“It’s … the other paladins think this monastery might have been used for the creation of Saints.”
“How does one create Saints?” I asked carefully. That sounded like something for the God to determine, not for man to orchestrate.
Precisely.
He lifted a single brow in an ironic look. “How, indeed?”
I thought about what the demon had read. “Perhaps they say it in this way to keep the fainthearted away?”
In my head, the voice laughed and kept on laughing, echoing through my thoughts. Madness would have been bad enough. I had someone else going mad inside my mind, and that was so much worse.
“Perhaps.” Adalbrand was quiet for a long moment, his hands busy with the pull of thread through ruined flesh.
I was accustomed to horrors, but not accustomed to lingering so long over wounds. I felt my stomach flutter unhappily at the sight of what Brindle’s mouth had done. If I could keep a demon under control, you’d think I could keep my own bile down.
Who says I’m under control.
“Talk to me while I work, Vagabond Paladin. Tell me about how you ascended to your rank.”
I shivered at his commanding tone. I thought that if he ordered me to march with that voice, I would step straight into a blizzard and never look back. I glanced at his face. It was tight with pain, but his eyes were sharp when they focused on me. His dark hair was cropped short but sweat had formed around the brow of it, dampening his hair enough for a few small locks to fall over his forehead and across his temple. It made him seem younger, despite his situation.
“Did you hear the Call?” he pressed, eyes flicking up to mine from his work.
I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself, flinching at the burn in my own stitches. My work was not nearly as careful or proficient as his.
He stiffened slightly as he drew in a breath and let it out slowly. It made all his muscles flex. Even the ones in his neck.
“So. You didn’t hear the call. Or you are uncertain.”
My cheeks grew hot. I kept my eyes anywhere but his. “I knelt in vigil all night. Wounded. With the blood of my only friend in the world on my clothing. Is that not call enough?”
He grunted and then it morphed into a cynical gust of silent laughter.
“Perhaps.” He shook his head and the shake held all the weariness of a man who’d seen as much or more than I had. “You’re right. Is that not what faith is? A reaching into the darkness, conscious of the blood on your hands?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and for my trouble, I received another of those gusting laughs.
“And that solves the puzzle of why all your wounds are infected. They were not tended promptly. I watched a fellow paladin die that way, you know. It was a miserable death. At the end, he thought he saw his own mother gnawing on his bones.”
This time when he glanced at me, his eyes were an open window to vast sadness.
I shivered. “I see what you’re doing here, but if you love healing so much, why don’t you heal yourself?”
He shot me a sidelong glance with a glimmer of a shared jest in his eyes. How was he so playful when he held such sorrow?
“You know I cannot turn my gift on myself, so why do you suggest it? Are you testing me, Lady Paladin?”
Did I not mention that? my former mentor asked me.
It seemed there were a lot of things he’d forgotten to mention.
I did my best to mask my lack of knowledge, flicking my eyes to his exposed leg. “Are you testing me, Sir Knight?”
I shouldn’t have felt satisfied by his sudden flush, the bobbing of his throat, or the way his gaze couldn’t dart away fast enough, but I did. And shame mixed with it when I heard the laughter of the demon in my head.
Plum. Sugared. Plum.
“Whatever you do,” he said carefully, “do not tell the others what you have told me. Let it be our secret, me and you. A secret we take to the grave, hmm?”
