I swallow hard. I am a mess. Where I would usually be compassionate and kind, patient and accepting, I have let myself become twisted. No, that language is too passive. I was all the ugly things that passion can be — possessive where no possession is warranted, demanding where I had no right to demand, violent in my pursuit of my own wants.
Shame burns through my chest and makes my belly churn.
She rolls her eyes at me. Such a slight gesture. I cling to the way it trivializes what has come before. It promises a chance at reconciliation.
“I’m not going to kill you.” Her words are like dawn after a night of illness. “And I don’t think you’re a murderer just because you were part of a dreadful tragedy. Get up.”
Her eyes are old in her young face.
“A dreadful tragedy?” I whisper. How she can dismiss my crime so readily? “I left her to suffer on her own.”
“And how old were you at the time?”
I feel my cheeks grow hotter. My youth does not dismiss what happened then, just as my … whatever this is now … does not dismiss what I did a moment ago. If anything, it makes it worse. I indulged myself so thoughtlessly while other boys were busy riding horses and shooting bows. Had I stayed with them and done that, a life would have been spared.
“I was fifteen,” I say quietly.
“A child,” she says.
“Not a child at all. Not once a child was fathered by me. A poor excuse for a man who let those who depended on him perish.”
She sighs and to my horror, she wanders over to the nearest bookshelf — there are ten separate bookcases, each gilded along the edges of the shelves — and runs her finger along the spines of the books. Dust is thick on these tomes, but they do not crumble as I expected.
“Oh, you’re one of those.”
“One of what?” I am loath to take to my feet again before she’s rendered judgment, but it seems like she might not bother to do even that. Behind the door, her dog gives up growling and lets out a pitiful whine.
“One of those fools who think that everything in the world depends on them and all the failures in it are their fault.” She turns to look at me a little coyly. “Am I right?”
I stiffen and clench my jaw. “I take my responsibilities seriously. I am accountable for my actions. Both in the past, and in the present. I wronged you with my accusations.”
She says nothing to that, and I have to turn awkwardly to keep her in my line of sight while maintaining my kneeling posture as she rounds the room.
She reads the spines of the books and tilts her head to the side as she regards a bed and a tufted chair, both finer than anything that existed in my father’s house. With the air of a practiced thief, she checks behind each book and turns the bedding and cushions. She sifts through trinkets on the sideboard and side tables. Her fingers dance over music boxes set with leaping goldfish, fans painted with peacocks, a bedframe thick with intricately carved songbirds.
“You would think a thousand years would have turned all this to dust.”
“There is clearly a miracle at work here,” I agree, my eyes trawling over the fine golden and crimson brocades. “What we call magic.”
She tilts her head to the side as if she’s listening to someone other than me and then marches over to the desk and begins to take out each drawer and examine it. The desk is a thing to behold — its legs are slender and delicate, but they wrap around in a way that the eye can’t quite follow until they become four lovely maidens holding up bullfrogs larger than their heads, who, in turn, hold up the desktop. The drawers of the desk are full of parchment and bound books — more things that ought to be dust. She rummages through them with a disregard that makes me flinch. Midway through, she pauses and gives me a very long look, her gaze resting pointedly on my knees as if to draw attention to how I am still kneeling.
For one so young, she is very exacting. It is almost humorous — her blasé attitude about my crimes, combined with her fierce judgment of my penitence.
I give her an abashed smile. She is trying. I am difficult and irrational as I fight my internal battles but still, she is trying with me.
She scoffs lightly, but there is a ghost of a smile around her lips, too. Perhaps, young as she is, she is experienced enough to see that I am trying to fix the mess I’ve made of this.
“You go from penitent to charming far too easily, Sir Paladin.”
“What would you have me do, Lady? Here I am, on my knees before you.”
“I am not your God to take your confession,” she says lightly as she examines a strange bronze sphere placed on the desk.
It sits in a bracket fitted to a stand that lets her spin it on an axis. She moves it, tentatively at first and then with more force, watching it spin with a puzzled expression before she stops it and peers carefully at the surface. I wonder why she is so fixed on this one oddity when the room is spilling over with so many.
Beneath her frosty exterior, I see to her heart where doubt still rages, where fear still makes her eyes dart toward any sound, where tight intelligence is making sense —somehow — of whatever is etched onto that sphere.
“You are my fellow paladin. You can accept my apology on behalf of the God,” I say. I don’t know if I mean my apology to her or my apology for everything.
