Goddenwood is not so very far away. Did you think we wouldn’t know if you tried to pay a visit, all those months ago? Even if the old woman decided to show you anyway.’
This time, the anger was impossible to tamp down. ‘Siobhan,’ he hissed. ‘Siobhan. And you murdered—’
‘Jude.’ Ezra held up a hand. ‘I hardly control the entire Abbey. Whatever happened to her, to Siobhan, was out of my hands.’
Jude didn’t believe him for a second. ‘Why?’ he forced out. ‘Why was she killed?’
Ezra studied him for a long moment. ‘Sometimes hard decisions need to be made. The sick need to be pruned for the sake of the flock. And sometimes, Jude, the sick go willingly, knowing their sacrifice is for the betterment of the whole.’
‘And did she? Go willingly?’ Jude spat. ‘Or was she manipulated to think she was?’
Ezra sighed. ‘If I may be so bold – her business, the Abbey’s business, is not always for you to know. Especially as you have made it your mission to turn your back so thoroughly.’
Jude chewed the side of his cheek. He’d never experienced such a consuming longing for violence.
‘As I was saying,’ Ezra continued. ‘Magic is fragile, as you well know. Any… tampering is like a misbalanced scale. Instantly recognizable. When you began probing into your abilities, we felt it. Is it not natural for us to want to know why? To want to protect the Abbey and its followers?’
Jude fought to keep his words steady, his emotions at bay. The last thing he wanted was his magic lashing out right now. ‘How long have you known?’ he asked.
‘A year or so,’ Ezra replied.
His words confirmed Jude’s earlier wonderings – Maeve wasn’t the only spy, then.
He wondered why they’d thought it best to send Maeve when Elden was already there reporting back.
How much had he seen? Had he, too, broken into the library and seen the memory books?
Had he realized Jude was looking into iconography?
Or had it been more mundane, more intimate, reports of long hours spent in the garden, of dawn walks in the moors.
Of pints and burnt dinners and arguing over whose turn it was to feed the cat.
Jude tried to swallow the pain, wondering if it would always ache just so violently.