Twelfth Verse
The great doors of the Temple Rock slammed shut behind Jael Leonhardt. She didn’t look back. The gold-panel inlay of the eight ancient patriarchs no longer evoked the same grandeur it had. It seemed almost sinful now, an extravagance. So instead she focused over the moonless Valley where, in the dark, it could have been morning or night. Morning, she decided, walking toward the lodge when she heard the clangor of chains ring out from the portcullis, felt a tide of icy wind cut under the gate. A rider—carrying missives, most likely—more complaints for the captain that she’d have to sort. After my other chores, Jael remembered sorely.
As she entered the lodge, she stripped off her armour still soiled from the Hibernis Fair. It was still early enough. If she hurried, she’d have time to wash what stains she could. But the buckets were nowhere to be found, not near the ducts nor in the kitchens. The last place to check was down the stairs.
Trey was waiting for her in the basement with a bath ready-made, the smell of salts and lavender prominent in the mist. Jael tried to feel grateful, but after a night lamenting in the cloister, she found it impossible to feel anything but weak. Nevertheless, she found the strength to thank him, then undressed and climbed into the bath upon his leave. She watched the steam billow out across the ceiling while the humidity melted the knots beneath her skin. He was kind to her, her captain. She wanted to believe it, but another thought manifested within the mist. “Murderer.” She heard the word leap from her lips—saw the images in the water: Blackheart’s pleading face, the axe, the blood—but who was it that took the squire’s head? “Murderer,” she repeated, sinking to her chin.
“Do you think so?” asked Trey from around the doorway.
Jael leaned her head back till only her face floated above the water. She rubbed her shadowed eyes. “You killed him, didn’t you?”
“You might say he killed himself.”
“I might say that I was the one that killed him.”
Gildmane stepped so his profile showed in the threshold. There was an earnestness to his voice, a seriousness—just as there was when he asked Harold for his last words. One of the wall-lanterns dimmed. Leonhardt shivered in the water. After a pause, he called to her, “Jael…”
“Trey?” she shot back with a mask of sarcasm.
The captain laughed, “I warned you, didn’t I, that there would be worse?”
“You didn’t have to kill him.”
“And Acker didn’t have to die, but he did because he couldn’t accept that a knight must do things he isn’t proud of.”
They reminded her of what Ricard had told her when he handed over his sword—things done he wasn’t proud of, the very inverse of what he wanted Jael to be—what it seemed was the captain’s very ideal. “You remind me of my father,” She confessed, “how he claims he used to be.”
“Old Twin Fangs? That’s a Hell of a name to live up to, if the stories are true. Is he like the rumors say?
“I don’t know about any rumors,” she said, reminiscing. “I only know him as he was to me. Just a farmer, kind and—”
“It sounds like you love him.”
“Very much so,” answered Leonhardt. Then, suddenly embarrassed by the intimacy, she turned and suggested that he should go and found him standing wholly in the doorway. Her stomach tied in knots. She hid under the water until the heat became unbearable. When she emerged, Trey shrugged and laughed, yet he turned away as she had asked and started up the stairs. Halfway, he called down to her, “Trust me, Leonhardt. You’ll be happy you learned this lesson soon enough.”
What was the lesson she wondered for the rest of her bath and through breakfast and after, while the other squires performed guard duty for the remaining days of the Hibernis Fair. She was given leave to clean and to practice, every second of which she spent in prayer. Why? she asked the Lord, do I feel this way? He was wrong, wasn’t he? Should I forgive him? Is it me who’s guilty? She pretended they were about Blackheart and not Captain Gildmane—at least for the first day. For the next morning, it haunted her like a ghost.
She awoke flushed and heart racing, unable to catch her breath, unable to remember what it was that she dreamt that left her longing to dream again. Yet it left her with answers: Trey was protecting her. What happened to Blackheart—that was an inevitability. He attacked her, didn’t he? The captain only acted in her defense, and if he hadn’t, she might have killed Harold herself. Or, he might have killed me. It was self-defense. Why should she feel guilty?
“I’m glad he’s gone,” she told Gildmane that evening in his office while sorting the mountain of letters on his desk. There were already dozens of requests for next season’s Struggle and just as many for the following year’s Fair. There were complaints from the clergy, about the clergy, and everything in between. And even commander Pyke of the Watcher’s Eye was
