It amounted to the same thing.
Or you put your cups on there and you have to drink from them and you all burn up like Sir Whatever-His-Name-That-Will-Not-Be-Remembered, and won’t that be fun.
My heart was in my throat, choking me, strangling me. It wasn’t the challenge. What was picking a cup? It wasn’t being locked in, though I was. It was realizing my hand was forced, that I had no option but to play out this pantomime. That I was just a piece on a board played by hands not mine. Every shred of me fought against that, clawing up my throat and biting through my skin.
I could not accept it.
I was mistress of my own destiny and I always had been, with nothing but the road before me and the horizon behind, hands empty, heart full. The idea that I could be shuffled and prodded into a cattle chute for slaughter made my blood feel too thick and the world around me swim.
Sometimes there are no choices.
But there had to be. There had to be a choice.
The Engineers had moved farther into the room and the Inquisitor bounded after them, searching side to side like a hunting dog ferreting out the scent of the cup.
I was spinning, my mind frantic, heart in my throat.
Something gripped my arm suddenly and I was wrenched into the burning cinnamon gaze of Adalbrand. His face was hard, strength radiating from the bones of it, and I remembered, as I sometimes did around him, that he had a decade of experience that I did not have. And it showed now in his measured look. He also had the hard strength of a man given to daily training since childhood. Though I was strong and capable, too, I could feel his greater strength in how he held me.
“Fly to your rock, little bird,” he whispered to me, so quietly no one else would hear.
I clung to the feeling of his hand on my arm. I clung to how strong and real it was.
“How,” I gasped.
“Find your faith. Build your nest high in the rock and fly.”
His voice was barely louder than his breath. He made a self-deprecating moue with his mouth before leaning in closer.
“It’s what I tell myself. It’s what I think when the world seems to overwhelm me.”
He was giving me a talisman then, something of his held up against the darkness.
He had grabbed my non-sword-arm. He held it still, my sword hovering between us like a wall that could not hold in the tide. And all my wanting for warmth and closeness flared up hot and tight, washing over me even as his sad eyes burned.
The music swelled, strange and strangling, like the Saints were being choked to death as they gasped out Hefertus’s tortured song.
“We have no choice now, Lady Paladin,” Adalbrand said gently, and I realized that the way he was standing blocked me from the view of the others, kept this weakness to just the two of us. My heart swelled with the kindness of that. “We are in this. You and me both. We dance to the tune or we die under the rock.”
“Both?” I asked.
“Both.” His tone was very certain and his eyes burned with something.
Devotion. They burn with devotion. I have seen it before. But toward you or toward the God?
“Fly up to the rock, little bird. Let the God protect your heart. And let me guard the rest.”
He looked sharply to the side for a moment, as if checking again that we would not be heard, and then leaned in closer, making a kind of a shelter over me out of all that muscle and knightly strength. I could feel the warmth of his flesh radiating out to me.
“I feel it, too,” he confessed. “Something is not right and we are trapped, but what else can we do?”
“We can always fight,” I snapped, but I was snapping at myself, at my own limitations.
“We can die,” he said gently. “Or we can play our part in this.”
“I can’t seem to make myself submit to a force I cannot see.” I couldn’t quite keep the wobble out of my voice.
He shook his head. “You’re courage and fire. I’ve watched you.”
