The order of things ruined. And all because of her.
Swift, sudden, he turns to me. “Je vous le dis, elle est marquée!”
He draws a long thin blade from nowhere, from what seems like thin air, and flicks it, deft and sharp, at my throat.
But not at my flesh. Not cutting me at all. Only slicing, with fearful precision, the cloth of my sweater, front collar to side seam.
The fabric peels away, a triangle flap, just enough to reveal the skin above my heart, the tip of his sword just millimeters from the raised pearly stripes of tissue.
My scar.
He lowers the blade. The two Brothers on my sides grab me again, squeezing my shoulders to hold me in place. The one on my left presses gloved fingers to my exposed skin. Hard, probing,feeling mein a way that makes my skin crawl.
“Oui!” he declares. “La croix.”
The cross.
“La croix!” cries the prior. “The mockery she makes. To put this on her body.”
Tears are streaming down my cheeks, the sensation startling me—I didn’t even know I was crying. I sniff, pathetic, trying to make no noise, but it’s useless. Those hard fingers on my skin. The glee in their voices when they found what they were looking for. A sob escapes me.
The prior pauses.
“Vous entendez?” he cries. “It is as we knew it would be. She manipulates. With tears. With sighs. She has welcomed them to her body and invited them down the path of destruction. And this—this is why we must do what we do, my brothers. For is it not written in Scripture?—”
The room speaks in unison.
“Si ton œil te scandalise, arrache-le.”
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.I shiver, harder, tears still streaming.
“Et c’est pourquoi, c’est exactement pourquoi, on insiste que les chevaliers affirment le voeu.”
That’s why we make the knights take the vow.
“Parce que nous savons, nous avons toujours su il y a neuf cent ans?—”
Because we know, because we have always known, for nine hundred years?—
“—que quand ils recontrent le Graal, elle arrivera en forme d’un putain.”
that when they find the Grail, she will come to them in the form of…
His last two words knock me in the stomach.
A whore.
Now he turns, glides in a circle to me once more.
“And so the marked one sates her lust, and the men who were sworn to retrieve the Grail instead die slavering for her bed.”
This time, there are no more murmurs. Just…justhissing, from everywhere, pressing on all sides. I clutch at the sagging piece of sweater, looking everywhere and nowhere at once as the realization hits.
It was never about holy chastity or sacred self-denial. The vow was because they knew. The White Brothers knew they were sending their knights out to find someone, not something,and they knew it would be a woman.
They knew all along.
But I can't stop to process it, because a Brother is approaching me from the side, and he's carrying something yellow. Fabric. He pins it to my sweater—rough, fast, a yellow cross sewn onto cloth.
