“Wasn’t she going to use the key?” I asked. “She was right there by the door.”
“Unless she took it from the one who was going to use it,” Hefertus suggested. “Perhaps she saw it in a vision. Perhaps she was trying to stop it from coming true.”
“Perhaps this is all speculation,” Adalbrand said firmly. “And Victoriana still has a very bad fracture.”
There was a shuffling sound and we all turned to see Sir Owalan coming into the room from the hall. The broken cups crunched under his feet like shells upon a stretch of beach.
“I came to get your cups,” he said, eyes tight. “You don’t mind, do you? Only, there are slots in the clock for them.”
“Do as you must,” Adalbrand said, returning to my arm. He was swaying slightly.
“You shouldn’t heal me,” I reminded him. “Not now when you’re so weak. Wait until tomorrow when you’ve had time to rest.”
The arm hurt — like a burning rat was chewing right through my bone — but I could live with it until tomorrow.
“We should set it at least, just in case.”
I don’t know if you’ve had your arm set by two fretful paladins just strides away from a corpse. It was not my finest hour. I had to bite down hard on the hood of my cloak to keep from screaming as they levered the bone back into place through the tear in my flesh. By the time they were done, I was trembling, fighting tears hard, and yet spilling them silently anyway. I felt both freezing cold and sweaty.
“We need to talk about this place,” I gasped as the pain still made me shudder.
“Later,” Adalbrand suggested. His eyes were thick with sorrow and winced every time they strayed to my arm. I missed the lighthearted man I’d met days ago.
“Now,” I insisted, panting. “This is no holy monastery to the God. Or to any God, I think.”
“There is no God but the one God and the Saints are his servants,” Hefertus quoted immediately, crossing himself.
“Yes, that,” I agreed. “And this place is not his.”
“Then whose is it?” Hefertus asked, his somber paladin eyes deep with worry.
“A place of demons,” Adalbrand said in a low voice. “A place of evil.”
We nodded with him.
“And we’re trapped in it,” I said, forcing my shuddering voice to be firm, but my teeth betrayed me. They clattered together as my body dealt with the quick doctoring done to it.
Adalbrand was gentle, but his hands were winding my torn sleeve around my arm as a makeshift bandage and the way it made the bone rub on itself forced my eyes to smart and my brain to spin.
“We have a plan,” Hefertus reminded us. “We can watch each others’ backs. But what about the rest. The puzzles? The cup? If the monastery is not what it seems … are they what they seem?”
I shrugged and immediately regretted it.
“And if we are not becoming Saints, then what are we becoming?”
“Devils,” Adalbrand said, and it sounded like a curse.
“No,” Hefertus said, chopping his hand through the air. “Not me. Not you. Not the Beggar. And we’ll do what we can to hold the rest back from the brink.”
“How?” Adalbrand asked him, meeting his eyes. “We have to play through. There’s no turning back now.”
“There’s always a choice,” I said dully. “Even if it’s an impossible one.”
“We don’t know it’s impossible yet,” Hefertus said, quickly changing the subject. “We should carry her dog out with us. She won’t be able to carry him.”
Adalbrand’s eyes lingered on Brindle for a moment and he looked like he wanted to say more, but in the end, he merely nodded. After all, what more was there to say?
They had to take three trips.
