Five paces or so from the Butcher, I shook off the paxiam’s hold, feet now steady on the parquet. I thought of Demetri, wrestled and pushed, and Esioul, dragged out by her hair. Tilting my chin, I met the cool glaze of his veil and bored into the links guarding his eyes. Guilty or no, I would march to my fate without the hounding touch of a paxiam pushing me towards it.
For a breath we stood motionless, toe to toe, slipper to boot, head to helm, neither deigning to give but an inch.
“When I say follow, you follow.” A groan of metal heralded his step towards me, helm lowering until the sway of his chain meshghosted my sternum. “When I command you to stay, you stay. When I ask you a question, you answer.” His quiet voice rolled over me like Ovidian smoke, cloying the air. “If I tell you to bark, you bark. Or else know nought but agony for every meagre turn you have left. Understood?”
“Yes, Your Holiness,” I whispered, eyes fixed on the hem of his chainmail where it draped to his chest.
Oh, to be a dog, orwolf, with teeth fit for a throat. I ran my tongue over my own, blunted and flat anduseless.
Better yet a bear, then, with claws sharp enough to shred metal.
“Follow.”
Turning, the swish of his cloak clipped at my ankles. Paxiams to my back, I followed its trail, onwards to whatever awaited at the end of the turnpike he led us down. Every step I hunted for it, from my chill-tipped toes to the peak of my skull, scouring the deepest parts of me…searching for that quaking fear that took hold of my limbs whenever a due was about to be rendered. Instead, I stumbled on something else entirely: something new, something heavier, something hotter.
Around the fiftieth stair, I jolted, near breaking my nose against the Butcher’s cuirass. He’d halted, reaching for an unlit sconce on the wall to our right. Cranking it down, a cluster of stones pushed forward and swung open, revealing a small hidden corridor.
Ushered into its gape, stone gave way to redwood panelling, scratches marring the ceiling where the tips of his helm must have snagged and scraped. The passage tightened, winding into a spiral staircase dotted with slitted windows. Outside, only inky blackness pressed against the embrasures, Dendra lost to the nothingness of a cloudy night sky.
Ascending the final steps, we approached an arched door of indented metal, a small hatch of chain cut from its middle.
“May the Other have mercy upon ye, laurel.” The paxiam’s stale breath wafted over my shoulder. With one last spiteful nudge, I breached the threshold to cross into the abattoir within, certain I was no bear, wolf, or even a dog, but a lamb. A lamb who’d scented the sweet tang of blood.
***
What little drachmae I had, I would have gambled it all on the certainty that tongs, blades, whips, scorchers, all manner of penancer would line every wall. What I didn’t expect was paper.
The space curved like an apple split in two, small cubbies packed with hundreds upon hundreds of rolled parchments on every side, from the flagstone to the beamed ceiling. Before me stood the back of a simple chair tucked beneath a polished wooden desk, its surface buffed to a lacquered gleam. Candles of blackened wax, likely made from the ash-bees of Mount Garnet, dripped like droplets of ink across the gloss, staining the embellished map in puddles of shadow.
To the side, bound in another chair by heavy, rusting chains, was a laurel. A laurel who, despite the split lip and leaking wound slashed down his brow, I recognised.
“I’ll ask it but once.” The Butcher unclasped his pauldrons, hanging his cloak on a hook to his left, though his helm remained firmly in place. The gauntlets and breastplate came next, both clattering to the floor before he kicked them under the desk, the room too modest for them to go anyplace else. “Do you know this laurel?”
I glanced at Osric, to the tangle of sandy blonde hair now matted with blood, his tent of a shirt more red than off-white, and those empty, grey eyes, tracking the Butcher without so much as a flicker to where I stood by the hearth.
Rounding the desk, the druid splayed his hand over the carving of Thromarra, fingers clawing over the southern swell of its teardrop shape. “Have you so soon forgotten what I warned you in the chamber? Speak, laurel, or bark.”
“No,” I answered as whatever I felt in the stairwell melted to something stickier. If they suspected Osric, then Demetri might be inquisitioned, too.
Perhaps he already had been. Perhaps he wasdead.
“Lie!” A crack resounded as his fist collided with the side of Osric’s nose, the clack of bone turning my stomach. Blood showered over the side of the desk, splatters absorbing into the patterned rug underneath, staining its weave.
His elbow bent, readying for another.
“I swear it, I do not!” I grasped the wooden nubs of the chair until my knuckles strained white. “We exchanged a few words in the atrium after the Last Rite, but I have never laid eyes on him before this day.”
His fist hovered, still as stone in the air. “And pray tell, what did you speak of? Theweather?”
I wrung my hands, palms near bruised from where I’d been gripping the wood. A glob of jellied blood landed between Osric’s boots, trailing from his mouth. “I don’t reca—”
The strike sent Osric’s neck snapping backwards, his nose now little more than a lump of ruined flesh and mulched bone. I’d squeezed my lids shut, though not fast enough.
“Eyes. Eyes!” Throat dry and tongue heavy, I twirled my buttons on either wrist in small, slow circles. “H-he told me I had troublesome greens, and I told him he’d presumptuous greys.”
The Butcher’s glove, tacky with blood, cradled Osric’s jaw, forcing his gaze up. “Presumptuous, indeed.Presumptuousto assume he’d leave this templum unscathed, after such a lackwit attempt to conceal his tracks.” He latched his hand from Osric’s jaw and lowered to his knees, armour gaping over their caps.“But brother, bloodalwaysdemands blood.” Two large fingers clicked, prompting the laurel to meet his helm. “You have not looked upon her until this day? Or spoke to her before the pledge?”
“No.” Osric hacked another glob of congealed blood onto the floor, its edge catching the black leather of the Butcher’s boot.
