He’s only half-wrong. Oh, my sweet treat, my delicious morsel, he has the truth half-right, like a man grasps the tail of an adder.
At this exact moment, the gag felt enormously unfair. I would have liked the chance to defend myself.
“So your accusation is that she is a woman, and therefore she is weak where the rest of us are not?” Adalbrand asked, returning his cup to the slow swirl as if he had not a care in the world. “And therefore she must be a murderess? It seems rather arbitrary.”
“We’ve all confessed to murder,” Hefertus muttered from the sidelines. “Maybe you should be accusing all of us.”
He was ignored.
“I had a concubine much the same as this callow girl when I was a king,” Sir Kodelai said with a condescending glance at those watching. His gaze perused them, weighing, and finally landing on me before he said, “In fact, I had several.”
I shuddered. Lord forfend I was ever alone with this man. I did not trust him. I did not believe — now that I had watched him in action — that he had ever been called by the God at all. Perhaps he really did poison those cups to prove he was right. Perhaps he did any number of terrible things.
“Your taste in companionship is truly singular,” Adalbrand said dryly. “That being said, throwing her sex in her face is hardly enough to prove her a murderess. Nor is a stolen knife. Anyone could take her knife in the night and plant it here. We did not guard against each other.”
“It was used to kill the Seer.”
“Can you be so sure? Should you not examine all our blades and knives?”
Sir Kodelai’s lips thinned and he slammed his cup on the top of his wooden box-turned-table.
“Last night I knelt in vigil under the moon and the sky and the gaze of the God and I came away with an answer. It is not for you to tell me how to serve the God. It is not for you to judge. That is my right.”
Adalbrand cleared his throat and Sir Kodelai’s eyes burned with the insolence of it.
“I thought it was the God who judged. The God who demanded vengeance. Are you not merely his Hand?”
Sir Kodelai’s mouth twisted, but he made a quick shake of the head as if trying to control a flapping line of temper, and then he managed to bark, “Yes.” He drew in a long breath through his flared nostrils and tried again. “I am the Hand of the God and he will judge today. I give to him this contest between us.”
Adalbrand lifted his cup. “It’s still not too late, Sir Kodelai. No one needs to die here today.”
“I think someone does,” Sir Kodelai said grimly.
He snatched up his cup, shot back the water, and smacked it down so hard on the case that the whole thing shuddered.
With a shrug, Adalbrand lifted his cup, too.
“The will of the God,” he said grimly, and then he drank it down and delicately set his cup next to Sir Kodelai’s.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
We remained still in holy silence in this white hall of pale stone and crystalline light, we tiny few in the great echoing vault. For one delicate moment, everything hung in the balance.
Sir Adalbrand moved first, leaning heavily onto the folding table with one hand. A leg cracked, split, and the whole structure collapsed with a clatter, one of the cups rolling and bouncing to careen off my knee and over to a wall. The other landed perfectly on its base, spinning round and round with a rattle before it finally wobbled to stillness.
My heart seized in my chest. Oh no.
Adalbrand reeled, caught himself, turned, and was violently ill to one side, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, his breath heaving.
“I’m sorry,” he said while the cups were still spinning, his face green, his eyes wide. “By the God, I am sorry.”
My head spun. My heart hammered. Was this it, then? Was I to die, too? Was he dying on my behalf?
Sir Kodelai hadn’t moved. Not even a hair. He collapsed so suddenly it was like watching someone step on rotten ice in spring. One moment he was upright. The next he was a heap of bones and dust with his helmet and armor tumbling wildly in every direction, clanging against each other like garish wind chimes.
So the rumors were true.
The bonds let go of me without warning and I caught myself with one hand, gasping for breath at the same moment that Brindle smacked the mosaic floor with a doggy squeal.
