“I should hope so.” She sounds bitter, too. Perhaps I am not the only one swimming in misery. Well. That credits her. She can still feel regret. Is that enough to absolve her? Not nearly. “If he lives, then he suffers. He fell a very long time before I heard his body hit.”
I grunt at that. “And the others? Where are they?”
She seems to harden with resolve when she says, “They completed the task and left. They’ll be back. They return every so often to check on my progress.”
I pause. My thoughts must catch up to my circumstances.
It is unlikely that the Vagabond would fail at a task the others have succeeded in. She has purposely refused the task — whatever it is.
There are only two reasons she might do that. She could be taking a moral stand against the evil of this place. I dismiss that immediately. No one who fosters demons in their pets would stand on principle against evil.
That leaves only the other choice. She has stayed for me — whether because she vowed to work with me, or out of misplaced compassion, or to keep my mouth from revealing her depravity.
She is a fool.
“You know I have to kill you, don’t you?” I ask her, and my deep sorrow flows through my words. “You will not dismiss the demon. You will not kill the dog. You’ve suffered evil to take a foothold.” My voice nearly breaks, but I take it in the grip of my determination and force it to be firm. “I have no other choice.”
Her chin stiffens and for a moment I see conflict on her face. And then she laughs — sudden and sharp — and she throws her blade to the floor. It crashes to the ground and I wince. She’s certainly notched the blade.
“I’m going to die one way or another,” she says, still laughing darkly. In the darkness, I think I make out a bruise on her cheek, but it is hard to be certain. “Whether at your hands, or slowly on this platform, or when their precious clock runs out. Perhaps your blade is a mercy. Are you offering me a mercy, Poisoned Saint?”
She spreads her hands and arms wide, open and ready. I can see her heart beating wildly under her light linen shirt. The candlelight exaggerates the movement, and I have to swallow hard to dismiss the image of her vulnerability. I cannot afford pity.
Do not suffer the witch to live, is one of our tenets. And a witch is not a creature from a story — a poor beggared, bedraggled woman just trying to survive. I’m arrested for a moment at that thought and my eyes flick sharply to her golden-brown ones before my train of thought returns. A witch is not an elderly woman who knows herbology and the curing of ills with plants and poultices, or the art of tricking chickens into laying again, or of finding still waters, or of birthing children stuck in the passage. No, those are common misconceptions. A witch is, and always has been, a man or a woman who plays with the arcane, who draws up demons from under the earth and sets them to dance in fire and cruelty across its surface — who permits them life.
Just as Victoriana has.
I must act before I lose my resolve. Those wry marigold eyes are softening me like butter in the sun. I dare not let them melt me entirely.
My dedication is to the God. My vow is to act and live in his name. No earthly thing has the right to subvert that. I will fulfill my duty, even if it guts me. Even if it drives me to madness.
Everything in me twists painfully and the broken arm I took from this lovely sinner throbs with the pain I borrowed from her. I lean into the pain, into the sorrow. I let melancholy build and froth.
I am poisoned with her ills and poisoned with the thought of her death. I swallow it down and it twists me from sternum to tail. Twists and twists and wracks me but I dare not let it wrench me from my course.
In such attitude are the most valiant deeds always done — in sorrow, but in earnest.
I lunge forward, sword held perfectly for a killing blow. She juts her chin farther out but she does not flinch. The air flows around me, dragging as if to stay my hand. Every sharp moment lengthening out to feel like an hour in passing.
I will plunge my blade through her heart.
I will end her now.
I will — she glows suddenly, a subtle tremor of gold.
I gasp, pulling my strike at the last second.
NO.
The word — intangible and with the distinct flavor of holiness — echoes firmly through my mind and I pull my arms back so forcefully that I wrench them. I’ve stayed my blow in time, but the momentum of my torso flings me forward even as I drag my arms backward and release my grip.
My sword clatters to the ground with hers, the sound of metal on metal singing out.
My balance has deserted me and my body crashes into her. Breath sawing raggedly, we stumble backward together.
One of her arms wraps around me instinctually. The other must catch us against the rail and turn us, because we do not fall over the side. Instead, she bends our momentum into a spin and we wheel away from the rail, bodies forced together in a clinch. We tumble to the ground to land on a bed of books. She has spun us so that she lands under me. And her chest heaves as violently as my own. Her look of shock mirrors mine. And when shock twists into relief within me, I see it twisting within her, too.
“It seems the God will not permit me to slay you,” I say slowly, wonderingly, and my voice is breathier than I expected it to be.
