Contempt turned Ezra’s face into something inhuman. His voice was barely audible – somehow worse than if he’d shouted. ‘You took him from me. My son. You set the Abbey fire, nearly burned me alive to do it, and I lost him. He might have been weak, a failure, born without the magic he was always meant to have, but he was my son.Mine. You shouldn’t have helped him leave.’ He huffed a breath, almost a laugh as he pulled back. His gaze fell to the half-open door and the basilica beyond. ‘But I found him in the end, didn’t I?’
Memories curled at the edge of Jude’s mind, frayed like they’d been burned. Something was there, teasing him with its nearness, a realization—
‘How you remind me of him, Jude,’ Ezra said, drawing his attention back. ‘You always have. A disappointment, just like hewas. Nothing more than a coward and an embarrassment. Unable to fulfil your purpose. Like him, you too will fall beneath my shoe.’
Jude’s knees ached on the stone, matching the pounding in his skull as he tried to parse out meaning from Ezra’s spitting threats and his sudden eagerness to talk about his son.
He remembered almost nothing about the Abbey fire. Smoke, a hand clasping his. Running feet and crying, pleading voices. A purpose to his movements, even if Jude couldn’t remember what it was. A piece of the memory he trapped in a book of his final day at the Abbey floated to the surface. His mentor –Ezra– had told Jude he needed to leave to ensure no one else got hurt. A name was missing from that memory… was it Ezra’s son?
The only thing Jude knew with absolute certainty was that they had failed. The Abbey remained whole, the icons still watching from the walls. Why had he and Maeve thought this time would be any different? He’d failed to protect Ezra’s son – someone Jude guessed had been his friend – all those years ago, and he would fail this time, too.
‘What happened to him?’ Jude asked, not expecting an answer. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Why should I tell you? His life doesn’t matter, not to the Abbey and… and not to me.’ Ezra’s mouth twisted, bitterness lacing his voice. ‘It never has.’
And it was there, in the small tell of emotion across Ezra’s face, that Jude saw an opening. Ezra was alone in this life he’d carved for himself, and if there was one thing Jude knew about isolation, it was how eager people were to talk if there was someone,anyone, there to listen.
He dropped his voice. ‘Why have a child at all if you hated him so much?’
Impatience crested Ezra’s face, underwritten by a stifled strain of guilt. A need to confess – just as Jude had hoped.
‘An accident. I thought of making the woman… take care of it.Him.But, the more I considered, the more I saw the merit in a child of my own. One I could raise to follow the Abbey. To learn devotion and obedience. Even if his abilities weren’t what I hoped. Even if he wasn’t the saint he was meant to be.’
He paused, studying Jude kneeling at his feet. In that moment, in the heartbeat of silence, a flash of disappointment moved across Ezra’s face, unmissable and unhidden.
It hit Jude like a punch to the chest.
Had Ezra chosen Jude to be his stand-in-son when his own had failed to produce the magic he coveted? Was that why Jude had been punished time and time again, singled out amidst all the other acolytes, given just enough attention to keep him glued to Ezra’s side? For a child raised in the Abbey, attention was a hard-to-get commodity, valuable even when it vacillated from care to punishment with little warning and even less explanation. Was that why he had returned to Ezra time and time again like a beaten dog, hoping that maybe, justmaybe, this time would be different?
Jude had been so afraid –still, he couldn’t stifle the instinctual rush of fear when he looked into Ezra’s eyes – but he’d grown enough to recognize his mentor for who he was.
A pathetic, crumbling old man.
Darkness ebbed closer in his peripherals, but Jude didn’t flinch. ‘After the sun sets today, even if my body is cooling in a grave, I will be better off than you, Ezra. You will never run far enough to escape what you did. When you remember me, remember your son – I hope itburns.’
For a moment, Jude thought Ezra was going to lunge at him.
He almost hoped he would.
Violence tingled at his fingertips. His mind ran hot, blood coursing with the memory of Ezra’s voice. Ezra’s hands, carvingDEVOTIONinto his skin, as if marking his skin with the word would reap the loyalty and love he desired. Jude imagined risingup from the ground, placing his hands around his mentor’s throat andsqueezing. Life would fade from those cold, pale eyes as he placed his palm over Ezra’s mouth to stifle his screams. He’d leave his body here. Let it rot into the Abbey’s foundation, where like recognized like.
Maeve, he reminded himself, desperate to keep his knees firmly on the stone beneath him. Ezra could do whatever he liked to him as long as she was kept unharmed.
The air between them thickened, becoming an entity all its own. Ezra looked away first. The hand at his side flexed and released. ‘It’s time to go.’
Jude turned his gaze upwards as he got to his feet and walked from the room and into the main basilica.
He wouldn’t look at the crowd parting around him; their eyes, hazed with longing and hunger. The hands touching his sleeves, the ridges of his spine. Incense in his nose, thick and familiar. The gems and thick ropes of brocade embroidery on his robes whisked against the stone floor behind him. His neck ached with the weight of the sigil swinging from a gilded chain, starkly gold against the black fabric. He was a puppet, and Ezra held the strings.
They moved down the long expanse of the nave, past the low railings guarding the chancel, and towards a ladder at the side of the wood and marble altar at the front of the room. High above his head, the rose window gleamed like a talisman of light.
The crowd’s singing grew louder, drowning out even the rush of blood in his ears as he ascended the ladder and stood atop the altar, Ezra by his side. He placed his hand on Jude’s neck, saying something in a clear, authoritative voice. Jude didn’t bother to listen as he was forced once more to his knees. The hands left his skin, and he was alone once more.
Beneath him, the carved embellishments in the wood dug into his skin. Jude turned his gaze upwards. Every colour he could think of streamed from the rose window, and how beautiful itwas. Indigo and crimson, azure and vermilion. He could stare at it forever.
How many years had he spent kneeling under this window, praying for absolution?
He’d picked himself apart in the name of piety, searching out his faults and laying them bare before his mentor and the saints. He’d carved himself to the bone in an attempt to be remade. And what had he gained in return? Tattoos on his flesh and the chance to die as a martyr?
