I heard his breathing shift into the shallow quickening that came when he was losing the argument with himself. His breath now was the sound of a man whose body had moved ahead of his convictions and was pulling them along on a leash.
His hand struck again. This time even lower and slower.
His fingers didn’t lift. They drifted.
Inward. Downward. They weren’t aggressive; nothing about Galahad was ever overtly aggressive; that was the particular horror of him. But they were tentative in a way that was somehow worse. His fingers pressed against the inside of my thigh. Then they stilled once more as every muscle inmy body locked. The river in my head went flat and silent. Corvin’s voice, which I’d kept there like a held torch went out. There was only the thin linen between Galahad’s fingers, my skin, and the absolute crystalline arithmetic of the moment. If I moved, it either stopped or got worse, and I didn’t know which was more likely to happen.
Galahad’s breathing was audible now, shallow and quick. His fingers pressed harder against my inner thigh, and his voice came back to me in fragments.
“The corruption... breathes outward.” He stopped. Started again. “It lives in the flesh. Kaelthar demands we do not look away. The source must be... known. To witness is to serve. To see is to stand—”
He was building his reasons why he needed to do this to me. The theology wasn’t preceding the act; it was chasing it. His hand had moved first, and his faith was running behind, trying to catch up, scrambling to throw a cathedral over something that was already happening under his palm.
I lay still and listened to a man constructing the justification for a violation that his fingers were already enacting, and the thing that settled through me was something colder than fear. It was the recognition that I had one thing available to me, and I didn’t know how many times I could use it before he built an immunity.
“Orath,” I said.
Quietly. Without turning my head. Just the word, dropped into the charged air between us.
The seventh god. The Silence. The Untouchable. The god Galahad had most likely abandoned, because Orath was the name he never spoke. Orath’s was the god whose chapter in the Book of the Boundless Galahad had literally torn out because‘Orath is not doctrine, Orath is the absence of doctrine, the gap the faithless fall through.’
The other six gods governed things that could be legislated: obedience, devotion, sacrifice, the body in labor, and the body in war. Orath governed the body in stillness. The self that existed before vow, collar, or command. He was the god of the interior that no other person could enter without invitation, which was precisely why Galahad had torn out his chapter. A god of inviolable selfhood had no place in a theology built on control. You couldn’t demand obedience and also worship the god who said the self could not be compelled. The contradiction was too visible. So Galahad had excised him, declared him not doctrine, declared him the province of the faithless.
Which meant he had no counter for him. No scripture to cite, no reframing available, no argument that didn’t require him to reach for the exact chapter he’d destroyed.
His hand withdrew from between my thighs as though I’d burned him.
The shove that followed wasn’t gentle. It was a hard push that sent me off his lap and onto the stone floor, my hands catching the impact, knees striking hard. I stayed down. I heard him stand, but I didn’t look up.
The silence in the room had a different quality now. It was thinner, stretched. I was aware of him standing behind me, and I was also aware of what his robes didn’t hide.
“Dress yourself properly,” he said.
I was dressed. We both knew I was dressed. I pulled the hem of my tunic down where it had ridden up but said nothing.
“The correction is complete.”
His footsteps moved to the door, but I still didn’t look up. When it closed, the door didn’t slam. Instead, it closed with the careful control of a man who was one tremor fromshattering something. I listened to his footsteps move down the corridor and then stop.
There was a single impact. His palm against the stone. Or maybe it was his fist. I knew it was something painful by the dull resonance of it through the wall.
Then the footsteps resumed toward what I could only guess was the chapel.
I pulled my knees to my chest and finally breathed out the air I’d been holding as I sat on the cold floor and went through everything that had just happened methodically. The time was midday, Kaelthar’s Hour. It was approximately the fourth day since the scourging. Galahad’s trigger was manufactured because my infraction had been minor. I’d simply closed my eyes for a second or so. I thought about where his hands had gone, then the scripture he’d cited.
Orathhad stopped him. I’d learned as much after I’d named the abandoned god during Galahad’s bath liturgy, and I’d watched something flinch behind his eyes. I’d used Orath’s name now as a lever, and it had worked. I wouldn’t use it a third time without necessity because every time I used it, Galahad adapted slightly, and the next time would require more than a word.
Yes, Orath was a depleting resource.
I went to my pallet, lay down, and faced the wall because the wall was something that didn’t require interpretation. The stone was just stone. It didn’t want anything from me.
The next hour was Illara’s: the Healer’s vigil, two hours from now. I’d be on my knees for it, and this time, I’d be sure not to close my eyes. I wouldn’t give Galahad the infraction he needed because I was done making the path to my body easy.
The stone was cold against my cheek, and I heard something moving near the base of the wall. I went still in a different way. I was alert now, not braced. There wasa gap in the mortar near the floor, a crack I’d noted in the second week, but it was too small for anything to push through. Yet, as I watched, a shadow moved through it, and soon that shadow resolved into the shape of a cat. It was small, midnight black, with emerald eyes that held too much awareness for any natural animal.
Morgan.
It moved without sound across the floor to my pallet, where it sat down in front of my face and regarded me with the calm patience of something that had seen considerably more distressing things than this room.
