I’m still caught in the swirl of emotion that comes from being near her. I have never felt this. Not with Marigold, who I thought was the love of my life, not side by side with the women I have served with, not even in dreaming desires for the other women I’ve known in pieces and scraps. I cannot justify this — not even to myself. It is not that I healed her and wore her soul for a moment, though I have no doubt it was rooted first in that. It is not that her eyes have haunting similarities to a woman I once loved, though that has not helped. It is not her dauntless courage conjoined with stunting doubt — but it is partly that.
The strangeness of how she is a single-edged sword, sharp on one side and yielding on the other, is an intoxicating brew — an exact mixing of all I love best in another human. There’s also a sense that she sees beyond the surface, as if she can claw the world away as one draws back a drape and see what lies beyond it. I see it in her eyes when she squints at the statues of the Saints and then draws back. I see it in how she watches her dog with a tilted head and how her eyes narrow when they encounter the Penitent. I want to be near the woman who scowls at false holiness and sees the value in small things. I want to guard the tiny innocence she still burns like a stub of candle at her core while outside she is hard as flint and twice as sharp.
I puff out a long breath. She’s nervous about this offering of cups, though it seems a small thing. Even if we must try every one upon these pedestals, it will only be tedious, not dangerous. But I would be a fool to discount her wariness. What does she see that I do not?
I choose a cup of ravens and owls for their eyes, so like hers, which can see to worlds beyond, and I cross to the far side of the room from her. The statues that are akin to our forms and faces — and do not think for a moment that does not make my skin crawl as if it were lined with grubs — are in a rough semi-circle and the Vagabond’s image is directly across from mine, both anchoring the ends.
I look up into staring, empty eyes just like mine. Whatever artistry depicted me here — be it glorious or depraved — has read me well. The white stone forms lines of sorrow, and the set of the shoulders is tight with determined pain. That’s me in every line. That’s my worried brow, my lips curled into the edge of a smile, my scar on the tip of my chin. A nick I received in some scuffle before I was even a man, never mind a squire. I can’t help the ironic smile that curls my lips. I never thought to see myself set in stone. I’m no Saint nor king. My father would scorn it on sight.
I set my feet on the steps and try not to flinch when I see they are woven of human bones. Those are two femurs my foot steps on. This next step is jaw bones and scapula. I stop looking after that, looking up, instead, at the great image before me. It’s not a Saint — because it is me.
It’s a terrible perversion to have an image of me set up like it is a Saint, though. This troubles me deeply. My stomach roils with it and my chest seizes. I have the most overwhelming urge to smash it, to tear it down. It seems too close to an idol, too near to a sacrilege.
I am no Saint, despite my moniker. I am only a man of flesh and blood, seamed through with darkness and light. I am only a humble knight before the great God. I hope he will forgive this blasphemy, as it is not of my making.
I think, perhaps, that I see why the Beggar Knight is so reluctant to play her part in this. I am, too.
God have mercy.
I set my cup into the hand. There’s a place there for it, a ring carved into the stone, and at a glance, I can see varying rings with varying patterns set into the hand. They look like the tumblers of a lock at different depths. The cup I selected goes down four layers in and it mates up neatly with the tumbler there. A twist, and it clicks in place, stuck now and secure.
“Are you sure this will determine which cup is the real one?” The Inquisitor sounds like a cornered animal, surrounded by men with sticks. “Because that doesn’t feel right, Penitent. I sense something else here … something very different.”
“Why else would there be so many cups?” Sir Owalan sounds very confident. “How else would we decide on which to use?”
“Use for what?” The Inquisitor shifts back and forth like the ground he’s standing on is burning hot. He can read the spirits. It’s his aspect’s dispensation. Does he sense something now he is not putting a voice to?
“There were slots in the clock in that main room, I noted,” Sir Sorken says. “Slots for cups, I wager. Did the rest of you notice it? No?”
“We could return home with all of them,” the Majester suggests. “Let our bishops sort one from another.”
“Could we? How grand.” Hefertus’s words are almost a drawl. “If you wouldn’t mind lighting the way, Majester, and showing me the path out, I’ll be happy to follow. Though I’m not sure my stallion can support the weight of hundreds of cups, I’ll certainly give it a try if it means being free of this place.”
The Majester’s voice snaps like a flag. “Obviously, I don’t know the way yet, Prince Paladin. Your mockery is not welcome.”
Hefertus is right. It would take an army to carry all these cups from this place.
I look across the room and see the Vagabond Knight hesitating over her cup. I can’t make out her features well from here, but she looks to the sky as I bid her. Perhaps, in her heart, she flies up in faith and entrusts herself to her God. The idea that I could spark faith in another snatches my breath for a moment. It’s a dear thing. Precious.
I must pluck my gaze away from her to quell the emotions rising up. Here, as in the other vault, we are tiny, living, breathing, messy, colorful dots in a massive white vault that reaches so high up that I cannot clearly see the roof. The statuary towers over me in layers of figures, white with dove-soft shadows and muted edges. If this place were in St. Rauche’s Citadel, it would be honored by the soft chanting of monks and the burning of rare incense, and pilgrims would come from all across the face of the earth for a single hour of blessing in such a place. Instead, it is shut away from the world, preserved, standing ready.
I wonder if I can find a favorite depiction of a Saint in those clustered on the wall nearby. I focus, finally, on their faces and my heart freezes.
The Saints are familiar in how they are depicted with graceful limbs and distant expressions, carved with symbolic weaponry and the flowing clothing of the righteous.
But these are not my Saints. Nor any that I recognize from ancient texts — and I have read so, so many texts.
As the light twists around them, my stomach twists, and I have a terrible feeling that they are no one’s Saints at all.
That one is posed like Our Lady of Kindness. But it is not her, for that Saint certainly did not have a forked tongue, nor did she wink one eye in derision.
The one just there looks like the Hunter King, with his bow and stags. But the Hunter King never had human victims bound to the back of his stag, their wide eyes helpless and naked forms trussed so tightly that the chiseled ropes bite into their flesh.
My lips fall open and I bite back a gasp.
This is all wrong.
And I didn’t see it until now. I was too entranced with Victoriana to see what she saw. I raise a hand, about to try to stop her — but with a sigh I can hear from even this far away, she clicks her cup into place.
It’s too late.
We all freeze, tense with readiness. My gaze flicks across the other paladins, but no one has moved. We’re waiting for something to happen. Maybe for a cup to glow or for the rejected cups to melt away.
There is nothing. Silence reigns.
It feels eerily like the moment before Sir Kodelai died.
The Majester laughs a little nervously, and his laugh bounces back at him from every wall and up into the cobwebbed ceiling.
And then a whisper bursts from the mouths of the not-Saints. It’s half sigh, half song, and just at the very edge of hearing it carries words. Words I cannot understand, though I feel as if I know what they say. They are telling us it has begun. They are telling us we are accursed.
A subtle shudder runs up my spine and an echo in my unconscious mind whispers, run.
Sir Coriand is yelling at us — a translation, perhaps?
“Give us your rival’s blood and your rival’s pain, but choose with care or you’ll see no gain. For the cup you desire, the cup you’ll receive, in sacrifice, you’ll learn to believe.”
Trite, but threatening.
For the first time since we arrived, I think that perhaps this is no monastery. This is no ancient place of worship. At least, not to the God. And whatever pretender made this place is powerful and terrible and he wishes to make us powerful and terrible, though we are but motes of dust in this yawning mouth of a monastery.
I want none of it.
It’s the Majester who moves first, shouting as he half claws his way up the arm of his image. He starts chanting and I feel his blessing settle over us — the one only Majesters can give. A blessing for a whole group.
He’s given us acute awareness, and with it, I see what he has seen, and my gaze snaps straight to Victoriana. She draws her sword with easy fluidity, raising it grimly as I draw my own, but she’s so far away. Too far away. As if someone planned, knowing we were partnered together, to force us apart.
The statue on the wall behind her is a man with a long beard and a holy expression, hands clasped before him in prayer. He shudders, lifts his face, lifts an arm, and then — as my skin crawls up my back — he draws his sword, steps forward, and leaps. The statues on both sides leap with him. Their weapons flicker as they move so quickly, stone legs launching them forward. They are larger than life — giants made of white stone and whatever wild magic has brought them to life.
The Saints on the walls have come alive.
Some of them, at least.
I think the ones with pipe organ mouths remain fixed to the walls, but it’s hard to tell in the sudden maelstrom of white marble bodies, carved to perfect human form, white marble weapons braced in marbled hands. They stalk toward us from every side, some slow and ponderous, others moving quickly, dashing across the cups, crushing and shattering and destroying as they race.
If this is a race to find the true cup, it’s almost certainly over with half the cups crushed. Somehow, I don’t think it was ever that.
The dog barks sharply — twice, and then no more — as he leaps between towering white bodies, darting towards his mistress.
When the Engineers curse and begin to haul on the chains holding their platform, I realize that they’ve seen what I failed to see — that the chains are part of a ratcheting pulley mechanism, and as they fly through the old men’s hands, the platform begins to ascend above the fray.
Should I do the same?
Before I decide, it’s already too late.
A whoosh of air rushes past me and I move, led by instinct and sudden battle fever. I whirl, duck, and pop up just in time to avoid a blindfolded Saint who tries to harvest me with his great marble scythe. His blank eyes drive a spike of terror straight into my spine. How do you reason with mindless antagonism? How do you fight stone with steel? I don’t want to break my sword, but it’s all the weapon I have. There’s no time for qualms. He’s already moving again in the space of an exhale, slicing toward my head. It’s a game of leap and dodge now and I will either be quick or I will be dead.
Hefertus curses in the background, and it worries me enormously that his curses seem to be quieter the longer they spin out. I hope he’s not already overrun. I’m not sure I can get to him in time to back him up. He was midway around the circle when this began.
I need to see.
In a feat I haven’t tried since my squire days, I concentrate all my efforts and leap up onto the cupped hand of my stone image. Letting my momentum carry me, I launch from there to the shoulder of the blindfolded statue with the scythe, dodge a stone arrow that narrowly misses my shoulder — how does it even shoot? — and then pivot from the shoulder, spinning through the air to land on the back of a stone tiger ridden by a Saint who seems to think one carefully draped cloth is all the clothing he needs to wear while he tames the beast.
“The poem, my children,” Sir Coriand calls down to us. “Blood and sorrows. The cup needs blood and sorrows.”
Easy to say from up there. Down here, we’re fighting for our lives. There will be blood — oh yes, and sorrows plenty — but there won’t be much riddle-solving.
It’s not easy to keep your balance on a stone tiger sculpted at one and three-quarters real size while its rider reaches a massive stone hand back and tries to throttle you. I do it anyway, fighting to hold on as I keep out of the reach of his grip. At least his arms are subject to the normal rules of anatomy.
I turn a blow from a stone sword streaking toward me from my left. There’s so much power behind it that even turning it sends quivers up my arm, but the force breaks the stone blade, and that blank-faced Saint with a ram’s curling horns upon his tousled head must attack the second time with no weapon but a stub. Unfortunately, it’s just as deadly broken and even harder to defend against.
When your enemies are stone and half again as large as you are, all the rules you’ve learned fighting men must be thrown aside.
My heart is racing with the intensity of the moment, every muscle straining with what I demand. Part of me loves this — the exertion, the pushing myself to the edge — but the rest is just gasps of thought between near misses and a barrage of sensation I must translate and make sense of before I miss the one thing that kills me.
I leap from the tiger, trusting years of experience to help me land. I almost twist an ankle, but I roll at the last minute over a clinking, shifting floor of crumpled and broken cups.
By now I’ve lost all sense of the battle as a whole. I’m just one man weaving out of the way of a Maiden-Saint as she tries to skewer me with her trident, her fishy face implacable right down to the gills in her neck.
I’m running with high knees over the multiple arms of a tentacled stone creature — no, wait, this is the bottom half of one of the so-called Saints. No Saint of our faith has ever reached rippling arms toward the innocent, scowling through a seven-braided beard.
I don’t have time to shudder. This is the madness of nightmares and curses. This is the power of the dark realm beneath the earth where those damned by the God play out their wickedness.
The sound of this battle is almost creepier than our emotionless attackers. It feels all wrong. There is the occasional cry from one of the others, but mostly all I hear is the grind and smash of stone on stone or stone on steel. There are no screams or curses, no desperate exhales or wheezing gasps. It’s not human. It’s not like any battlefield I’ve ever been on. Does it make it more or less horrible not to slip in blood and over corpses? More or less horrible not to see flashes of humanity in the faces you cleave in twain?
A man with shells in his long flowing beard and a crown on his head bears down on me with a club fashioned to look like shells but made — of course — of marble. I try to dodge his attack, but my spin is caught short by the movement of a female Saint, face swathed in carved scarves. She tries to grasp me, stone fingers raking across my side, and I’m forced back with a grunt of pain into the path of the shell club.
It glances off my sword arm, sending me gasping, but long training takes hold and I channel my pain into awareness. I need higher ground.
I slip through a gap made by two statues — the shortest of them is still a head taller than me and my metal blade is notching and chipping as I turn strikes. I feel the damage as if it is damage to my own body. If this sword fails me, I have no backup here. Everything was left above thanks to Sir Kodelai, may the God shelter his soul.
I’m slowed by the injuries I’ve taken already and my arm screams with every movement.
Through the gap, I spin and leap again, attaining the platform where my avatar swings. There are too many of them on the ground. I need to get up high if I want to see what’s happening.
I sheathe my sword, kicking a grasping stone hand away while ducking under another, and haul the chains through the pulleys with a desperation born of pain and weariness.
As my platform wobbles upward, the pipe organ begins to play again — a hollow, spooky sound that makes me think of walking among the dead at night after a battle. The stanzas tumble over each other, keening and crying. I know this song. I’ve heard it once before and it has haunted me in sighs and snatches ever since.
The chain won’t budge, jamming in my hands like a choked wheel.
I spin.
A stone Saint hangs off the side, making my platform rock wildly. I snatch up my sword seconds before it rattles off the side. I barely have it in hand before the Saint rushes me. He’s hooded and reverent, eyes downturned, features smooth of emotion, but he claws at me with a stone hook, aiming for my shoulder. I duck under his strike, twist my body roughly to the right so that I lead with my left shoulder, and with all my weight I slam into him.
Pain splinters through that shoulder — it’s as if I fell from a sharp slope and crashed into rock … which of course is what I’ve done. It’s enough, though. It knocks him backward and he slips — stone on stone — and falls from the platform without a cry.
The organ cries for him, soaring now in a melody too bittersweet for this world.
Someone screams from below. A masculine cry of torment. Every call is one of us. I don’t dare ignore any of them when I’m the only one who can save a life.
I’ll deal with it in a moment.
I need to solve my riddle first and look over the battlefield — even if that battlefield is more akin to a church sanctuary than a muddy strip of land.
My arm throbs as I hurry to my owl cup. I think I know what I must do. I slit my left thumb on one of the notches in my sword blade and flick a drop into the cup before I spit into it.
I’m my own adversary, so this is my blood. And I’m made of sorrow from bones to skin. I can put any part of myself in that vessel. What I give to it now shows what I think of this madness.
Go ahead, revile me. I care not.
My cup gives off a slight glow. I’m not sure if I’m relieved or annoyed that my efforts have accomplished the task. I’m not enchanted by the puzzle, or the battle, or the trickery that brought me here. I feel like a goat tied in the middle of a cage of lions — offering, tribute, sacrifice. I’ll gore them all before I agree to go easily down their throats.
I spin and scan for the scream. The Engineers are so high up that I can only see their grim faces looking over the edges of their platform. Not them.
Sir Sorken is shouting to someone below. The Penitent, I think. At least he’s being helpful.
I follow his gaze and see Sir Owalan stab his belt knife entirely through his forearm. His back arches and his mouth opens in a pained rictus.
I’ve never liked Penitents. They’re always pulling stunts like this, forever acting dramatically to draw the attention of the God.
His arms reach up as if in prayer and my heart is stuck in my chest. I almost forgot they could do that — that the God gives them blessing in proportion to their self-inflicted wounds. My mouth twists involuntarily. I wish they could keep it to themselves and I wouldn’t have to remember. Either way, this isn’t an injury I need to concern myself with. The Penitent can fend for himself with that.
One of the statues tries to hit him, but the blow glances off the Penitent as if it is a feather smacking into him rather than stone. Though Sir Owalan is clearly in agony, sweat breaking out across his brow and blood flowing from his wound, a second attack also fails to injure him. He is immune to any assault other than his own.
No need to worry about him. He’s crazy but not in danger. His madness protects him.
Hefertus’s platform is empty.
My heart stutters for a moment and then I see his cup is glowing. He’s solved his puzzle already.
I find him at the organ, playing that melancholy song, golden head down, arms spidered out, lost in his anguished melody.
Though the Saint statues attack from every side, their blows miraculously miss both him and the organ. I sense the power of the God at work there.
Behind him, the floor is cracked, all the vessels crushed to dust, and around the pipe organ there are bits of stonework battered to nothing. I watch as one of the Saints pulls down his stone cowl and throws a hammer at Hefertus.
It whips toward him end over end. I grunt, feeling the blow before it hits my friend. It slams into his skull.
No.
It doesn’t.
It falls to the ground right behind him as if it hit a stone wall where his head is.
A chunk of stone flies up from the floor where the hammer rebounds.
The Prince Paladin can clearly take care of himself. Or the God can. Or something.
I find the Majester next. He’s looking at Hefertus. His hands are up. I see one make a flinging motion and then one of the Saints flings a discus at my friend.
Wait.
He’s controlling that statue. And he’s attacking my friend with it. I feel my mouth form a firm line. Interesting how challenges bring out the heart of people. If it was he who screamed; I don’t have time for his pain.
I hear a shout from below — higher pitched, feminine. My heart is in my throat as I spin.
Victoriana.
She’s not on her platform and her cup isn’t glowing. She either hasn’t figured out the puzzle or she’s not her own adversary and therefore can’t use her own blood. She should take her dog’s blood. There’s an adversary if I’ve ever seen one.
I scan through the bodies and find her standing over her fallen dog. He’s lying at her feet in a clump of fur and blood as she spins and bats at the statues, her braid an inky whip around her, her sword an extension of her arm.
I knew that creature would get her in trouble; I just thought it would be the perpetrator, not the victim.
What’s she doing halfway to the Inquisitor’s platform?
Oh.
He’s fallen, pinned under a broken statue. It’s in three pieces and the Inquisitor is under one of them. I do not know if he lives. It seems his qualms about this place were justified.
Saints and Angels. He must be the source of the original scream, and she’s trying to get to him.
Of course she is. She has more honor than anyone else here — and I include Hefertus in that, because my dear friend would rather play music as everyone around him dies than lift a hand to help.
I need to get to her.
Even as I think that, I see the High Saint cutting through the chaos, a statue clearing space before him and another keeping the rest of them off his back. Both these Saints he controls are slow and lumbering. How are they doing that? He doesn’t have the Majester’s way with command, but he’s figured out a rudimentary system.
I don’t have time to discover what has given them power over the denizens of this place. Perhaps they merely asked and were granted their requests.
I need to move.
Something catches the edge of my peripheral vision and my breath is jagged in my chest as my gaze is torn back to the movement.
The Vagabond spins out of the grasp of one adversary, kicking up a foot and pivoting in the tidiest spin attack I think I’ve seen. She executes it perfectly, fearlessly. Her quick strike hits the flat of a stone sword and it shatters. I haven’t seen her in real action before. Apparently, she was holding back in the friendly bout up top.
This Vagabond Paladin could hold her own against any fighter in the capital. I’m not entirely sure I could win if we turned on each other. This Vagabond is a fearsome thing indeed.
I’m impressed. I don’t mean to be, but I am.
Her second blow knocks the stone teeth out of a lion. It leaps forward, rearing up on hind legs from where a female Saint with many braids flicks out a stone whip in one hand and holds the lion with the other.
The Vagabond doesn’t hesitate. She spins under the lion and bashes it in the side of the head with both the hilt of her sword and her gauntleted hand. On her way past, she kicks up onto the lion’s haunch, spins into a double-footed kick, and both her hands wrap around her sword hilt. The stone whip catches her across the pauldron but she grits her teeth and lands her kick, knocking the Saint’s stone head off her shoulders.
She’s bold and powerful, skilled and agile.
But she’s only one woman.
More enemies closing in on every side and she won’t leave the dog. She circles it, batting back the enemy one at a time. She can’t hold on like that.
Grimly, I grab my second chain and tug hard, releasing the ratchet and sending my platform careening downward. Hopefully, there’s no one beneath me. I can’t stop this descent and I won’t.
I know one thing — whether we find the cup or not, whether we find a way out or not — I will not be whole if the Vagabond dies. I may never be whole again.
I crash to the ground and hear a cracking sound as the stone shard breaks away and shatters. Pain rips through my shins. I ignore it.
A sword is in front of my eyes before the dust settles, thrusting downward toward me. I use the Vagabond’s clever idea and hit it on the flat. It shatters in the most satisfying way, but I have no time to enjoy the victory.
I pivot, leap over an enemy, and almost crash into the Penitent, my heart in my throat.
He spins, looks at me wild-eyed without comprehension, and then spins away again, a whirlwind of movement and violence, kicking and lunging through the white, perfectly formed stone bodies surrounding us.
I feel like a child among murderous adults. They dwarf me, unfeeling, unknowing, bent on my destruction.
I try to do what the Majester has done and command them with my mind.
Move! I roar with all my thoughts, but nothing happens. Whatever trick is at play for him and for the High Saint has sidestepped me. I don’t have time to figure it out when these statues threaten everything.
I clamber over the body of a fallen stone Saint — I think she was a virgin sacrifice or something. Her pinched waist is the perfect place to plant my boot between the swell of her hip and the sweep of her rib cage.
I’m pushing up and over her cold stone flesh when I see the Majester raise his sword over his head and bring it down in both hands, tip pointed at a place between his feet. It’s not until it lands that I see what he is striking.
It’s the throat of the Inquisitor, pinned under the stone.
What has he done? I swallow down bile.
This is murder, pure and simple. No true paladin would commit such an unholy act.
My guttural roar of fury bubbles up at the same moment that the Majester is kicked from behind. He stumbles forward, spins, sword up, and then throws himself at his attacker — the Vagabond Paladin.
Of course.
She’s crying — tears streaming down her face — but her lips are clenched together and her eyes are narrowed in rage. Her strikes are fast and sure.
Her sword hits his in the familiar ring of steel on steel, striking at the exact moment that a crescendo peaks in the passionate music Hefertus is spinning from his haunted instrument. Perhaps he is finding his cadence in the rhythm of our deaths. There’s something poetic about having my last moments set to the melody of a friend’s tears.
The Majester’s blade slides down the Vagabond’s, locking them in a clinch for a half second, but it’s long enough for the High Saint to suddenly be there.
“Majester. Beggar. Don’t move.”
The High Saint’s voice is calm and precise but loud enough that I can hear it even as I sidestep a fresh attack from a female Saint with a light veil drawn round her head and hanging down to her knees. The fabric of the Saint’s veil is carved to be translucent so that the swells of her cheeks and her wicked smile are easy to make out while she still appears veiled. It’s artful. And terrifying. And not holy at all.
I breathe out as the combatants freeze in place. Good. They will listen to reason.
It’s only when the High Saint slides in, slips a cup under the Beggar’s eye, swipes a tear, then flicks a knife across her cheek and takes her blood with it that I realize he has used his boon from the God against them.
“Go in peace,” he intones, making the sign of the God self-righteously. At least he didn’t kill her for it. I should be thankful for that, right? Count my blessings? I am counting only how I might get revenge, a cut for a cut, a wound for a wound.
These fools are using their God-given gifts most flagrantly and someone must call them to account.
The High Saint whirls away, prize in hand. I taste the violation of Victoriana’s person like rotted meat in my mouth. There will be war between the High Saint and me. I shall press him until he comes to her on his knees. Until he stands vigil for three nights in prayerful repentance. Until …
Swords clash again between the Majester and the Vagabond, released suddenly from the High Saint’s grip.
This is the High Saint’s gift, exercised now in a harsh way. If he keeps his sacraments perfectly — and we all know he has — he may ask a request of any other follower of the God and they must give it. In this case, standing still in the middle of a fight while he raids the Vagabond’s tears and blood. But this is an abuse of the power bestowed on him. A blasphemy.
The God will judge.
I hope.
I channel my anger into forcing the veiled maiden back. I lose track of the Majester and the Vagabond as I push forward, noticing, out of the corner of my eye, how the Penitent is taking blood from the fallen Inquisitor. The milky paladin must have spilled tears as he lay there, crushed, for they are raided — most indecently.
I feel a pull, dragging me toward him. Perhaps it is not too late to save him? But if I divert my path, it may be too late for Victoriana.
I’ve always hated prioritizing those who need my aid. I hate it now.
“I’ll have your tears, girl,” the Majester is saying grimly as I finally break free from the attack of the veiled maiden. “It won’t hurt you, so why deny me?”
“I’m not your adversary!”
“Then what would you call this dance?”
I can’t see them.
The statues of the Saints are too thick for me to catch a glimpse as I try to push past a robed Saint waving a censer. He thrusts it at my face and it’s all I can do to dance back from the lunge.
I split his censer with my sword, spin a second Saint statue over my shoulders in a move I haven’t had to use in battle since the Sixth Plague War, and then aim a careful blow at the delicate ankle of the trident-bearing Saint just in front of me.
He tumbles to the ground in a heap and I leap onto his shoulders just in time to see the Vagabond on her knees, straddling the dog, sword held in both hands as she blocks a blow from the Majester with all her strength.
She’s bleeding freely from one side and for a moment I’m shocked that the Majester has managed to bring her to her knees … until I see that her head is caught in the pale marble hands of a statue. The curving female Saint looks past me as she holds the Vagabond in place, a look of empty nothing in her eyes. Beside her, a second empty-eyed statue makes a grab for the paladin’s off-hand, catches her forearm, and levers it backward. She cries out in pain.
And that is too much for me.
I fling myself forward, uncaring of the blows aimed at me.
One takes me hard on the left scapula, barely deflected by my breastplate. I stumble, but move with the blow, forcing myself forward despite the flaring pain in that side.
Another knocks my right hip. Not enough to stop me. I’ve battered my way through worse.
I see the Majester raise his sword in what is clearly meant to be a killing blow, but I ram my blade through him before he can bring his sword down, right beneath the heart.
And now I’ve committed murder, too. Not my first. Never my last.
He stumbles.
I feel the tremor in my grip, through the sword, as his quaking flesh makes my blade shiver and buck. His collapse pulls the blade down with him, but it also drags down the statues he was maneuvering. I snatch my sword free before it can be further harmed.
My heart stutters in my chest as my lungs heave with effort. I swallow down bile. I hate killing. Hate wounding. I’m not sure which I’ve done now. Not sure.
I think I’ve killed him, but there isn’t time to check.
With a shuddering breath, I step back from his body and toward the Vagabond.
Shock paints her face with long lines. Her hair is spread and tangled around her neck and shoulders as if she’s been dragged down into a river and strangled by weeds. She’s forced her statue attackers away and is breathing as hard as I am.
“Are you mortally wounded?” I gasp out.
“You killed for me.” Her words are sharp, disbelieving. She looks every inch the warrior queen despite an arm that hangs at her side.
For just one sparkling moment in the middle of horror, it is just we two, looking at each other. Something sparks hot and fierce between us and it’s more than brotherhood or common cause. It’s something that shoots deep and hard through me and it’s never coming out again.
“I’ll heal you,” I gasp, struggling up to my feet. “I’ll heal you both.”
I’m surprised when she half shakes her head — is that denial or refusal? Will she not take my gift?
The strains of the organ turn to a sad, sweeping strain.
“The blood!” Sir Sorken yells down. “This isn’t over. Get the Beggar some blood for her cup or you’ll be crushed!”
I look up and see the statues moving past the ones that fell with the Majester. They have all turned toward us. With their targets winnowed down to two, we’ll be fighting all of them at once.
Before I can say a word, they break into a run toward us.
I growl in my throat and grab the Vagabond by the arm to guide her. She screams when I force her to her feet, but her teeth are gritted and her eyes are all determination. A broken arm, I think.
“The dog,” she gasps.
“We’ll come back for the dog,” I tell her. “After.”
I push her ahead of me with my off-hand. Hers falls uselessly at her side — a compound fracture, then, if I’m any judge.
I feel jagged inside, but the Engineer is right. We must get the blood and tears in the cup and we must do it now, or we’ll be clobbered again.
I glance behind us, guarding our backs as I hustle the Vagabond to her platform.
Over my shoulder, I see the Penitent at the Majester’s cup.
“If he still lives, he needs his cup filled!” Sir Coriand calls down.
They’ll have to work that out for themselves. I have no energy for traitors.
We’re at the stairs. I’m supporting the Vagabond as she ascends them, stumbling in a way that tells me she’s in a lot of pain.
She reaches the top and pauses over her cup.
“I have nothing,” she says through her gritted teeth, and her eyes are a little wild as her gaze darts back to the dog. Ha! She’d had the same thought I’d had about him.
“Let me,” I manage to say between heavy breaths. I still have angry tears on my face. It’s easy enough to let one fall into the broken cup she chose. Why a broken one?
“You’re not my adversary.” She says it like a declaration, like a queen awarding a prize.
I want to kiss her.
The thought is unbidden. Unwelcome. I thrust it aside.
“Aren’t I?” I grit out. “Have I not made things harder for you? Do I not make them harder now? Trust me, Lady Paladin, I am no proper friend to you.”
“Are you not? For you are a friend like no other,” she says, lips trembling at some emotion I cannot discern.
Her confession tears something inside me, opening me wide. I’m stuck in her gaze. I’m trapped like a fly in treacle. I can’t breathe.
“It’s not working!” the Penitent calls from behind me. “Why isn’t it working?”
Beneath us, our platform begins to sway and the sound of stone on stone rings as the statues throw themselves at our refuge.
I lift my hand up, press the cut in my thumb to her vessel, and squeeze a drop into her cup. Friend or not, I am indeed her rival. Her enemy. Because friendship with me is ruin to any woman.
Her cup glows bright, confirming that.
And as sudden as the sneaking dawn, silence falls. My breath saws in my lungs. Victoriana lets out a vulnerable, trembling exhale that melts me straight to the core. Hefertus’s organ lets out a last gasp and all is still.
“Well,” Sir Sorken calls out in his usual cheerful tone. “I suppose that’s done it, then.”
