“Hardly.”
I paused. Backtracked two tiles. Tried again. Hesitated, and then just went ahead and asked.
“I didn’t really sully your honor, did I?”
“If you did, then I beg thee sully it again,” he murmured and I smiled, guessing at the pattern. Some pieces of the window had been too broken to be certain what they’d shown. Nothing. I tried a second pattern.
“Have I ruined you so you may not return to your aspect?” I asked quietly.
His gusting laugh made me pause and look up.
“No. We’d have fewer paladins by half were that true. I could turn back now, return, and my slate would be blank, as if I never so much as touched your lips. That’s certainly what the Engineer would like me to do.”
He sounded speculative.
I shook my head at myself. I’d known the man mere days, so why did the thought of him walking away from me make me feel as though my nearest kin had been ripped from my arms? It choked me up. It hurt as an arrowhead hurts when it is lodged in the ribs.
I had that happen once. A mistake when a group of us were tussling with a possessed boar, trying to root it out of a clump of thorns. A local man had loosed too quickly and the arrow had struck my rib and wedged there. This bore with it a similar sensation. Every breath brought a reminder that I was stuck and could not be free, for it was in the bone.
“Sir Sorken certainly had a grudge against me. I had always thought of paladins as holy and upright and other from common men,” I said sadly.
“We are only men.” Adalbrand’s voice was wistful. “Perhaps we once were those things when we were few, just a handful of fanatic knights swirling in tiny eddies in the corners of the reach of the church. One here, a pair there, stark in faith, swollen with prayers, surrendered entirely to a force beyond comprehension, to a God both powerful and terrible. Perhaps then, honor grew like a mighty oak, and righteousness flowed like a river, and the good won every battle.”
“But now?” I prompted as I tried a third combination. To me, his description sounded just like him. It sounded like his heart whittled down to the quick.
“Now we are bloated with men who claim to be called by the God and sent out in his service, but we are among them now and that is not what I see. I see men blinded by selfish ambition, driven to murder, to exclusion, to the mad allowance of evil thriving in their midst.”
“What then shall we do?” I asked grimly, sliding all but the last piece into place. And I meant both about the others here and also about him and I and the tangle of hearts we’d accidentally made.
He leaned so he could look me in the eye when he said, “We shall fight this evil at every turn.”
That was good. We were still one in this fight. What more could I reasonably ask for than that? I shouldn’t have said more. I knew it. I should have just nodded steadily to let him know I was on his side. Instead, my weak tongue tripped on itself.
“And when we have finished? If we survive?”
He shook his head, his expression torn as if he were fighting a second great war within himself.
“I do not know.” He looked up then, his bright brown eyes catching mine in the light of the silent golem’s dancing flame. His eyes narrowed with purpose. “But I know I will not leave you, Victoriana. Survive with me, and we will leave this place together and never look back.”
An excellent promise. A promise a girl could hold to. Even if it felt like it would not be enough.
I slotted the last tile into place as I nodded firmly to him, turned the key in the door, and then the floor shook again. Exclamations rang out from the other end of the great main hall, and the rumbling, squealing misery of the moving floor began, shaking us both as the world turned.
“Whatever comes next,” I told Adalbrand, “whether we live or die, or go wildly mad, I’m not sorry to have met you here. And I am not sorry to have loved you, however insufficiently.”
He laughed, a dark, gallows laugh.
“I like how you think, Vagabond Paladin. And I agree.” He paused as if he would say more but then he shook his head. “Let us prepare to slay demons and take their blackened hides for trophies.”
Excuse you.
“And their shriveled souls for boot leather,” I agreed, my tone still wistful, but my words bolstering me.
I’m not sure I like your claws, little snack. Retract them at once.
I grabbed his hand and held it in tight purpose to make our words a promise, but in his eyes, I found a different kind of vow. One that did not fit this grim, terrible place, but was suited more to a land where hopes and mercies still rang true. And it wrung me with a hope I didn’t dare keep, but I let it sit a moment like a butterfly resting on my palm. Not mine to keep, but mine for as long as I did not try to keep it.
“Agreed,” he murmured, and the rumble of his voice gave me just enough of the taste of that world of hope that my spine stiffened and my heart felt brave.
