“You forgave the Majester. You saw what he did and you healed him anyway.”
He said nothing and his quiet compelled me to speak, though my brain was hot and wild with pain and possibly infection.
“You’re a mystery, Poisoned Saint. Why do you refuse to believe you can be forgiven when you forgive everyone else?”
His wry snort was so faint I barely caught it at all beyond a soft gust against my cheek.
“You tell me, Vagabond. You have so much courage that you wade into danger without a thought. If you have so much faith in the future, why can you not have faith in the God?”
We lay there in silence under the tent of my bearskin cloak for a long time. And whether he was wounded by my question or taking his time to think — as I was — about the truth laced all through it, I did not know. I knew only that he had caught me and cut me with his precise words, and I could not shake the two sides of myself that could be both brave and cowardly all in one.
When I woke a third time, I thought I was dreaming. Hands gripped my waist and someone murmured endearments sleepily beside me. I leaned drowsily into the caress.
My broken arm twinged and I came back with sudden clarity to where I was. I was sleeping on a tiled floor in a grave under a fur cloak with a beautiful holy knight who apparently whispered sweet reverences into my ear as he slept.
The ferocious pain in my broken arm mixed with the ineffable sweetness of this moment that wasn’t mine to keep. I let the two sensations twist together, let them hurt and heal, keep me in the moment, and draw me away from it. And I did not know if the pain was my friend or the pleasure, for the pleasure was forbidden and the pain was rightly mine, but both sang hard and sharp and full.
Adalbrand nuzzled blearily against my good shoulder and tears sprang to my eyes. I should wake him and bid him stop. But we’d both removed our armor the night before and stripped down to soft inner layers — modest enough, but they did nothing to prevent the exchange of warmth between us or the softness of his body melding into mine.
My eyes smarted, and not just for the jarring hot pain of my broken arm but for the forbidden sweetness, the gift that was not mine to accept, the desperate, sudden want that filled me from brow to boot buckles and left me trembling.
And it was not lust, for lust is of the body. It was something deeper, something more bitter, something so much more full-bodied than the mere want of physical sensation could ever be. It was the call of soul to soul and the answer. The question and the reply. His arms bid me accept him and his soft murmurs bid me receive his acceptance.
And I did. God have mercy, I did.
I could tell the moment he woke for his nose no longer stroked my cheek and his delicate fingers froze against my fevered skin.
He let out a trembling exhale.
“Victoriana?” His whisper was so faint I doubted anyone could hear it past the fur cloak.
“Adalbrand.” I heard the tightness in my voice, the embarrassing way that it softened his name, even caressed it. My cheeks were hot with the admission.
He cleared his throat quietly.
“I’ll heal your arm now, the God willing.”
“Yes.”
Could a Poisoned Saint choose to love? Did it matter, when I so clearly had accidentally lost my heart to him?
Call me a fool if you want. Call me an inexperienced girl. I was all those things. But I was also honor and fidelity to my core. I had set my feet on the path of the God as a child and I did not turn back through the lashing winds of poverty and the cold chill of friendlessness. I had set myself to serve Sir Branson and I did, right up to the moment I served him by releasing him from the grasp of an enemy. When I set my path, I did not look back.
And now I had set my heart on the man who drank poison for others and ate their pains.
As he set his hand upon my arm and offered his thick-tongued prayer, I felt that firm purpose settle through me, felt that kindled love throb like embers banked in a careful fire, and as the healing took and my arm was whole again, I knew he felt it, too.
I felt how he carefully drew his hands back to himself. Heard him sigh in what tasted like regret. Heard his quiet, self-deprecating curse.
And I dared not say a thing, for now he knew. He knew as no one else ever could, even were I to say a thousand words of confession. My very heart had betrayed me to him.
When he retreated from me, I noticed he only put the smallest distance between us, only put enough to be decent, enough to tell me not that he was disgusted or disparaging, only that he did not yet know the answer to my unspoken question.
His breath took a long time to even out.
Mine took even longer.
It did not help that I heard Hefertus cough in a way I was relatively certain was meant to disguise a laugh.
