“I had no right to use your secrets against you.”
“No.”
“But I had to know.”
I lifted an eyebrow. Did he, now?
“Are you likewise afflicted with a punishment from the door?” I asked him as fear spiked hot within me. “Something that twists your mind?”
He nodded and looked away with an expression I’d seen many times before. It was the expression of a survivor realizing they had to deal with the hand they’d been dealt and couldn’t go back to how things had been before. He’d made this mess — mind afflicted or not. Now he must deal with his creation.
He squared his shoulders and turned back to me suddenly. I expected another apology or — perhaps — a justification. People tended to do that when they were particularly embarrassed.
“I will give you another secret of mine,” he said instead. And it was my turn to be surprised enough that my hand fell from my hilt.
“And what? That will make us even?” I felt amusement tickling the corners of my mouth.
“Yes,” he agreed, so fervently that the word sounded like a vow. “I will give you my secret and then I will kneel before you and if you wish to take my head, then that is your right. Perhaps death will be better than the shame I feel now.”
“Hold just a moment, there’s no need to run around headless.”
I threw a hand up but already he was kneeling. He drew his sword from a kneeling stance and I stumbled backward defensively, only for him to slide it roughly across the stone. It spun away until it hit an ancient rug and stopped.
“Your sin is doubt? Mine is lust,” he told me, his eyes wide and palms held up as if making an offering. “I told you I killed a girl. I did not lie. I got her with child and watched as her family abandoned her and mine refused to lend aid. She died giving birth to a stillborn daughter. I came too late to do more than watch her die before my eyes in a frozen, filthy hovel. I killed her as surely as if I’d done it myself. Killed her with my appetites. Killed her with my thoughtless taking. I left that day and swore myself to the Aspect. But we both know that makes up for nothing. It remits no guilt. No life I could live could make up for two innocents robbed of theirs. That’s my secret. Do with it what you will. Both my secret and my life are in your hands.”
Chapter Thirteen
Poisoned Saint
She stares at me, stunned into silence. As she should be. I have just confessed to the grimmest of crimes — a selfish act and abandonment that led to death. I am as guilty as any convicted criminal and I know it in my bones.
What I have not told her — what I dare not tell her — is how like my Marigold she is with that solemn expression and that look of skeptical doubt in her eyes.
“She is mine,” the God had said directly into my mind when I questioned her.
Said it with a searing light that still fills me.
Said it like the ringing of heaven’s bells.
If she kills me now, I’m not sure I’ll feel it. I will still be soaring on the vibrant emotion of the echo of that voice. It cut me deep, cut me hard. And yet, at the same time, it warmed me as nothing else ever has. Not the embrace of another. Not the burn of ambition or the warmth of compassion. It warms me to the marrow and burns away all else.
I didn’t think I would ever hear the voice of the God again. I still can’t believe it happened. It’s a miracle more wondrous than what Hefertus weaves. And it is for her. She who is untested, untried, so unlike the rest of us that I wondered how she could even be a paladin at all.
And why did I care so strongly about that?
It pains me to recount the last few minutes. The surge of longing in my heart at the sight of her compelled me to follow. She’d been leaning forward as she strode through the monastery, her pointed nose leading the way as if she were an arrow loosed from a bow, bent on ransacking this entire place in search of the Cup. How could I not flare at the sight of that?
Then that surge turned to a burn. It heightened my sense of this woman and bid me notice her every flinch and movement. I joined her without thinking about it.
And then came the realization of what I was doing, the shame of it, the need to justify myself. It suggested to me that she might be fraudulent, that perhaps I was mistaking myself for a guilty man who was making a fool of himself when it was she who was guilty of duping us all. It’s so easy to blame another for a guilt that is your own. Easy to deflect your folly onto another.
That deflection propelled me into the need to act and I was acting before I knew what had come over me. Before I questioned it — as I should have. I have not been so foolhardy since I was a boy.
My cheeks burn with shame. And so they should.
I can see how the door has twisted both my thoughts and desires.
But I also know that it can only twist what is already there. Nothing can manufacture these things in me. If I have desire rolling through me like a tide, that is no excuse to single one person out. It’s no reason to demand they meet some sort of arbitrary standard. If I have suspicions, that’s no reason to make violent demands. And if I have shame, that is not the fault of another, it is the fault of the flaw, the fissure within my own soul.
