Adalbrand removed his breastplate and backplate and with calm care, we pressed our spines and the blades of our shoulders together, set the swords across our knees, and each faced one of the still golems. In between them, Brindle chewed happily at Suture’s arm. And behind him, three twisting shapes grew more and more clear as they were formed from darkness and desire and selfish ambition.
I could see Sir Coriand’s head from where I sat. And the sight ate at me. I had killed him. He’d deserved it most assuredly, but even with his confession hot on his lips, the men of my aspect would want an accounting for his blood. I would be trialed. I may even be condemned. I had a thought that likely Sir Sorken would demand such, and if not him then the High Saint, and they would be right to require it of me. I’d killed a fellow holy knight. One did not just get up on their horse and ride away after that.
“Bless me, for I have sinned,” I said in a small voice, unable to see Adalbrand’s face, but snaking my off-hand back to find his hand.
He twisted his blunt, calloused fingers in mine readily enough. “I cannot be both your lover and your confessor, Lady Paladin.”
I shivered at the word “love” but he did not sound as if he judged. He sounded … tender.
“Must I choose then?” I asked wistfully. For I wanted him to be both. I wanted both the holy Saint and the tantalizing man. Was that too much to ask for?
“Yes,” he whispered, and his whisper sounded amused. “You must choose, Victoriana.”
And it was how he whispered my name — as if by caressing it with his tongue he could caress me, too — that made me bold enough to lay my heart bare. And why not? What had I left to lose?
Everything?
Why should I not make him both lover and confessor when the hours of my life slipped away like the hours of a winter day — too short, too dark, too pallid?
Do not do this. You leave yourself open to ruin.
Then he could ruin me. I cared not.
I whispered my reply, and if the demon or the dog or the missing knight minded, then they could go chew a golem bone for all I cared.
“I cannot choose one or the other, for my heart has made me yours down to its inmost weaving.” I couldn’t help but turn my head over my shoulder toward him so that I could catch the edge of his suddenly flushed cheek out of the corner of my eye.
“There is no longer a choice,” I went on. “You’re beloved or no one is. You’re treasured or I can no longer treasure.”
His back on mine was warm enough to heat me through — almost warm enough that I wondered if his heart were suddenly beating hard and fast just like mine.
“I was not made for flighty love, for pleasure without allegiance, for enjoyment without cost, for easy affection without eternal loyalty. Draw me close or cast me away, it makes no difference to the direction of my heart.”
I heard the sharp drawing in of his breath, caught the edge of his parted lips from the corner of my eye. It made my cheeks tingle, they’d grown so hot.
“I’ll love you still even if I go back out to my wandering paths and never set my eyes on your form again. I’ll love you in the dark caves and earthen sets of my heart. I’ll love you in the silent hours when the world sleeps. I’ll love you when I stare long into the heart of the fire in the cold of the night, when the wind sweeps across a world of ocean only to tangle through my hair, when the snow melts and the scents of the hopes of dreaming grasses release into the air, and I’ll love you yet when my soul at long last releases from this flesh and wings its way to the God. Even then will I treasure the sweet taste of your name on my lips, of the knowing of you on my heart. You have set me as a seal sets wax. I am changed forever and none but thee can break the seal and open me.”
Perhaps that might have seemed an extreme statement to make about a man I’d only met a few days before. But this close to the forces of life and death, to heaven and hell, with our souls and loyalties laid bare and all our secrets out, it felt perfectly natural to leap into life with the same intensity that it was setting upon us.
We were, without consciously meaning to, angling our faces away from the others, and for a moment we were both looking over our shoulders at one another, our breath mingling hot between us, our fingers tangled like roots of two unlike trees, and a mutual understanding hanging heavy and full in the air between us. After a very long moment, he nodded.
“I have thoughts on that,” he said quietly. “I have many thoughts. But they are not for this place. Or for the robber ears of our enemies. Go to sleep, Lady Paladin. I will watch your back and pray to the God for a solution to this madness.”
I wished he would tell me his thoughts anyway. It felt almost painfully vulnerable to have exposed myself so thoroughly. Perhaps he regretted the things he said earlier. Perhaps he was not so set on me as I was on him.
Perhaps he’s looking at a headless corpse and a frozen golem that wants him dead and a demon-infested dog chewing the arm of a living thing and he’s just not in the mood to be overly chatty.
Perhaps.
I smiled wryly and settled back in place, facing forward again, and when I shut my eyes the exhaustion of my body overwhelmed the tense longing of my heart. I was asleep in three breaths, but not before I heard the faintest of whispers.
“Doubt anything you like, Victoriana, Lady of the Rejected Aspect, but do not doubt me. Though all the world rejects you, I never shall.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Poisoned Saint
And now I come to the heart of the matter, having danced around the edges for far too long. It is easy indeed to become enraptured by what is before you, caught up in the warp and weft of the weaving of your life and to — as a result of that — lose sight of the pattern as a whole.
