“You mean aside from your own deeds? I thought I did well presenting them at court.”
“I mean my father’s. He’s told me loads of stories about other knights and men-at-arms, but he wouldn’t ever say anything about himself. It took talking to Sir Rillion before I even knew he was at Babylon. I used to make him tell me that one over and over, and never once did he even hint that he’d seen it first-hand.”
Trey smirked.
“What’s funny now?”
“The Babylon account,” he said like the words tasted sour, “You mean Saint Lucius’s farce, right?”
“It wasn’t a farce; it was a sermon: the orthodox version first, then Acolyte Gareth rewrote it more…flowery—but he didn’t change the details!”
“Wouldn’t have mattered if he did. Hardly a word in it is true—orthodox or not. I’ll say, though, Lucius did a damn good job at spreading the lie.”
“How do you know it’s not true?” she asked, half accused.
The captain scanned their surroundings again. “I heard it first from Bishop Ba’al. Apparently, Lucius wasn’t at all content with whatever happened with the Imps, so he drafted the Purge story to protect his legacy. I never truly looked into it, but as far as I know, all original records have been burned.”
“But the battle did happen,” Jael insisted, “so it’s at least partly true. And the seven heroes couldn’t just be made up.”
“Not all of them.”
That sent a chill down her spine worse than the numbing cold. Hesitantly, she asked, “So some of them were real?”
“Flesh and blood, none heroes though. But we should save this for another time.”
“Which ones?” pressed Leonhardt.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
Jael sucked in a breath and then nodded.
“Alright. I’ll need some help with the names.”
“Warrior-Priest Desmond,” she started.
“The Watcher?” he replied. “A real fanatic, that one. The Scribes still have his letters locked up in the Temple library. There’s more than a hundred, I’ve heard, and every one a complaint about someone or another in the Order or in the church who needed to be purged. The man was a regular witch-hunter, so, ‘off to war, he goes’ says Lucius.”
“And the clerics from Quiet Harbor? Marcus and Antony?”
Gildmane stroked the blonde shadow two days grown over his chin. “Not sure, probably just a couple of left-over protestants of Lucius’s tithe cuts, if indeed they did live. It’s more likely they didn’t, though. I think the only other ‘hero’ with any record was Iago. He was one of the first missionaries Pareo sent to Babylon. Tale tells he came home in pieces. Impii savages—I swear, if Paul’s done one thing right, it was the Second Purge.”
Second Purge? she’d never heard of that before. Then, doubtful, she wondered, Is he trying to lead me off the trail again? “What about the converts? and Camilla?”
He leaned back in his saddle. “You’re not going to let this go, are you? The three of them are almost certainly whole cloth. You’ve seen for yourself how impossible it is to bring pagans into the faith. They’re practically wild animals. Likewise, you saw how many strings I had to pull for your own knighthood, and even then half the lords stormed out of the room. No, there never was a woman knight before you, Jael. Camilla is just a convenient way the church could reclaim some interest from the skylords. There’s a limit to how much power tithes can buy, after all.”
“You said Bishop Ba’al told you this?” asked Jael, watching the captain stare into the sky. When he would not meet her eyes, she knew he was hiding something. “Why do you trust him so much? What makes him different from the rest of the clergy?”
“Going straight for the source, huh? You’re getting good at this, Leonhardt—but you asked me a question, ‘Why do I trust him?’ And I ask you this, ‘Why should a child trust his father?’ Because the scriptures say too, or does a child even care about truth? What is truth to a child? To a man? It is whatever allows him to live in the world, to conquer it, shape it to his whims.” His gaze descended from Heaven to the road ahead, then at last to Jael beside him. “But you don’t have to trust me. Why don’t we ask the former captain of the Temple Guard himself? Is that his farm there?”
Her head snapped around like she’d been slapped with a gauntlet, and her gasp intimated much the same. A sudden rush of feeling flushed the tip of her nose, her ears, her cheeks, her fingers and toes. Her legs came alive tight about the sides of her horse; she threw her body forward, felt the speed of the courser become wind, its hooves turn to hammers on the surface of the snowy road. And for just those few moments, her heart warmed. She was home.
Across acres of frozen beans, peas, carrots, and onions smoked the Leonhardt farmhouse with its dug out stable and snow-buried barn. A fire was roaring in the kitchen hearth, she could smell the wood-smoke; and as she drew closer, the sweet scent of fried dough and the tang of meat pies with mustard. Her mouth watered. She dismounted at a half-trot, Trey still galloping to catch up as she tied her courser beside Troy in the stable. The old hackney hardly noticed, though Jael took note of the goatskin curtains lining the stall—a new addition—but just then, the captain reined in, and she heard commotion coming from the house. The kitchen door creaked open then shut. Gildmane was securing his horse as the figure turned the corner.
“Father?” Jael called.
Ricard entered the stable looking more a bear than she’d ever known him, his shoulders broader from working the winter crop, his belly rounder from autumn barely, and his whole head was a mess of brown curls—loose on top and wiry at his beard. He grinned, and that’s when she saw the thick, pink scar slashing his face, the unfamiliar sword hanging from his waist. “I
