“Jael, who told you all this?” He knew the answer, yet he needed to hear it from her own lips.
“Saint Paul,” she admitted.
“And you believe him?”
A glimpse of fear lit upon her face. “It would be blasphemous not to.”
“That answers my question,” said Gildmane, then he led his squire to the center of the cloister yard where a circle of stones dressed a marble font. He sat her on a stone and knelt before her, his voice lowered to half a whisper. “Listen, Jael. I need you to make a choice. Things are going to become bloody soon. Where we’re going, what we’re likely to come back too—it’ll be war. You’ve seen for yourself the corruption in the church, as have I and good knights like Sir Rillion. And we want you on our side. I want you, Jael, but I need to know that you’re with us—with God and the people and the Cross.”
Leonhardt looked as though her heart were about to burst. She choked out her words, “‘With God and the people?’ Which side are they on? I thought I knew, and people died because of it. Because I was wrong.”
“People are going to die no matter what, and when that happens, the blood is on God’s hands. You can only control the story you tell yourself.” Trey charged her, “It’s up to you to decide what’s true: that you tried when no one else would to help the destitute victims of a protected criminal, that Vaufnar was guilty and the saint and the clergy already knew it, and now they are just trying to silence you by lying; or is it that the accusers lied to you and to Sir Brandon, that there just so happened to be a torture chamber in Vaufnar’s basement, and that he ran despite his innocence, despite God’s protection?”
Jael shook her head, “But what about the riots?”
“You can’t stop violence any more than you can stop people growing old or getting sick and dying. The riots in the Dim were inevitable. If not now, they might’ve happened in a year’s time.”
“Then what’s the point of trying?” she asked.
Trey smiled, “That’s for you to decide.”
After a long pause, she pressed a palm to her chest and said, “So it’s up to me to have faith in myself no matter how it turns out, just so long as I believe I’m doing the right thing?”
Just so long as it’s you who holds the power in the end to usher forth the world you intend. Aloud, he answered, “Now you understand the truth of it, squire. You’re on the road to becoming a real knight.”
Fifteenth Verse
At last, they were on their way. It had taken a entire day of marching to escape the Gautaman maze and another to reach the foothills which lay to the north. Adam thought it was thrilling at first, like they were on an adventure. But after two days hauling his body weight in provisions, his enthusiasm tempered in the frost-bitten winds. He could see the flurries breaking from the mountain peaks, bright and white and feathery as clouds. They were beautiful as they were terrifying, so unimaginably high above the rolling, rocky soil.
By the third day, the last signs of civilization had gone. There were no homesteads this far out, no distant villages, not even a road. Before and behind them was nothing but bamboo forest, pale in late autumn, turning gray as they climbed higher and higher where winter never died, where roots and burrows could hide in the snow, where their stockings and straw sandals soaked through to the bone like the cut of wind sharp as icicles. In this lesser Hell, their progress slowed. Despite the lightening of their packs with each breaking of camp, their feet became heavier, their legs cramped, their breath shorter—all except Adnihilo.
The half-blood had changed so much that Adam would not have recognized him a month ago. His bushy hair was tied back in a knot and his roughspuns replaced by Gautaman shirt, slippers and billowing trousers. Underneath his clothes, he had lost his gaunt shape to muscles like ropes wound tight about his frame. And the way he carried himself, it seemed as though he hardly noticed the four stone pack. He even volunteered to carry Magdalynn’s when she fell ill at the end of the first week.
They were near the peak, then, and nearly empty handed. Ba’al promised them that there was a place they could rest and resupply, a temple built at the highest reach of the mountain. Yet that was a more than day away at the pace they had been going, and they weren’t going that pace anymore. A blizzard had struck during the dead of the night, and come the next morning, they did not dare venture outside of their tents for fear of losing their way to white wind—their limbs to frostbite. So all that day they spent huddled for warmth, Ba’al on his own and Adam, Magdalynn, and Adnihilo in one tiny canvas tent.
“Growing up in Babylon,” said the pastor’s son, his teeth chattering, “I never understood Kayin’s punishment, when God cursed him and the Hibernis mountains. I didn’t know what it meant to be so cold.” He was talking to the girl, holding her safe from the frigid dirt floor, unsure if she was conscious, for her eyes were closed and her breathing shallow. “I never even saw snow before we came here,” Adam continued. “Does it snow this much back home in Quiet Harbor?”
Magdalynn coughed and shivered in his arms, her nose and freckled cheeks rash pink. It hurt to look at her, just as it did to look upon his friend. Are we still friends, he wondered. He and the half-blood hadn’t spoken more than a handful of words since their argument on the harbor that first Gautaman morning. Since then, so much about him had changed, and there
