By the time we reached the main room, I was so spun up with nerves that I hardly noticed that the others were gathered around the great clock until Sir Owalan slotted the last cup — mine, as things would have it — into place. How they could act as if nothing had happened, as if what had just occurred hadn’t revealed traitors and murderers, as if this were just another puzzle, mystified me. How could they not see the imposing threat of this clock made of hands? How could they seem so serene when Adalbrand and Hefertus had carried the dead Inquisitor right past them to lay beside the others?
The Majester had his head close to Sir Sorken’s, worried lines in his forehead as he whispered violently to the other man. He was rumpled and bloodstained and losing all the majesty he’d carried before. I no longer saw anything but a shabby excuse for a knight. As always, Sir Sorken looked slightly bored. His wiry curls and generally disheveled appearance were unaffected. I doubted the end of the world would shake him.
With a click, Sir Owalan twisted his cup in place, his eyes brimming with ambition. Fool. Could he not see that his precious cup was not worth all of our lives or the stains we were rubbing into our souls?
The room lit up with a warm glow and the tick of a clock.
“But what do the hands mean?” Sir Coriand asked in awe. “Are they hours, or days, or years?”
A second tick rang through the room and Hefertus growled, “It had better not be years.”
It was sunset on the other side of the bas-relief carving, shining through to the left of the stairs. As we settled on the floor around the stairway, which was now facing darkened windows, black against the wall that had been a corridor into the living quarters, the evening breeze caught at the cutouts whistling a dull note a little too close to the sound of the pipe organ for my liking. I shivered, flinched, and then shivered again.
“I think they plan to solve that sun and moon puzzle tonight,” Adalbrand said as he lowered himself to the floor. He was trying to sound confident and at ease, but he’d flopped a little too much as he landed, and when I sank to the ground with him, he turned to face me. “I need sleep. Now. Can’t hold on much longer. Hefertus knows.”
“Do I ever,” Hefertus said lazily. He’d guided us to the spot where he’d lain Brindle and now he produced my fur cloak. He was taking his role as the nursemaid of our newfound alliance very seriously. “We’ll take turns resting. You two first. I’ll wake one of you for the next shift. Sleep back-to-back. We don’t want more surprises.”
That was how I found myself huddled under the fur cloak, my arm on fire and my back pleasantly warm as Adalbrand breathed heavily at my back. He was lost to sleep the moment he lay down.
“Hefertus?” I whispered as my own eyelids fluttered.
“I’m here,” he growled. “I’ve got your backs.”
“Can you watch my dog?”
“Don’t plan to take my eyes off the cursed thing.”
That was the best I could ask for. I let my eyelids flutter closed and fell into the rhythm of Adalbrand’s breath. The pain was jagged and sharp in my arm, my fevered forehead cold and clammy, and yet, I slept.
Pain made sleep fitful, and when I woke, I heard murmured voices in the darkness, only to fall back to sleep, awake, asleep, awake again. By the third time it happened, I could not tell if I was still sleeping and dreaming fevered dreams or actually listening to two men murmur together.
“The heart wants what the heart wants,” Hefertus was murmuring.
“The heart can be told to go to hell.” Adalbrand, I thought. His voice was still thick with exhaustion and my back was cold.
“A cruel fate, that. I would not wish it on your heart.”
“Sometimes I would.”
The next time I woke it was still dark. I woke to breath in my face. There was something about how it hitched that told me he was awake.
“Adalbrand?” I whispered, hardly louder than a breath.
“I’m here.” His voice was just as faint. I heard how labored his breath was. He was paying the price of pain he took from the Majester. “Hold on.”
“You forgave the Majester. You saw what he did and you healed him anyway.”
He said nothing and his quiet compelled me to speak, though my brain was hot and wild with pain and possibly infection.
“You’re a mystery, Poisoned Saint. Why do you refuse to believe you can be forgiven when you forgive everyone else?”
His wry snort was so faint I barely caught it at all beyond a soft gust against my cheek.
“You tell me, Vagabond. You have so much courage that you wade into danger without a thought. If you have so much faith in the future, why can you not have faith in the God?”
We lay there in silence under the tent of my bearskin cloak for a long time. And whether he was wounded by my question or taking his time to think — as I was — about the truth laced all through it, I did not know. I knew only that he had caught me and cut me with his precise words, and I could not shake the two sides of myself that could be both brave and cowardly all in one.
When I woke a third time, I thought I was dreaming. Hands gripped my waist and someone murmured endearments sleepily beside me. I leaned drowsily into the caress.
My broken arm twinged and I came back with sudden clarity to where I was. I was sleeping on a tiled floor in a grave under a fur cloak with a beautiful holy knight who apparently whispered sweet reverences into my ear as he slept.
The ferocious pain in my broken arm mixed with the ineffable sweetness of this moment that wasn’t mine to keep. I let the two sensations twist together, let them hurt and heal, keep me in the moment, and draw me away from it. And I did not know if the pain was my friend or the pleasure, for the pleasure was forbidden and the pain was rightly mine, but both sang hard and sharp and full.
Adalbrand nuzzled blearily against my good shoulder and tears sprang to my eyes. I should wake him and bid him stop. But we’d both removed our armor the night before and stripped down to soft inner layers — modest enough, but they did nothing to prevent the exchange of warmth between us or the softness of his body melding into mine.
My eyes smarted, and not just for the jarring hot pain of my broken arm but for the forbidden sweetness, the gift that was not mine to accept, the desperate, sudden want that filled me from brow to boot buckles and left me trembling.
And it was not lust, for lust is of the body. It was something deeper, something more bitter, something so much more full-bodied than the mere want of physical sensation could ever be. It was the call of soul to soul and the answer. The question and the reply. His arms bid me accept him and his soft murmurs bid me receive his acceptance.
And I did. God have mercy, I did.
I could tell the moment he woke for his nose no longer stroked my cheek and his delicate fingers froze against my fevered skin.
He let out a trembling exhale.
“Victoriana?” His whisper was so faint I doubted anyone could hear it past the fur cloak.
“Adalbrand.” I heard the tightness in my voice, the embarrassing way that it softened his name, even caressed it. My cheeks were hot with the admission.
He cleared his throat quietly.
“I’ll heal your arm now, the God willing.”
“Yes.”
Could a Poisoned Saint choose to love? Did it matter, when I so clearly had accidentally lost my heart to him?
Call me a fool if you want. Call me an inexperienced girl. I was all those things. But I was also honor and fidelity to my core. I had set my feet on the path of the God as a child and I did not turn back through the lashing winds of poverty and the cold chill of friendlessness. I had set myself to serve Sir Branson and I did, right up to the moment I served him by releasing him from the grasp of an enemy. When I set my path, I did not look back.
And now I had set my heart on the man who drank poison for others and ate their pains.
As he set his hand upon my arm and offered his thick-tongued prayer, I felt that firm purpose settle through me, felt that kindled love throb like embers banked in a careful fire, and as the healing took and my arm was whole again, I knew he felt it, too.
I felt how he carefully drew his hands back to himself. Heard him sigh in what tasted like regret. Heard his quiet, self-deprecating curse.
And I dared not say a thing, for now he knew. He knew as no one else ever could, even were I to say a thousand words of confession. My very heart had betrayed me to him.
When he retreated from me, I noticed he only put the smallest distance between us, only put enough to be decent, enough to tell me not that he was disgusted or disparaging, only that he did not yet know the answer to my unspoken question.
His breath took a long time to even out.
Mine took even longer.
It did not help that I heard Hefertus cough in a way I was relatively certain was meant to disguise a laugh.
He should stick to his pearls and fine silks. I wanted none of them. I wanted only a cold, untouched place by Sir Adalbrand’s side and a right to call him friend. That was worth fighting for. If he could see through to giving it to me.
When I woke again, my arm no longer hurt, though my heart felt slightly tender.
I crawled out from the cloak into the faint lavender of near dawn. Hefertus sat inches from me, his naked blade across his knees, his eyes staring off into the distance.
“Have you been here all night?” I whispered to him. I could see the others only as lumps across the floor, barely recognizable in the pre-dawn. The golems made larger lumps, their eyes glowing in that terrible way that they always did.
“Why not?” he whispered back. “Adalbrand exhausted himself for a man not worth a minute of his time and then, the moment he could, he healed your arm. Don’t think I didn’t hear you two under that cloak.”
“I didn’t think it,” I said frostily.
I tested my arm out. It did, in fact, bend and move painlessly. I unwrapped the makeshift bandage. My flesh felt smooth and strong.
I swallowed down a lump. He’d healed me again. Given of himself again. I was forever in his debt.
“You’re very voyeuristic for a hedonist aspect,” I said sourly.
Hefertus grunted but I could tell it was meant to disguise a laugh. “Ready to take a turn at watch?”
“Yes,” I agreed, taking his place and spreading my own sword across my knees as he had.
He snorted at that and then crawled under the cloak to lie back-to-back with Adalbrand. He must have been more exhausted than I thought. He slipped into sleep before it even occurred to me to check Brindle.
My dog had survived the night. But he was still unconscious, his breath weak and thready.
A spike of fear shot through me. How long could I hold Adalbrand off from healing him? How long could I keep the secret? Were I a more calculating person, I’d smother the dog right here. Instead, I rested a rueful hand on his sweet head and stood my watch, shaking out my arm and inspecting it again every few minutes. The God did as he willed. He gave and he took. I felt like he’d given me a lot more than he’d taken recently. I worried about how that tipped the balance. I had asked the God for so much.
I paused.
The night that I killed my mentor, I had asked the God to help me bury Sir Branson. What had I said? Had I asked that he be laid to rest or that I bury him?
I pressed my lips together, suddenly worried.
The God answered the prayers of the Beggar Paladins — always — but not always in the way you thought. Could the demon have been trapped in the dog because I prayed that? Because Sir Branson’s soul yet persisted and I had not found a way to bury him with honor? Was the demon … was he stuck in the dog because Sir Branson was stuck in it?
Something icy gripped my heart. I thought, perhaps, with trepidation and a great deal of doubt, that I might have found one answer tonight.
“If you exist, Merciful God,” I prayed quietly into the darkness. “If you are there and you hear me, please help me to cast this demon out and remove him from the world completely, and with him all others in this place.”
It was a good prayer. A righteous prayer. After all, it wasn’t for me, and those kinds of prayers were the best kind.
Someone cleared his throat and I nearly leapt in my flesh.
“Did they tell you about the clock?”
It was Sir Owalan, staring at me in the half-light. On one cheek, the first rays of dawn painted his features pink. On the other side, his face glowed a very dull orange. A faint light that I realized was coming from down the hall.
“What about it?” I asked. What was he doing creeping around in the darkness? His sword was out, too, and he smelled metallic, as if he were bleeding.
He lifted one hand to point and his robe fell back, revealing a knife stuck through his wrist.
I hissed a gasp.
Erg.
No. Just, no.
I flinched back without meaning to do so.
“We slotted all the cups in the clock while you were being tended,” he said in a low voice, and the intensity of his eyes made my skin crawl. “The hands began to move.”
“It tells time?” I asked, stupidly, my eyes locked on his wrist.
“In a way,” he whispered. “I was checking on it just now, and it’s changed from where it was at sunset.”
“Clocks do that,” I said steadily.
“It’s counting down, I think. And we’ve used up one-sixth of the time.”
“What happens when we run out?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, but I followed his gaze up to the ceiling where the demon slept.
“Do you think the monks here left because the Rim moved?” he asked me. “Or did they leave because of something else?”
“I haven’t thought about it,” I said slowly.
“Funny. It’s all I can seem to think about.”
If he was trying to scare me out of my mind, he was doing an excellent job. I almost thought I felt my own shadow flinch.
And then he was gone, and as the dawn swelled and light pierced the room through the carving in long, sharp beams, I saw drips of scarlet blood trailing after him.
