“Why won’t you listen? I don’t care about the rest of the world. I don’t care if it’s pretend. I want to stay for me. And I want you to stay with me.”
“And I want the same,” he said and groped through shadow till he found her hand splayed against a wall. He took it in his. Starting off to his left, he continued, “Come with me. It’s this way, just beyond the belfry and—”
She snatched her hand back, damp footsteps faltering. “Listen to me, dammit! I said I’m staying!”
At the end of the sanctuary, between the dim oil lamp and Pozchtok’s lantern, the priest’s shadow coiled and uncoiled again. He was watching them, and his attention pricked Trey with a shame like an itch—impossible to ignore and growing more in the attempt. It dulled his thoughts, slowed his responses.
A grating pause.
Jael whimpered in the interval, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell, I just—this is something I have to do, alone if I must…” she sniveled, “but I’d rather to do it together, with you.”
“I know you didn’t mean it. You’ve had too much to drink, is all. Why don’t you lie down for a while? I had Pozchtok prepare a room.”
“God,” she cried, her voice tremoring like rain, “Why won’t you listen to me?”
A crackle of laughter emanated from the priest, and Trey thought his teeth might shatter from the clenching. His words escaped, singed and gnarled, “I am listening! I’m the only one who’s listened! How do you think you got here but for me giving you the chance? Who do you think it was that arranged for this damned ceremony?”
“Then why are you trying to take it away from me?”
Her footfalls faded in the darkness, echoed against the sanctuary walls. Gildmane tried to follow but tripped on a piece of discarded armour. The floor came up fast: hard, cold granite. Pozchtok laughed, and Jael’s shadow cast from the lamp atop the alter. Trey could hear her crying between the priest’s gasps. It tore him apart, yet still he had to decide which path to take—which half of himself he would leave behind—who was it that was the fake: The knight? The bishop?
Who am I? he might have asked, but instead the captain dragged himself to his feet and abandoned his charge. With no light to guide his way, he proceeded through a maze of corridors and stairways, gray-black switchbacks with portals locked to bar his way, alcoves and side passages, until the church bell hailed from its frozen seat, jade green, inundated with moon glow. Onward and upward, he entered the dim well and by iron rungs ascended out the mouth of the belfry, onto the snowy roof pitched mountain steep, and slid like a child sleds to where the buttresses joined the parish and keep. His brother had gone this way before him—brave Elliot, their mother’s favorite, unafraid of the shadows cast by the duke and his heir. He would have made a true Aestas knight had he lived. But he hadn’t, just as he failed to ascend to his father’s chambers. He never even made it into the keep. Trey had spotted him sneaking across the parish roof the night of his attempt and threatened to betray him to their father. It was envy and cowardice that made him a traitor. It’s what brought him to the Cross at twelve years old and now to the window of his late brother’s chamber. Same old shutters as they were before. The servants never noticed that Elliot left them unlatched, and so they had remained the last decade. Trey pried them open, ice tearing away the paint from the wood.
Inside was silence and vacancy. The door hung ajar as far as Gildmane could see, and beyond that, darkness. No lamps, No candles. The fifth floor had been abandoned, it seemed to the captain, and he began to worry that the duke’s chamber had been purged, that nothing would be left but an empty garret. Yet it was too late to turn back. He had to see for himself, and so he opened Elliot’s chamber hoping to illuminate to the corridor with dim moonlight. The tower portal stood opposite his brother’s door. He left that one wide as well, spellbound by the hundred and fifty stairs spiraling into the abyss.
It was a long climb. Trey’s thighs were burning and his calves cramping by the time he reached the top-most stair. And that was it, no platform nor landing but mere inches of oak trimmed in iron red. The blood pumped hot into his limbs from his chest. Numb toes and fingers both curled as he grasped the rusted door ring. Like an icicle’s stab, as if the flaking metal might crumble into handfuls of dust, he leapt back from it, frightened, then laughed until he found that his legs were frozen, his doublet damp, cold sweat running down the back of his neck. “Don’t be craven,” he said, “you’re not a boy anymore. No one’s left to punish you.” He coaxed a leg forward, then another, then a hand.
Gently, the door opened, hinges whined, and Trey squinted for strips of gray light in the black room. There were two, each opposite the other at his left and right, windows shuttered and iced over. He chose one and plunged into the dark and at once was met with obstacles. So he tried for the other to much the same. Back
