“I have to see to the Majester,” Adalbrand gasped out. “I … my desire for revenge is a slap in the face of the God.”
“You can’t possibly mean that,” I said stupidly. Of course he meant it. Of course it was true. It just didn’t feel true when I’d seen the Majester murder the Inquisitor with my own eyes. The pale-haired warrior had done nothing to him. Worse, he’d been trapped under the statue’s rubble, unable to defend himself. A more ignominious deed could hardly be designed.
Pain was etched across Adalbrand’s face.
“We forgive. It’s who we are.” He swallowed roughly. “Or at least it’s who we should be.” He looked down, seeing something I didn’t. “It’s who we should be,” he repeated, as if convincing himself, and then he looked me over with a critical squint. “I’ll be back for your arm. You’re safe here, yes?”
He reached for me as if he would cup my face, winced, and then spun with a muttered curse and was gone, hurtling down the steps from this terrible platform and into the wreckage below.
I gathered in a long breath.
Well then. That was very Adalbrand of him. Very chivalrous knight. I gave his back a long, dry look. And what about me? Was my lack of chivalry an offense to the God? I hoped not. I would not offend the one who had given me a second chance.
I also wasn’t about to go haring off to the rescue of Sir Sword-in-the-Throat.
Pain still radiated hot and jagged from my broken arm. If Adalbrand couldn’t heal it, I’d need to set it. It felt wrong in every way. I’d had worse but I knew this kind of pain was more than a warning. If I didn’t tend the arm properly I’d lose it … or worse.
I was about to follow him, but a scraping sound arrested me, long and terrible like the wail of a dying soul. The fallen statues slowly stood.
Great. Just really excellent. I swallowed down a lump in my throat and jutted out my chin.
I could fight them again. I could. But I’d rather not. Already they’d scored their claws through the flesh of my soul. And this arm would be a problem.
I was still bracing myself for a second attack when they began to recede toward the walls with excruciating slowness. I let out a puff of breath.
No more fighting today, then. Good.
What had been a beautiful room of wonders was a smashed, bloody mess. That the urgency of the attack was over did not take away the bitter sting of the treacheries committed here. We’d turned on each other. We’d killed.
And for what.
I turned to the worst of it. Brindle.
Broken on the ground. He’d be defenseless against even slowly retreating statues.
I leapt from the platform, misjudging the height slightly, and stumbled awkwardly when I hit the ground. Bursts of black clouded out my vision as the raw ends of my broken bone jarred against each other. My sword was still drawn. There was no blood on it. I’d destroyed only statues, thank you. Not like that God-forsaken Majester.
Saints and Angels, was Adalbrand really going to fuss over him?
I should have sheathed the sword before leaping, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I sheathed it now before I started to run.
I’d missed whatever had taken Brindle out in the fight. Something had hit him hard — the flat of a stone blade, I’d thought — and sent him careening through the air to smash into the floor. There had been blood and he’d wobbled, and then his pelvis had collapsed under him and those … those … those demon-loving, unethical, rotten-hearted, selfish paladins had tried to kill him.
They’d wanted blood. They hadn’t cared whose it was. Even a dog’s. I wasn’t sure I could forgive them the way Adalbrand could.
Even if I had mixed feelings about the dog-knight-demon.
I didn’t think they should have Brindle’s blood and I didn’t think they should have my grace.
I’d been the one who had gone to all that trouble to save his life at the river, and I’d been the one who had to cart around an excess demon that I was not fond of and have it live in my head, have it give me an ongoing commentary about the ways it would like to kill me, feel its icky black soul brushing up against mine. Gah. These other people hadn’t earned the right to draw Brindle’s blood. That was my right if it was anyone’s — and I was choosing not to exercise it, so they should stay out of the matter.
Besides. He had those trusting doggy eyes.
I ran between the receding statues — they weren’t violent anymore, but they were still mindless, and they could easily scrape over the dead. Parts of them that had been knocked off were floating up into the air, repairing themselves. I shuddered. I did not feel the power of the God in this magic. And if it was not his work, then whose was it?
There were gaps between the pieces and fissures across the faces. If the magic could bring them back together, would it also repair them after we left this place? How many times had it done this before? And did the scholars who wrote about this monastery know?
For it was obvious now that this place was not erected to serve the God. This was no house of holiness.
We’d all of us been deceived.
And I could feel that deception trickling through my blood and reaching its clawing hands up into my hot, rage-filled brain.
When all this was done, I was going to hunt down the head of our aspect and we were going to have a talk about paladins going where demons feared to tread. Or something like that. And then he was going to … well, actually it was hard to say what he’d do. Apologize, maybe? Discipline me? Ask if I had a coin to spare?
I snorted at the ridiculousness of it.
I made it to Brindle just in time to tug him out from the path of a moving statue. I was out of breath and turned around, unable to sort out my jumble of emotions, my hands trembling as they pulled a heavy dog by the loose skin at the back of his neck. My nose was filled with him — wet fur, the tang of blood, something that smelled just a little of smoke.
Please don’t be dead, Brindle. Please don’t be dead.
I shouldn’t even care. I had almost killed him myself back at the river.
But I did care. The thought that he might be gone gripped me like a hand gripped a rope on a ledge.
He was breathing. I could smell his doggy breath, and when I yanked a gauntlet off, I could feel it very faintly against my fingers. Alive, then. My chest seized sharply.
Of the demon and of Sir Branson there was no sign. So. Where were they?
I looked upward, swallowing, fool that I was. As if I’d be able to see the demon if he fled his coop. He wasn’t the black blob caught in the ceiling; he would simply jump to another person.
The Majester, perhaps. That might explain a lot. I shot the other paladin a long look. Adalbrand knelt over him, head bowed in prayer.
I would have bet my own life that Adalbrand could have repaired the Inquisitor. The man hadn’t been even close to death. He was merely trapped, both his arms and pelvis stuck under the weight of a fallen statue. And a man didn’t have to be dead for you to take his blood. After all, the High Saint had easily taken mine.
Maybe I should work on finding the forgiveness Adalbrand gave away like a flower offers up pollen, but I wasn’t sure I had it in me to be like him.
My glance at the Majester’s fallen form turned to a glare. Was there a demon in there? Come out, come out, little demon. Show yourself and let’s end this.
“Here now,” Sir Sorken called down. He and the other Engineer were lowering their platform at a leisurely speed. I understood them, I thought. They were practical men. They wanted no part in battle or murder. They’d help where it cost them nothing, but they’d stand back if there would be a price. “Are you certain you want to spend yourself for the Majester General, Poisoned Saint?”
“The God forgives and the God condemns,” Adalbrand called up grimly. “I meant to stop him, not to kill him.”
“He did kill the Inquisitor though, yes? A terrible blemish on all of our names. He has made us complicit in a crime most foul,” Sir Sorken said, his voice booming down to Adalbrand, who was turning a gasping, choking Majester onto his back. Blood ran from the Majester’s mouth, staining his beard. “Perhaps best to leave things alone. This may be the judgment of the God after all.”
Adalbrand frowned. “I don’t want this blood on my conscience, too.”
Sir Sorken shrugged as he descended, looking like an overly practical angel. “Heal him if you wish, but you might have to kill him again. In my experience, people don’t really make mistakes, they just show you their intentions. He’ll be at the Vagabond’s throat a second time, given half a chance. A strange choice for a target.” His eyes speared me for a moment before returning to the dying Majester. “You’d think he’d realize she isn’t the weakest here, but the Majesters have always been more interested in groups than individuals. Perhaps he struggles to separate the two.”
“Whatever you do, stop quarreling, and let’s get down,” Sir Coriand complained. “I want a fresh cup of tea and a bit of a think. If we have a fallen paladin in our midst then we’ll report him to his aspect when we get back above, as is proper. No point fussing about it now.”
“Agreed.”
Adalbrand ignored them, crouching over the Majester and placing his fingers on the other man’s forehead. He closed his eyes, healing the man, no doubt.
If Sir Branson was here, he’d say it was chivalry. I swallowed a lump in my throat at the thought. Had I lost my old mentor? Lost him forever now? The thought left me strangely bereft.
Adalbrand’s shoulders slumped, head fell forward, and then he collapsed beside the other man, face-first into the dust.
My heart froze and I felt ill as I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the piercing pain in my arm. But before I could move, there was a loud curse and then Hefertus was there, lifting Adalbrand.
“You always overdo it. I tried to tell you that it’s too much. You don’t need to take everyone’s pain. He could have died and we would have lost nothing. The Engineers even warned you.”
The Engineers were warning no one now. Their heads were bent together over their cup.
“What have I done?” a rough voice asked. And then, as my eyes widened, the Majester sat up, brushed himself off as if he hadn’t just been dying, and said, “I killed him. I killed him. But I was only doing what was required of me, wasn’t I, Engineers?” He shot a panicked look at Adalbrand. “And then you killed me.”
“A life for a life.” Hefertus’s voice was bored as he took a flask from his side and lifted it to Adalbrand’s lips. The Poisoned Saint sputtered, coughed, and then pushed away from his friend looking dazed but conscious again.
The Majester spoke like one sentenced to death. “There were rules. We all had to follow them.”
“Some followed more cleverly than others,” Sir Sorken remarked, looking up only long enough to be sure we’d heard him before he returned to the cup.
“We beat the trial and it meant nothing,” Sir Owalan said despairingly, limping over to us and running a hand over his face. It was the first he’d spoken and he looked gutted. Clearly, his priorities rested in one place alone. “One of us fell from grace. One of us is dead. And none of these is the Cup of Tears. Must we do all that over and over until we find it?” His gaze swept the room. “And what if it is one of the broken vessels?”
Nearly all the remaining vessels were battered or broken. They were in shards or crumpled messes in shoals across the ground, forming long furrows where the statues had scraped their way back to the walls. If I thought our salvation lay among them, I’d give up now. We could not fight this battle a hundred more times and live — time alone would make that impossible and we’d die of thirst on the first day if not at the hands of marble statues.
I snorted.
The “Saints,” or whatever they were, looked down on us innocently, as if they’d be the first to question whether anything had happened at all.
“Who? Us?” they seemed to say.
“Fallen from grace?” The Majester’s voice was hollow. He patted his chest, fingers streaking through the blood smear there as if he couldn’t believe a sword had plunged through him and been removed. “I’ve broken the commandment. I’ve drawn steel on the innocent and taken blood without cause.”
My Brindle remained silent. I was so unused to having my thoughts clear of the influence of others that I hardly knew what to do with myself. I expected a snide comment or a victorious laugh. Instead, there was only my own voice asking me, Can he really be so good an actor? Does anyone believe he did not mean murder?
“It’s not one of the broken vessels,” Sir Sorken said. Not like a comforter, but like a man breaking news to a king. He straightened. “And it’s also not the vessels we chose — but those are not useless.”
“No, indeed, and you’d best hold on to yours,” Sir Coriand agreed, removing their cup from its holder. It continued to glow faintly in a way that made my eyes cross, as if they couldn’t quite agree it was happening at all.
Sir Coriand had a look in his eyes I couldn’t parse. It looked a bit like hunger, but that couldn’t be right. After all, the Engineers were the only ones who had been entirely out of the fight. Except for Sir Hefertus, I supposed. But he was meant to be bereft of common sense. It was what his aspect forswore. They had clearly done it deliberately.
“The cups are one part of the solution, but an important part. Or at least they should be.”
“Solution?” Sir Owalan complained, but I wasn’t looking at him. “Speak plainly.”
My eyes trailed to Adalbrand. He squared his shoulders, rolled his neck, and then, with obvious pain writ large across his features, he made his way to the Inquisitor.
I lifted Brindle’s head onto my lap. No voices. Not one.
Worry bit around my edges, tugging and terrorizing me. I hadn’t stopped to think of what would happen if the dog died by something other than my hand. It seemed a terrible thing to have neglected now that I was there.
Perhaps I should have quizzed Sir Branson on the things he had failed to teach me. Perhaps I should have worked harder to oust the demon.
I ground my teeth together, annoyed with myself for these failings.
The Majester muttered from where he stood, “There’s murder in my heart. Black doings. Terrors unknown.”
Look, he kind of sounded demon-possessed, if I was honest. It was unnerving. And yet, I sensed no demon there.
“The solution we are searching for is the riddle of this monastery,” Sir Coriand said. “We’re in a trap. Or perhaps I should say a giant puzzle box. It’s terribly clever, really. I wish I had the funds to build one myself, but it would take a king’s ransom and access to the arcane, I would think.”
“And a lifetime to build,” Sir Sorken added.
“And a lifetime to build.”
“And slave labor. Or prisoners. Or supplicants, I suppose, were they dedicated enough.”
“Or monks,” Sir Coriand suggested gently.
“The ones who are bent just a little. You know. Twisted. Off. Not right.” Sir Sorken was nodding.
“And about a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, obviously,” Sir Coriand said absently. “Which we don’t really have, unless you’ve solved the puzzle of age, my friend.”
“I’m working on it. No progress as of yet.”
Sir Coriand paused, realized we were all listening, and cleared his throat. “But building a replica is neither here nor there. For now, suffice it to say, we won’t be getting out of this one until it’s solved. And it’s wickedly clever. Puzzles within puzzles and all that. If there weren’t so many tragic … incidentals … it would be quite a lark, really.”
“He means deaths,” Sorken clarified.
“Yes, that. The solution for this room required every living person in the room to participate. Interesting that it didn’t need the dog, don’t you think? But I suppose the dog didn’t sign up for this. Maybe consent is required.”
“I consented to nothing,” the High Saint said with a barb in his tone. I shot him an angry scowl. I hadn’t forgotten what he’d taken. And I hadn’t consented to that.
“Well, the door did try to keep us out. I think that perhaps entry is consent. Except where the dog is concerned, at least. He came with the girl. It wasn’t his choice. And we had to work together as a group. It couldn’t be solved separately one at a time. It stands to reason that the rest of the riddles will be like that, too.”
“Surely there cannot be more.” Sir Owalan sounded aghast. “This would test the patience of a true Saint.” He paused. “Or is that how it creates Saints? Through tests that stretch us to the edges?”
“Which is your goal?” Sir Coriand asked with a faint smile. “To be a Saint or to find the cup? I think — perhaps — that the puzzle box offers both to you.”
“Please, Brindle,” I whispered. “Please be well.”
I needed him back, if only to have an intelligent conversation.
I cleared my throat. “I’m not certain anymore that this place makes Saints. I think it’s trying to kill us.”
“Well, it’s certainly being creative about it,” Sir Coriand said tolerantly. “Well? Cup or Saint?”
“I want the cup,” the Penitent said at the same time that the High Saint spoke. “I want to be a Saint.”
Sir Coriand laughed. “Well, at least you won’t kill each other if you want different things.”
And just like that, every eye turned to Adalbrand.
He sighed, his head bent over the Inquisitor. When he looked up, his face was lined and tired.
“I can do nothing for him. His soul has fled.”
“Oh, Merciful God, have mercy, have mercy,” the Majester moaned.
The wicked part of me wondered if the God had as little mercy to spare as I did. Perhaps he’d flick the Majester’s request away as one flicks away a gnat.
It would serve him right.
The look in Adalbrand’s eyes was murderous, and I thought that perhaps the Majester owed Hefertus a great debt, because the looming paladin had followed his friend and right now it was only his meaty palm that held the Poisoned Saint back from lunging at the Majester. Adalbrand may have healed him, but it seemed he still struggled to forgive. A part of me felt very satisfied with that.
“I can’t remember why I did it,” the Majester said uneasily. “There was some voice telling me it was right.” I felt a chill at that. “Blood was required. And with him broken beneath the masonry, it was a mercy. No one wants to live with their legs and pelvis crushed to powder. That’s what the voice said.”
“I could have healed that,” Adalbrand gritted out between clenched teeth.
“No one can heal what the God has wrought,” the High Saint said, making the holy sign. “Come with me, Majester, and I will hear your confession and grant you reprieve as I may. We shall take this matter to the God where it belongs.”
“I … I … yes.” The Majester looked shaken.
He was already turning his back on Adalbrand, led by the High Saint, who seemed unconcerned by the other man’s flushed face or white knuckles.
Annoyance bubbled up in me. First, the High Saint had taken my blood and tears by trickery. Now, he ignored the Poisoned Saint and condoned the murder of the Inquisitor. I hated him for his arrogance. I hated him worse for the insult he dealt to my friend.
Good luck to them getting help the next time they needed it. Now that I knew what they did to the defenseless, you wouldn’t see me offering any.
“Bring your cups,” Sir Coriand commanded. “If we went to this trouble to earn them, we shouldn’t leave them here. I think I saw slots for them in the base of the clock.”
I turned my eyes back to Brindle. I didn’t care about the Cup of Tears. Not anymore. Losing Sir Branson now in finality hurt more than I’d expected it to. And I was worried about the demon. And I was so angry that I wasn’t sure I could hold all that anger inside my one measly heart.
I bit my lip hard and held on to my dog. I tried not to see how weak his breathing was, tried not to cry at how soft and furry and vulnerable he looked like this, and I tried not to think about what it would mean if Sir Branson was really gone after everything we’d been through.
Or worse … if Adalbrand offered to heal Brindle.
He’d told me he’d been one with me when he healed me, hadn’t he? He’d known me inside and out at that moment. What would that mean if he touched Brindle? Would he know what I’d allowed in the dog?
Fear spiked hard, and when something touched my shoulder, my eyes shot open and I jumped, my sword arm reaching for my hilt.
“Easy. Easy now.”
Adalbrand squatted in front of me, hands held up like I was a dangerous animal. Beside him, his friend Hefertus squatted, too, one eyebrow lifted, one finger tracing his pearls mindlessly.
“You’ve been through a lot,” Adalbrand said carefully. He was drawn and pale again. And why not? He’d nearly taken death from the Majester — who I saw out of the corner of my eye striding jauntily to the door as if he owed no man anything. There was a paladin I could stab in his sleep. No regrets.
“If you’re thinking of murdering the Majester,” Hefertus said in an undertone, his eyes finding mine and locking on, “I have prior claim. He attempted to kill me while I did nothing more violent than play a heartbreaking tune.”
“I was thinking that,” I admitted, as the heels of the Engineers vanished. There was no one left but us three. Four. I wouldn’t give up on Brindle yet.
Adalbrand ran a tired hand over his face. “I just healed the man and now my friends are fighting over who will try to kill him again.”
“I did try to warn you not to, brother,” Hefertus said, smirking at me as if sharing a joke. “Some men were born needing to die. Your heart is too soft to see it. The Vagabond sees, though. You can’t live destitute without knowing who people are at the core. What they’ll forgive in the rich is never overlooked in the poor, and what’s praised in the stable is often persecuted in the outliers, right, Beggar?”
“Yes,” I agreed fiercely.
Adalbrand looked back and forth between the two of us. “Must I remind you that the God forgives us as we forgive others? Must I remind you that we are commanded not to let hate and anger seethe within us?”
I should have felt chagrined. I knew that. He knew that. I did not feel at all as I should.
Hefertus merely laughed. “Preach all you like, Poisoned Saint. But give us some credit. The God demands forgiveness, yes, but he also demands wisdom, and it would be supreme folly to forget what we saw today.”
“I can heal your arm,” Adalbrand told me gently, ignoring Hefertus, who snickered at what he clearly considered a win. “I know it’s broken. You favor it still. Show me.”
I tried to remove my gauntlet and flinched.
“Set the dog down and —”
“No.” My denial was too fast and I knew it.
He raised his calming hand again and he kept his voice carefully neutral.
“I will remove your gauntlet for you.”
So I sat with a heavy doggy on my lap as a beautiful, disheveled knight gently drew a metal glove from my hand and checked my knuckles one by one with the smooth pads of his fingers while an even prettier knight looked on and snickered. This was possibly the most storybook-like moment of my life. And it was drenched all through with pain and blood and awkwardness.
“Your hand is unbroken,” Adalbrand said almost sternly, as if rebuking us both for our unforgiving hearts and silent innuendo. “Let us see to the arm.”
My sleeve would not move without me hissing in pain, and eventually, it had to be cut.
“You can have one of mine to replace it when we get up top,” Hefertus said easily. “I have a silk blouse the color of a blooming lilac that would look very fine on you indeed.”
Adalbrand shot him a poisonous look that I might have liked. It did not slow his work. He cut my sleeve slowly, inch by inch, with his knife. His eyes flicked up to mine every few seconds as he worked, one hand cradling my arm at the elbow, the other cutting my sleeve. His expression was open and sure. And I found I wanted to give myself over to him entirely — let him tell me what to do, who to fear, who to forgive. Surely he could do a better job of it than I.
“I should charge for admission,” Hefertus snorted from the sidelines. I blushed hot and looked away. “I could bottle this angst and sell it to elderly kings to use in their harem.”
“Don’t talk to me about elderly kings,” Adalbrand said with an edge to his voice.
“I always forget your father was one until you get prickly about it. Your loyalty is so very unearned, my friend.”
“Loyalty is a gift, not a reward.”
“From you it surely is.” Hefertus paused. “Not to put too fine a point on things, but we need to talk. I think we must do it now while the others are out there fitting cups into clocks. Which means the pair of you must put your — whatever you are doing with one another — to the side so that we can deal with the business at hand.”
My cheeks heated, but he was not looking at me and neither was Adalbrand. Adalbrand had the corner of his tongue stuck out of his mouth as he carefully cut my sleeve and Hefertus swallowed hard, his eyes on the dead Inquisitor. I bet that if we checked, the poor man would still be warm.
“They killed him in cold blood and they turned on me and on the Beggar.” I didn’t care that Hefertus used the slur for me. I didn’t think he noticed when it happened. “Lines are being drawn.”
“I think it was panic, mostly,” Adalbrand said, wincing as he peeled back my sleeve and finally got a proper look at the place where my bone stuck through the flesh of my arm. I hissed and bit off a whine when he tried to touch the skin close by.
The Poisoned Saint’s eyes met mine, sharing the wince. He was so pale.
“I don’t think you should heal this,” I said, forcing firmness into my voice. “You’ve already taken too much from the Majester. Just …” I felt a bit ill to say it when relief was an option and my voice stung in my throat. “Just set it if you can and wrap it. I can endure it.”
If I breathed a little thinly after that, can you blame me?
He looked from me to the dog, his face twisting with indecision.
“Not Brindle,” I said quietly.
“Definitely not Brindle,” Hefertus agreed dryly. “I swear to the God, Adalbrand, you take the martyr role too seriously. Do what the girl says and bind her arm, and when you have the strength to sit upright, you can heal her. That won’t be until morning at the earliest, and we both know it. The second you’re safe, you’ll collapse. Which is why we need to speak now. We’ve been working together loosely. We slept in one tent without killing each other. Can we speak words to this? Can we put our honor to an alliance until we get out of this cursed den?”
Adalbrand said nothing. His hand hovered over Brindle and fear seized my heart. I grabbed his wrist with my good hand and his eyes snapped up to meet mine. I’ve never been much of a secret keeper and I was afraid he was seeing my last secret laid bare in my eyes — but fearing something and letting it happen were two different things.
“Not the dog.”
He looked at me for a long moment and I winced internally at the expression in his eyes. He was weighing what it meant that I didn’t want healing for my dog. Yes, Adalbrand, I’m a mystery. Can you live with that?
He drew his hand back and cold washed over me. I could feel that with it, he was withdrawing some of the trust he’d given me, and that hurt. Even if he was right. Even if there was absolutely no way I could give in on this point.
It was one thing to overlook that I’d killed my mentor when he was possessed by a demon. It was entirely something else to reveal that I had not killed the dog the demon leapt into. He would judge me. And knowing Adalbrand, he would carry out his judgment with grim determination.
“Alliance?” Hefertus asked again, an edge of warning in his voice.
“Have I ever denied you, old friend?” Adalbrand asked, but his eyes were still on me, frowning.
“And you, Vagabond?” Hefertus asked me.
I glanced at him, surprised. He was only the second person to ever ask this, and the first was staring at me like I might shape-shift into a snake if he looked away.
“I welcome such a union,” I said gravely.
Hefertus nodded. “The others will form their own alliances. The High Saint and the Majester will work together. The Engineers will stay a pair. The Penitent will have to land somewhere. Do you think the Majester killed the Seer, too?”
“What?” I asked, genuinely surprised. That was a strange leap of thought.
“She had the key in her hand, didn’t she? The one Sir Owalan took when he thought no one was looking and then slotted into that lock the next morning. The Majester might have been after that. Or he might have just wanted to eliminate the competition. Like he did with the Inquisitor. I don’t believe his pretense at repentance.”
Adalbrand grunted, unwilling to commit.
Hefertus snorted. “You’re too trusting, Adalbrand. Someone knew what this place was. Someone who killed the Seer before she could stop us from being sealed in here. Someone who knew she had the key.”
“Wasn’t she going to use the key?” I asked. “She was right there by the door.”
“Unless she took it from the one who was going to use it,” Hefertus suggested. “Perhaps she saw it in a vision. Perhaps she was trying to stop it from coming true.”
“Perhaps this is all speculation,” Adalbrand said firmly. “And Victoriana still has a very bad fracture.”
There was a shuffling sound and we all turned to see Sir Owalan coming into the room from the hall. The broken cups crunched under his feet like shells upon a stretch of beach.
“I came to get your cups,” he said, eyes tight. “You don’t mind, do you? Only, there are slots in the clock for them.”
“Do as you must,” Adalbrand said, returning to my arm. He was swaying slightly.
“You shouldn’t heal me,” I reminded him. “Not now when you’re so weak. Wait until tomorrow when you’ve had time to rest.”
The arm hurt — like a burning rat was chewing right through my bone — but I could live with it until tomorrow.
“We should set it at least, just in case.”
I don’t know if you’ve had your arm set by two fretful paladins just strides away from a corpse. It was not my finest hour. I had to bite down hard on the hood of my cloak to keep from screaming as they levered the bone back into place through the tear in my flesh. By the time they were done, I was trembling, fighting tears hard, and yet spilling them silently anyway. I felt both freezing cold and sweaty.
“We need to talk about this place,” I gasped as the pain still made me shudder.
“Later,” Adalbrand suggested. His eyes were thick with sorrow and winced every time they strayed to my arm. I missed the lighthearted man I’d met days ago.
“Now,” I insisted, panting. “This is no holy monastery to the God. Or to any God, I think.”
“There is no God but the one God and the Saints are his servants,” Hefertus quoted immediately, crossing himself.
“Yes, that,” I agreed. “And this place is not his.”
“Then whose is it?” Hefertus asked, his somber paladin eyes deep with worry.
“A place of demons,” Adalbrand said in a low voice. “A place of evil.”
We nodded with him.
“And we’re trapped in it,” I said, forcing my shuddering voice to be firm, but my teeth betrayed me. They clattered together as my body dealt with the quick doctoring done to it.
Adalbrand was gentle, but his hands were winding my torn sleeve around my arm as a makeshift bandage and the way it made the bone rub on itself forced my eyes to smart and my brain to spin.
“We have a plan,” Hefertus reminded us. “We can watch each others’ backs. But what about the rest. The puzzles? The cup? If the monastery is not what it seems … are they what they seem?”
I shrugged and immediately regretted it.
“And if we are not becoming Saints, then what are we becoming?”
“Devils,” Adalbrand said, and it sounded like a curse.
“No,” Hefertus said, chopping his hand through the air. “Not me. Not you. Not the Beggar. And we’ll do what we can to hold the rest back from the brink.”
“How?” Adalbrand asked him, meeting his eyes. “We have to play through. There’s no turning back now.”
“There’s always a choice,” I said dully. “Even if it’s an impossible one.”
“We don’t know it’s impossible yet,” Hefertus said, quickly changing the subject. “We should carry her dog out with us. She won’t be able to carry him.”
Adalbrand’s eyes lingered on Brindle for a moment and he looked like he wanted to say more, but in the end, he merely nodded. After all, what more was there to say?
They had to take three trips.
One for Brindle. One for the dead Inquisitor. And then finally one for me. For some reason, my legs didn’t want to hold me properly and I needed to lean on someone to walk.
“Shock,” Adalbrand said calmly. “It happens to everyone. There’s no shame in it.”
But it felt shameful when he’d taken a chest wound from the Majester and was still on his feet. He wasn’t the one who was struggling to keep his head clear enough to stand.
“We’ll sleep — both of us — and in the morning I’ll heal you, too,” he said, and I thought the offer was as much to comfort himself as to comfort me.
I nodded grimly but I didn’t say much. I was starting to realize the inevitable truth that if Brindle didn’t pull through on his own, Adalbrand would certainly heal him. And when he did, he would know our secret. And what then? Would he think I planned this trap? Would he — like the High Saint — blame me for the loose demon in the ceiling and whisper in the ears of others until they came to slay me for my sins?
