“I’m pretty sure that if you move, you’ll crush us all, and then he’ll have to attack, so it’s a coin toss really,” I said dryly.
And if Adalbrand’s muffled chuckles were balm to my soul, who would deny me? Below, in the monastery, it had been hell. Could we not enjoy a single night of reprieve?
Enjoy it at your peril.
It was hardly excessive. After all, I had the edge of a ruin as a pillow and Hefertus smelled of horse.
Admit it, sweetmeat, you like it just fine.
I fell asleep trying to ignore both a demon and the loud chanted prayers from the man kneeling in vigil before the monastery door. But before I drifted off, I thought I caught the edge of another prayer muttered low in a soft tenor as teeth clacked together on a string.
Chapter Seventeen
Poisoned Saint
I wake for the first time ever to a pair of eyes looking right into mine. They are large and brown as good earth and deep as my forever guilt, and for the first time in years, I forget to say my prayers upon waking.
I look and look and it almost hurts that she doesn’t look away, that she doesn’t so much as blink, just stares into my eyes with the same intensity that she does everything — like someone has lit her on fire and she’s trying to live an entire life before she’s consumed.
I don’t want to go down beneath the earth again. I don’t want to seek the cup. I don’t even want to see the Seer buried — as much as it shames me to admit those thoughts.
That door ruined me yesterday and it will ruin me again. How can I protect the innocent, defend righteousness, and take the pain of the suffering, when my heart and mind are not right? I cannot. It steals my honor. It unmans me.
I do not want to go.
But I also do not want her to go without me. I can imagine her crouching in the darkness, looking up at that terrible statue that matches her. I can imagine it coming to life and picking her up and putting her into its gaping mouth, and something inside me rejects that like it rejects the yawning, grasping darkness of a life without faith. I cannot. I will not.
I blink and it’s gone and she’s biting her lip as she looks at me. She whispers and I shiver lightly at the intimacy of it.
“We’re bound to go down there, aren’t we? There’s no way out.”
I nod, but my mouth is dry and I don’t know how to reply to her. I hear her words, but I also hear the words of another girl.
“The baby’s dead, isn’t she? And I am dying with her,” Marigold had said to me all those years ago.
And my heart twists because I couldn’t save the other girl and I have a terrible feeling that I can’t save this one. I say those terrible, damning words that I’ve said once before.
“I’ll be here with you,” I say with my stupid thick tongue and poisoned lips. “You won’t have to do it alone.”
She huffs a laugh. “I’m always alone. I always have to do everything for myself. Alone.”
A smile plays on the edge of my lips. I feel something of a fool lying here in my bedroll next to a stranger and whispering with her rather than strapping on my armor and steeling myself for the day like a proper knight ought to.
“Is this why you’re so fierce? Because you must always be alone?”
“You think me fierce?” She seems taken with the idea. She has a freckle on the end of her nose. What a strange thing to note.
“It’s your best quality,” I admit.
She shakes herself and sits up in her roll of blankets. Her tangled hair is everywhere, dark as the waves of the angry sea. She tames it so deftly that it’s already transforming into a woven snake while I am still sitting up and finding my boots.
Hefertus is gone, his bedroll left in disarray as it always is. He’s scattered some kind of jewelry over the top of it as if it took him time to decide on what decorations to wear. I wonder what the Vagabond thinks of that — she who is forsworn against wealth. It’s nearly as wildly inappropriate to have that wealth of gold and gemstones in her tent as it is to have her wealth of femininity in mine.
I steal an unwarranted glance at the curve of her hip. A wealth of femininity indeed.
I am reminded of why my order calls no women. The most dove-plain among them hide a secret — that their words are life and their caresses more valuable than all of Hefertus’s gold. Just waking to the deep eyes of one of their kind has snared my heart and strung it up like that demon suspended in the ceiling. I may never slip free of this trap.
“I’ll give you your privacy,” I tell her with a half smile. It’s rueful, for I know I am a fool, but as kind as I can make it for all my failings are no fault of hers.
