Worry forced me to my wobbling feet, though my vision was blurry with tears. I rose, trembling, just in time to find Hefertus breaking through the waves and hauling himself onto the shore, supporting a sputtering, half-drowned Adalbrand. They rose together from the slate-colored sea, the water pouring off them as if in holy baptism, and my heart leapt with something that sliced through me like hope. Adalbrand was whole — bleeding badly from one side, but whole.
“Adalbrand,” I gasped, relief filling me as I looked from him to the angelic Hefertus. That giant who could lure in a thousand maidens just by walking dripping from the waves. I had questions for him later — specifically about why he’d abandoned us — but for now, my heart was full of Adalbrand and I cared not for any answer but his. “Are you whole?”
To my shock, he did not meet my gaze, did not so much as look up as he strode onto the beach with what seemed to be the last of his energy and fell to his knees beside Brindle.
I wanted to fall there with him, to wrap him in my embrace, but his lack of acknowledgment made me hesitate. Perhaps he had only wanted me while we were within the monastery walls. Perhaps all that was over now.
I exchanged a helpless look with Hefertus.
“You drown them because drowning is something you can come back from,” Adalbrand muttered, and then he half leaned, half collapsed on Brindle’s body.
His beautiful lips, dragging against the soaked doggy fur, muttered a prayer so quietly that I couldn’t catch most of it.
I’d seen Adalbrand glorious and burning with light. I’d seen him best enemies who outnumbered him, arms rippling with the fury of the God raining down. But here, praying over my dead friend, vulnerable and broken, here he was beautiful.
He laid his hand on Brindle’s head and I thought I heard him mutter, “Amen,” before he passed out, his body going slack.
I looked at Hefertus again and the big man looked sharply away, as if this was all too much emotion for him.
Movement caught the corner of my eye.
It was the rise and fall of a brindled fur chest.
A cry escaped my lips and I fell to my knees just as Brindle wriggled out from under an unconscious Sir Adalbrand.
He hardly seemed to know what to do with himself. His tail wagged to an irregular rhythm and he barked sharply before slathering Adalbrand’s cheeks in doggy kisses and then jumping up to put his paws on my chest and knock me backward so that he could give me the same treatment.
I was laughing, I realized, laughing in wonder. Laughing with joy. I caught the big furry face on either side of his head and tugged his ears gently back and forth.
“Who’s a good boy, then?” I asked affectionately.
“Adalbrand is. Just like always,” Hefertus said dryly, but his eyes were glassy and red-rimmed, too.
“Of course he is,” I agreed with a grin. “And so is Brindle.”
“I won’t ask you if he’s still full of demons,” the golden-haired paladin said, lifting Adalbrand from the rocky shore.
“That’s polite of you,” I said just as dryly.
He narrowed his eyes and I laughed.
“They’re gone,” I assured him. “All gone.”
And if my voice sounded sad, it was not for the demons. It was for my old friend, Sir Branson, buried now with honor beneath the rubble of the Aching Monastery, just as I’d asked the God to help me achieve.
“I suppose there won’t be any more trouble coming from that place?” Hefertus glanced at me.
I shook my head and he let out a relieved sigh as he scratched his beard.
“Survivors?”
I paused. “Sir Sorken still lived when I fell into the sea. Adalbrand was … trying to help him.”
Hefertus grunted. “If he had been salvageable, then the fool would have stayed and died with him. We won’t need to go back looking for survivors. Come along, then. The fire should still be burning.”
“Fire?” I asked, surprised.
Hefertus frowned at me again. He did that a lot.
