I look away to where our shadows shoot out in front of us, since we stride with our backs to the arrow-slit windows. The shadows seem darker somehow, as if stretching out to reach for the black violence ahead. My imagination is so over-alert, it almost makes me think I see something twitch within mine.
I’m almost grateful when — eventually — we reach the poor Seer. Time has not lessened the horror of her corpse. Her face is grey, eyes like river stones dried along the banks, hair a matted tangle. The blood in her head has spread across the chest of her clothing, leaving it tarry and ruined.
Sir Kodelai’s voice is rough when he speaks.
“Arrange yourselves in a circle around the Seer.”
We do as he says, but I am uneasy. There’s an edge to the Hand’s voice that wasn’t there before.
“I will investigate the death of your servant, oh Lord,” he intones. “I will investigate in the presence of those here.”
He rounds the body within our circle and I frown. This doesn’t seem right somehow. This feels like some sort of horrible show, and not an investigation.
Sir Kodelai pauses dramatically. “What is this?”
He reaches down and from under the edge of the Seer’s spread garments, he brings out a belt knife, chipped and well-used, about the size of my hand.
“To whom does this belong?” he asks, holding it up between a finger and a thumb. He looks from the wounds on the Seer and then back to the knife and then back to us and there’s a look on his face that makes my stomach flip.
I have seen that look once before.
Oh no.
There was a man in a village I came across. His mother-in-law begged me to go into his house, for her daughter was there, dying of a fever. She and her child both. The village blacksmith had already died of the same fever, so deadly it was. I hurried to the cottage and I found the man of the house there, seated on the steps, taking his ease with a pipe in his hand.
“Your wife,” I’d gasped. “Your child. I’m here to heal them. I’m of the Aspect of the Sorrowful God.”
“I heard the blacksmith died,” he replied, coyly, flipping a knife in his hand as if to bar my path, eyes not meeting mine, mouth twisted in irony.
“Last night,” I told him grimly. “So let me past, that I might save thy family. I can heal all but death.”
“What are the odds?” the man had said, and he said it with that exact look on his face. “What are the odds that he and my wife and child are the only ones with this fever?”
That exact look.
I won’t detail what he’d already done with the knife in his hand. Nor will I tell you what I did to him once I’d seen how the inside of his cottage was more red than brown and fit for nothing but the flame. Suffice it to say that when I confessed to the door that I was a murderer, it was not only for Marigold’s sake.
“It belongs to me,” the Vagabond Knight enunciates quietly from beside me. “I noticed it was missing this morning.”
And my blood runs cold as something clicks in my mind and I realize why we are here in this circle. And why the paladin has asked us to carry nothing down with us. It is going to take all of us to carry two corpses up so many steps.
“Wait,” I say, throwing up a hand. I hardly know what I shall say, only that this must be stopped before it fully begins. “Wait. We are here in a place full of wonders and demons. Let us not forget there may be things happening beyond the ordinary.”
Sir Kodelai pauses in front of me. He is, possibly, attempting to appear compassionate, but he can’t quite seem to arrange his features the right way, stumbling into condescension instead of compassion.
“You are a healer, Poisoned One. You take our pain and sorrows, you stain your own heart with them. And don’t you think that twists your judgment? Don’t you think it inclines your ear to those who do not deserve either your mercy or the mercy of the God?”
“I do not,” I say firmly, though there is some truth to his claim. I certainly feel more for those I have healed. That tiny thread never completely snaps.
My mind is racing underneath it all. We are all bound here by tradition and law. We can’t just walk away. And yet this isn’t right. I was with the Vagabond almost the entire time we were beneath the earth, and I would have seen murder in her eyes if she’d killed while we were apart.
“There are no dog prints in the blood,” I say, finding a piece of objective evidence at last.
“Dogs can be tied,” Sir Kodelai says, and across the circle, the High Saint is nodding soberly and the Majester is frowning. Sir Kodelai is garnering their support. Successfully.
Sir Owalan shifts uncomfortably. He sends little glances behind him at the unopened door. Maybe he, too, wonders what might have come through the keyhole.
“You haven’t considered this long enough, brother,” I say, shooting a glance at the Vagabond Paladin. She’s said nothing. Why would she say nothing?
