God have mercy on me.
“I can’t think,” he confesses to me in an undertone, laced with the melodic prayers of the others. “It’s twisted my mind, wrung me into a killer. Ruined me. I can no longer be a paladin. I took off the raiment today and I’ve given the Engineers my sword.”
My eyes widen as I see he wears no scabbard.
“I want you to have the map.”
He shoves it into my hand and his haunted eyes come so close to mine that I can smell the fear on him rolling off in waves.
“Map?” I ask.
“You healed me. That means you were me for a moment. Surely, you saw. Surely, you understand. I’m tainted, Poisoned One. I’m misshapen right through the marrow. You should have left me dead.”
“I did not,” I say through gritted teeth.
His eyes look into mine, hollow and furious. “My life wasn’t yours to preserve. It wasn’t yours. He told me to kill. Don’t you see that? Did you see it when you were me?”
He sounds almost like a child pleading with me, and I don’t know why I feel tears so close. It makes no sense. I feel no pity for him. I feel no harmony with a cold-blooded murderer — no longer a knight, holy or otherwise. Not now.
And yet I have to blink very hard to hold them back when he pleads, “He told me.”
And then he’s gone, back turned to me, and hurrying to rejoin the prayers of the others, and I’m left gaping.
I tuck the map into a pocket.
With my heart open and my chest constricted, I look to the Vagabond Paladin. I wasted all the healing on the Majester — insane now, perhaps, or so guilt-ridden he’s of no use to anyone. It should never have been for him. I should have swept down to that platform and lifted her beloved dog and healed him right there.
Mayhap that is why she resents me now.
When she bends her head and bows in morning prayer, I can hardly hold my feet back as they move me slowly, obliquely toward her. She has told me she rejects my healing for her dog. But that is not up to her. I will show compassion on whom I will show compassion and if that is a dog, well then, so be it.
And I know this is unwise. If Hefertus were here, he would hold me back and raise a very distinct eyebrow. If we are to fight again, I should be fit to fight, and I won’t be if I do this.
But Hefertus is not here. And within me, something tugs me forward and will not let me go. Something good, I hope.
Because as her sweet voice recites the Prima Dolce morning prayer, I kneel beside heavy paws, and lay my hand on a brindled head, and I feel where the skull is fractured, feel the butterfly breath threading through a doggy nose. And I close my eyes and pray.
God grant your healing to this dog. Let me take upon me his woes, let me take upon me his pain. Knit him together as you have from the first.
Like always, it starts as warmth in my heart and spreads out to my fingertips, and then — for one ghastly moment — we are woven together, dog and man and — God forfend, what is that?
My eyes pop open. I’m staring into wide-open, golden doggy eyes. But that’s not what I’m seeing. I’m seeing distinctly three different beings. The dog, yes, with the scent of warm grass in his nose and a deep affection for Victoriana in his heart — you and me both, canine. But also the specter of a barrel-chested knight with sharp eyes and surprise highest in his emotions. He opens his mouth in wonder at the same time that I gasp at the third thing. A dark, twisted, painful presence. It bites my mind and heart like molten lead droplets hitting the skin.
I cannot think. I cannot reason. Fear floods my bowels and chases up into my throat and I’m choked by it, I’m gasping with it. I violently throw it away from me. No.
But for that moment — that bare moment — I am the dog who wants nothing more than to run in the grass with the wind in his face.
I am the old paladin with pain in my bones, pain in my heart, and a fierce, protective love for the girl with the brown eyes — a love so strong that he cannot simply walk away.
And I am the demon with a heart full of wickedness and it bubbles up and it boils over, and my mind begins to scream at the terrors it teases out and the horrors it suggests as it whispers and calls to me by name.
I’ll flay you alive and eat you, my treasure. I’ll gobble you up and smack my lips.
“What have you done?” I whisper.
Her eyes snap open and meet mine, and the faint glow that surrounded her as she prayed bursts like a soap bubble. She looks down at the dog, up at me, and for a moment our faces match.
We wear twin expressions of betrayal.
