“What happened to laurel?” I asked, eating another, tasting blood on its skin from the slit to my thumb.
“No questions,” he threw over his pauldron.
I chomped my way through the rest, fiddling the barren twig between my fingers, the small incision I’d made no longer leaking. Remaining dutifully silent, he led me once more through the vast, winding corridors of the templum, the twists and turns too multitudinous to keep track of. We stopped only once for the Butcher to whisper some hurried instruction into the ear of a monk. I was thankful it was no acolyte, their presence glaringly absent from the hallways we travelled down. Monks were different from acolytes, their eyes still alive andhuman… ordinary men in ordinary clothes,their only distinguishing feature from the rest of the civitas a brown hooded tunic with the Dendralis emblem stitched onto their chest. I’d come to understand they were like servants, dispatched to do their bidding or become whatever was needed: butler, tutor,informant. Perhaps, if I was smart, a messenger, too.
The Butcher pulled on a sconce, and I realised we were headed to his room full of parchment, the walls of the corridor shifting from Ovidian stone to panelled wood. I rolled my shoulders, steeling my nerves, though they were far less consuming than the last time I’d walked here, certain I was to be executed on a false charge of treason. The line of Osric’s red throat scored my vision, and for a moment, the wood bled red.
The Butcher would not kill me today. Call me a fool, but I was sure of it. A man, druid or not, does not bandage the foot of one they mean to slaughter. Only one they wish to preserve oruse. Would Demetri be put to use, too? What job would the Dendralis assign to a spared offering and a former crusiax? I smiled briefly at the image of him being passed a mop and bucket, ordered to clean a latrine. Whoever could command him to do such a thing was a braver soul than I.
“Why the smile? What’s so amusing?” The Butcher sat opposite me at his desk. His helm had tilted sideways, hands knotted in front of him.
“Just the prospect of you spilling some more of my blood. It went so well last time,” I offered, extending my stitched-up hand towards him. The one with a clean, uncut thumb.
“Careful, or it could sound like you enjoyed it.” There was a wryness to his tone, though it was difficult to discern without the luxury of reading his face.
“Enjoy what? Having my blood spilled or the chaos that came with it?”
“Both.” His fingers had unclasped, and one stroked the desk, tracing over the intricately etched eastern border of Thromarra in the wood.
“Then most definitely the latter,” I chanced, voice low.
There came a beat of silence as I scrutinised his veil, searching for invisible eyes. There was much to learn about the Butcher. Though he wasn’t fully aligned with the Dendralis, I still didn’t know where his loyalties lay, or if he’d eventually want me dead.
“I’d keep your loathing of the Dendralis a secret between you and I,” he continued, “and would not speak of it outside these walls.” He’d leaned back slightly, hands resting atop his knees.
“I can speak freely here?”
“Yes. Always.”
“And you won’t…penanceme for it?” The faint crack of a whip echoed in my mind, my back prickling with invisible lashes.
Chair creaking, he leaned forward. “On the contrary, I desire your truths above all else. Unless you enjoy a little penancing?”
I jiggled my hand he had only just stitched.Get on with it,Druid.
“I have no need for that hand, though I shall see to it a sister takes the stitches out later. Give me your other.” He batted away the one I had offered and reached for the other in my lap. I hesitated a moment, then thought better of it, trying not to wince as I let him have it.
“What are you going to do? Lick it again?” My stomach dipped with the thought.
A hum—of either amusement or annoyance, I wasn’t sure which—resounded from under his veil. “Not this day. Why…did you like it?” He laid my hand palm-up atop the wood, coaxing my fingers open with a gentle pull.
“No, of course not. Perhaps that helm has damaged your mind.” My breathing quickened. From annoyance, surely.
His short laugh startled me, and I jumped in my chair. “Ha! A lie; and it’s not yet a turn past dawn. Even for you, I didn’t expect one so soon.” He proceeded to grab a roll of parchment from a cubby behind him. Unfurling the crisp, cream-coloured paper, he flattened it beside my hand.
“What’s this?” I asked, watching the way his hands fanned out the last of its crinkles.
“I need to take some samples of your blood. Finger.”
I extended one to him, curving my thumb to conceal the slit. He selected it anyhow.
“Lost a battle with the carafe?”
I nodded, somehow knowing better than to give him any more than that. Producing a blade from his pocket, he deepened the cut and squeezed the split flesh. It was deathly sharp, and I felt nothing, even as the blood started to pool. He kept hold of it, the blood gathering into a crimson orb until it threatened to drop. The usual coolness of his hands grew warm, clammy even. After what felt like an age, he inhaled, pressing my digit to the parchment and holding it there. He repeated the process, again and again, and soon, the paper was littered with my crimson fingerprints.
“Done, and mercifully, the templum still stands.”
“That’s it?” I pulled my thumb to my mouth, suckling once more at the small amount of drying blood left there—the incision so clean it had already stopped weeping. It tasted of iron, of metal. If there was something strange hidden within it, I hadn’t the keen sense to detect it.
