“I’m coming into your tent to help,” I murmur. “Please, do not kill me.”
I think I hear a grunt, but I’m not sure. I take a deep breath and push my head into her tent.
My eyes are still adjusting to the darkness when a hand snakes out, seizes me by the throat, and I am launched backward through the door with a heap of paladin on top of me. She’s wrapped in layers of rags so that I don’t know where paladin ends and rags begin. I hit the ground hard, seeing stars, and then her face is right there, white eyes tinted coral in the firelight. She’s lighter than I expected.
“I’ve looked and looked again,” she says, her breath sawing out of her lungs. It stinks of fear. “At the end of every road is death.”
“And such is true for all of us, sister,” I whisper gently, trying to get a hold of her shoulders so I can ease her weight off my chest. My aching ribs feel like they might give. It’s only a perception. I’ve taken the pain in the ribs but mine are actually undamaged. But perceptions can feel real.
“Every vision is the same no matter the decision. There is no path out.” She bats her hands frantically at my chest. “How can I prevent it? How can I stop it?”
I try to soothe her. “All is in the hands of the God.”
“You don’t listen, boy.” She grabs the front of my jerkin and shakes me. “It all ends in evil. It all ends in death. I see no way forward except through blood.” Her eyes roll back in her head and her jaw clenches as she begins to shudder and shake, seizing right on top of me.
I manage to finally get a grip on her and spin her so that she’s on her back.
My hands find her face and I try to take her pain, her misery — but whatever this is, it is not a thing I can take from her. I drop my hands, stymied, reciting a prayer in a frantic whisper.
When she finally stops shuddering and is still, I lift her and carry her back to her bed. Her breathing slows and evens and I think she is asleep, but I am deeply troubled. What has she seen that has left her in this state?
I can’t go back to my bed. I wait outside the entrance of her tent, pull out the rosary my paladin superior gave me when I ascended, and say prayers as my fingers skim along the teeth that comprise the rosary beads.
“A Poisoned Saint must know two things, Adalbrand,” he’d told me. “Prayer and body. Know the body so you may heal it. Know the prayers that you may know the one who heals. That’s why I give you this string of teeth.”
Now, as I feel them and pray, I wonder what manner of beads might be on the rosary for a Seer. If they pray by the beads, I’ve never seen it. Maybe they string visions together. Maybe hers have been stolen away.
When dawn paints the distant sea, I am drowsy and swaying. But I breathe a sigh of relief when I see the Seer come out of her tent. She is arrayed head to toe in armor, two swords swinging on her hips, a tabard of filmy fabric like the raiments of ghosts flutters over solid steel.
“Are you feeling well now, Lady Paladin?” I ask her.
She says nothing, but her pearly gaze finds my face somehow and she presses a shred of parchment into my palm.
She’s already limping off when I read the ill-formed letters scrawled madly on the scrap.
I saw into the depths and he took my eyes, listened to the future and he took my ears, warned of the cataclysm and he took my tongue.
Chapter Ten
Vagabond Paladin
Today, we’ll enter the monastery.
I slept poorly last night wrapped in my musky bearskin cloak, huddled against the door that was not a door as the demon and paladin fought within my mind. I did not pitch a tent. I wanted a wall at my back and I didn’t trust any of the others out of my sight. Except maybe the healer. Maybe.
She’s tempted by the dark horse. Did you feel her pulse quicken near him? I shall watch the sweet morsel fall from grace yet. It will be like the crackling on the edge of the pan. I savor the drama. It shall be my cup and sup.
As you will be mine.
Do they allow you to speak so, paladin? I’m appalled. I thought you had to at least pretend to goodness. Don’t you all bathe in hyssop and launderer’s soaps until your skin flakes from your muscles and the fun flakes from your bones?
At least we bathe, hound of hell. Your sulfur stench has filled my nostrils since the moment you arrived and I cannot discern if it comes from the brimstone of the hells, or if it is simply that your spectral intestines are ruled by wind.
If you are trying to insult me, your words need more teeth. But maybe you’re too distraught as you watch your successor fall into a trap.
I huddled in my blankets, scowling, and clung to Brindle — the dog, not the spirits within him. He was my one true friend, though I wished I could rid him of parasites. He put a paw up on my arm and whuffed quietly. I scratched him behind his ears and frowned into the darkness.
I might have been young and I might have been “driven by passions as the water is driven by the course of the river,” as the demon so aptly put it, but even I was not foolish enough to fall for a man sworn to celibacy. Even if he had eyes like sad pools of darkness.
