Priest (Ratcatchers Book 1)

by Matthew Colville

  The knight had disappeared. There was only Heden’s horse. And the empty wode.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  He stood behind a tree at the edge of the clearing for a full turn, staring at the priory. The building the headless knight with flowers inscribed on his armor called a chapel. Heden wasn’t sure what he’d meant by that. It was an obscure term.

  He watched the priory. No one went in, no one came out, no movement within. It looked deserted. His horse stepped up and put its massive head over Heden’s shoulder, as though it were looking at the priory too. Wondering if they were going to approach, or just stand there. Then it made a horse noise, and Heden reached into his pack and gave the beast another apple. As the horse chewed, Heden reached up and absently scratched its ear.

  It stood, a narrow stone building with a single large tower, on the far side of a large clearing, maybe four acres across. The trees marking the edge of the clearing were all very close to one another, in contrast to the rest of the wode. It was a dark building, and the dirt around it looked black.

  Heden was watching the priory, and not watching it. He was thinking about the knight, or whoever or whatever it was, whose head he’d chopped off. He’d seen many strange things in his years as a professional, certainly much stranger than a man putting his own head back on, but something about this knight was personal. Directed at Heden. It unnerved him in a way dragons and celestials and floating cities had not.

  The knight had been testing him. Had intended to test him from the beginning, and Heden had passed. Why the test? No one else had gained the priory since the death, the probable murder, of the knight-commander. Renaldo said anyone who came in, just came out again. Turned around without realizing. That was a kind of magic Heden understood. The knight mystified him.

  There was a dreamlike quality about the man he fought. But nothing could be more real than the man who found him on his ass and helped him up. The man he talked to. Heden had replayed that conversation a dozen times as he followed the path that led here. It revealed nothing.

  He related to the man. Understood him. Was he meant to? Was the knight he fought the real thing, and the man he conversed with the invention? A fabrication designed to find out more about Heden? He went through a dozen possibilities and then shook his head. No point. If there was anything to be gleaned, he wasn’t smart enough to do it. He missed Elzpeth.

  He reached up to his neck. He’d healed the wound on his arm and his shoulder, but left this one. He wanted to remember the encounter was real. He pulled his hand away. The blood was dried, the thin cut already healing, but some dried blood came off on his hand. Real alright.

  The horse sniffed the air, and Heden noticed there were two troughs of water in front of the priory. Looked like there was water in them. He saw no well. Could be rainwater. Didn’t matter. The horse needed water.

  Heden and the horse walked into the clearing.

  The sky was bright blue, the day brilliant. Large white clouds drifted by. It was beauty Heden was not immune to. He missed scenes like this in the inn. He checked the ground. It looked as though it had been churned and then matted down. If by horses, there was no obvious sign. But he knew he was terrible at reading the ground.

  As they approached, Heden saw there was a large stained glass window set on the north facing wall. It would be on his right if he entered, and let the sun in. He led the horse to one of the troughs. It slurped up the clear water while Heden looked around again, taking in the whole clearing. He didn’t know what he had expected, but at least some horses. Knights rode horses, didn’t they? Maybe a pavilion.

  The stone was granite, but black in many places. Most places. Heden’s boots sunk into the soft dirt all around. Rich soil, he thought.

  He walked slowly around to the back of the priory, looking closely at the blackened stone. It looked as though the priory had burned, but whether recently or in the distant past, Heden couldn’t say. Wouldn’t rain wash away soot? Maybe not without soap or quicklime. The dirt within a few inches of the priory was also black.

  Heden ran his hand over the granite and soot came off. He put his hand against the rough hewn rock. It was still warm. But no warmer, Heden thought, than it would have been just from absorbing the heat of the sun all day.

  He looked up at the stained glass window, still intact. This was a puzzle. What kind of fire would leave this much soot and not melt the glass? Who would try and burn a granite building? Someone trying to kill the people inside.

  He walked back around to the front and looked in. A foyer lead to a long, narrow nave and several small rooms branching off. At the end of the nave, past several prayer benches, was a small altar on a raised dais. Where were the knights?

  Feeling like an interloper, he walked into the priory.

  The stained glass window dominating the north wall was large. It seemed odd to Heden, then he realized. He’d never seen a church oriented in this way. The entrance west, the nave leading east to the dais. Usually the entrance was north or south, so the stained glass window would be above either those entering, or the priest at the altar. Why the difference here? Was it significant? No way for him to know.

  He stood in the middle of the priory, even empty it felt intimate compared to the cavernous enclosure of Llewellyn’s cathedral. He looked at the window. The glass artwork depicted a scene he recognized: Godwin the Vigilant, Saint of Cavall fighting Saint Pallad the Black, Saint of Nikros. He knew the story. Godwin lost. The glass depicted their final battle. It was, Heden thought, a strange moment to commemorate, but then he often felt that way about the stories of saints.

  He turned and continued up the nave, his boots loud on the flagstones. The altar was typical. Raised. A stone rectangle with pictures of knights in Cavall’s service carved into it. Behind it, nested into a cubby hole at the back wall, Heden saw a font about four feet high in a recessed hole.

  Something about the font triggered Heden’s instincts. He walked around the altar and examined it.

  He resisted the urge to try and move it or inspect it to see if it hid anything significant. Sometimes even writing hidden away from view was useful, but this was a priory and he reminded himself it held nothing secret. No dwarf would arrive and use a metal pole to make the altar slide away revealing a complex underground chamber.

  He leaned against the altar and looked at the font. There was a little water in it. This meant someone had tended it recently. It looked exactly like a bathing pedestal for birds such as noblemen had in their castle grounds.

  Then he saw it. The font was of a different stone from the altar, the flagstones, the wall. Everything else was granite. Hard to work, requiring master masons to ensure the building didn’t collapse under its own weight. But the font was limestone. It was, Heden realized, much older than the rest of the building. It was weathered, heavily so. Heden suspected the priory was built around it. He imagined the small stone pedestal, its bowl filled with water, alone in the forest with no building around it. Sunlight reflecting off its water. Something that could not happen now. This priory had started off as a simple shrine, a font hidden away miles in the forest. How old was this place?

  He touched the font. Ran his hand around its edge and put his fingers in the water. He said a prayer to Lynwen. Not much of one. Thankfully no response, and continued his survey of the priory.

  Along both walls, five on one side, four on the other, were several crests painted on wood about seven feet up each wall. Each was very simple, and all followed the same theme. Each had a white field with a solid green circle in the middle. Each was adorned very discreetly with one additional element, no two alike. This crest has crossed swords. This one stylized shields. Each had a different number of elements, no two the same. Two shields, seven crossed swords. A spring of holly with six branches. Three horses rampant.

  Heden noticed two things. Beneath each crest was a hook to hang a shield and below that a wooden brace, as though to hold a spear or a lance. They were all but one empty.


  The one held a large metal shield. A knight’s shield. With the green circle on a white field, the sign of the Green Order, Heden surmised, and in the middle of that green circle, one yellow star. The sun.

  Kavalen.

  Without thinking, he reached up and lifted the heavy shield off its hook. The shield had been heavily damaged and some attempt at repair had been made.

  Heden turned it around. Not repair, just reshaping. From behind, he could see the shield had been pierced twice. By what, he couldn’t tell, and the metal then pounded back in shape. The leather straps were new. But the shield was now useless. The reshaping was for show. Its owner, he knew, was dead. And the shield hung as a memoriam.

  “Replace that shield upon its hook,” a soft voice came from behind Heden, causing him to jump almost out of his skin. He turned, alarmed, and saw a figure framed in silhouette in the entryway. “Or my lance will find your heart.”

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Heden held the shield with one hand and used the other to block the sun streaming in from outside. The shadowed form in the archway resolved, and he saw a woman pointing a long spear at him. It wasn’t a lance, as Heden understood it. It showed a tell-tale dullness and weather-beaten quality that Heden had learned to associate with constant use and a sharpness that didn’t need enchantment to kill.

  The woman was slim and lithe, but clad in chainmail with hard leather underneath. She had a shield strapped across her back, a dagger on her belt, and a sword in a scabbard. She seemed in her late twenties. She wasn’t crouching, but was coiled and ready to strike. She had long red hair streaked with blonde. Bleached from hours and days in the sun.

  In addition to her arms and armor, which gave every impression of being well-used and expertly repaired, she was covered in what looked like moss and vines. The moss grew from every crevice and the vines twined around her arms and legs, some sprouted small leaves. All in all, she looked like part of the forest had come alive. She was a strange clash of civilization and feral wildness. Heden remembered Gwiddon saying most people didn’t react well to the Green Order.

  “I, ah…,” Heden began. “I’m not here to, ah,” he bumbled.

  The girl frowned at him and cat-footed forward into striking range. Heden didn’t move.

  “Replace that shield ‘ere another word passes thy lips, or by the wode I shall strike thee down,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

  He noticed she swore an oath on the forest itself. Not, for instance, Halcyon, the patron saint of the order. He took a deep breath, aware that this woman could make a bad decision forcing Heden to hurt her even in her own defense, and carefully turned and replaced the shield on its hook.

  When he turned back to face her, he found her spear tip at his throat. He stood rigidly still, remembering the knight in the wode who found him on his ass.

  “What is it with you people?” he managed, looking down at the shaft of the spear. He wondered if he was fast enough to grab it and kick her away, but the length of the spear made this unlikely. And he wasn’t a young man anymore.

  “Eh?” the woman asked, peering at him. He looked away from the spear, and noticed she had blue eyes, her skin golden from the sun. She was peering at his neck.

  “This is the, ah,” Heden said, pausing as her spear tip pressed lightly into his neck, “second time one of you acted like I’m a threat.”

  She ran the spear tip down his neck toward his collar. He instinctively twisted his head up and away, but didn’t otherwise move.

  “Why is everyone around here afraid of me?” he asked, his voice low.

  “Silence, lout,” she said, and used the spear tip to push down on the collar of his breastplate. “Or you will bleed your life out here on the priory floor.”

  Delicately, she used the tip of the spear to fish a metal necklace out from under his collar. How had she seen it there?

  She slid the spear point under the necklace and pulled, and the whole necklace came out from under his breastplate and leather. There was a talisman hanging from it.

  She stepped forward, grabbed the spear under her right arm, halfway up its shaft, and leaned in to get a closer look.

  “You bear a saint’s talisman,” she said. The spear was no longer at his throat, but uncomfortably close nonetheless.

  He didn’t say anything. She threw him a dark look and pressed the spear hard into his neck.

  “I said…,” she began.

  “Alright, alright,” Heden said, raising his hands and backing away a little. “Yes, that’s my talisman. You’re right.”

  She pulled the spear away and let the talisman fall to his chest.

  “A priest then?” she asked, straightening up. He was glad she didn’t ask him which saint. “A priest sent hither from Ollghum Keep?”

  “Sort of,” Heden said, frowning. He rubbed his neck. “My name’s Heden,” he said. He’d hoped a little to shame her into being polite and introducing herself. He was disappointed.

  They now stood at a respectful distance and though she was still tense, it no longer seemed as though she was going to attack him.

  “You’re a knight,” Heden guessed.

  “That I am not,” the woman said angrily.

  Heden’s eyes darted around.

  “You’re not?” he asked as though perhaps he’d somehow come to the wrong place.

  “Is it not obvious?” she asked, and shook her head, letting her hair fall behind her face in a manner she seemed to think was meaningful.

  Heden chose to shut up. He could not remember ever regretting silence.

  “My mistress shall be here anon,” she said, uncoiling. “We shall wait for her, and she shall find me guarding thee.”

  “You’re a squire,” Heden realized.

  “I am that,” she said. “Why how now, do you look so amazed?”

  “How old are you?” Heden asked.

  She leaned on her spear and cocked her head at him. There was a naked element of challenge about her.

  “Eight and twenty years, I have.”

  Heden blinked.

  “You’re twenty-eight? You’re a squire and you’re twenty-eight? Isn’t that a little late to get started?”

  “My mistress accepted me when I was thirteen,” she said proudly.

  Heden was silent for a moment.

  “You’ve been…hang on, you’ve been a squire for fifteen years?”

  “Upon this solstice I wouldst have been a knight,” she said, relaxing a little. Her face betrayed melancholia. “Earning my spurs, I would have been the youngest to take the Green since the Lady Isobel.”

  “Why are you talking like that?” Heden asked, frowning.

  “What sayest thou?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  She grimaced at him and relaxed a little.

  “The Green is an ancient order,” she said carefully. “The knight’s cant is traditional.”

  Having decided Heden was no threat, she walked around him to one of the long walls of the nave. He noticed she was wearing high, hard boots. Expensive leather. Good boots, he thought.

  “Furthermore,” she said walking up to one of the crests, “it is historical.” She placed her spear on a small wooden stand. There was one before each crest. Each knight was permitted one squire, and this is where the squires put their spears while at the priory. She placed hers under the crest of the second knight.

  “Why are you covered in moss and vines?” Heden asked. She ignored him.

  “Thou art no man from Ollghum Keep, though ye may have come by there. I can tell from your speech and manner. Hast thou come from the southern plains?” She looked up at the crest above her spear.

  It seemed as though she had not completely mastered the knight’s cant. Her words sounded forced, not elegant. It was the speech of someone from five hundred years ago and Heden wondered how she could have learned it. Probably from the other knights.

  “Do you have to talk like that? I mean, is it required?”

&nbs
p; She turned from admiring the knight’s crest and gave him a very cynical appraisal.

  “Did you come from the southern plains?” she spoke deliberately.

  Heden tried to smile winsomely in gratitude. He hoped it didn’t look like a grimace.

  “I’m not…ah,” he shook his head. Trying to dislodge a thought.

  “Vasloria, man. Did you come here from the southern nations?” She was impatient. “What is the matter with you? It is clear the answer is yes, why can you not speak the truth?”

  “I’m sorry,” Heden tried smiling again. “We’re only about ten miles into the forest,” she obviously didn’t take his meaning. He shrugged. “It just seems strange to refer to Corwell as ‘the southern plains.’”

  “Corwell?” she asked.

  Heden stared at her.

  “Yes,” he said slowly, peering at her. “The country directly to the south.” She obviously didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Where were you born?” Heden asked.

  She laughed derisively. “This is of no matter to you.”

  “Well, that’s probably true,” Heden admitted. “But I’d still like to know.”

  She seemed a little disarmed by his honesty, and there was something else. Something he didn’t quite understand. He took advantage of this.

  “You haven’t told me your name,” he reminded her.

  “I am named Squire Aderyn,” she said, a little shyly. “’Twas born in the hamlet of Brode some thirty leagues hence.”

  “There,” Heden said, smiling genuinely. “That wasn’t so bad.”

  He knew Brode. It was a little larger than Ollghum Keep. Heden threw out his suspicion that time was playing tricks on him here in the wode, that this squire might be from before the Age of Nations, before Corwell was a country. Far simpler was the explanation that she was thirteen when she joined the order and few peasants ever had an interest in or a real knowledge of the wider world beyond their town and barony. Corwell was less than three hundred years old and some places still resented the system of kings and counts that supplanted the dukes and barons of the Gol.