Paladin's Strength

by T. Kingfisher

  “Forgive me, but do you have something to eat?” she asked, looking over at Ethan. “A lot of changes today, and I’m starving.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry, I should have offered…oh dear…what would you like?”

  “Anything,” she said, “provided there’s a lot of it.”

  Ethan vanished into the back room and emerged with a loaf of bread and some dried fish. Clara’s eyes lit up. They settled at a small table and Clara proceeded to tear the bread apart with her hands and devour it like a starving wolf.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled, through a mouthful of crust. “Normally not a barbariammf…”

  “This is incredible.” Ethan patted down his robes until he extracted a small, grubby notebook and a stub of pencil. “You’re an actual bear? Do you breed true in bear form?”

  Clara paused, bread halfway to her lips. “I haven’t tried.”

  The proctor blinked at her. “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry, no, of course, that was a very personal question. Do you have any children? Are they human?”

  Faizen cleared his throat. “Perhaps we could discuss this later,” he said. “Ethan, may they stay with you?”

  “Yes, of course.” Privately, Istvhan suspected that Ethan would try to stop them from leaving, at least until his questions were answered. “Oh dear. Do you also need bear food?”

  “Most human food is perfectly good bear food,” said Clara.

  “Yes, but does it go the other way? That’s what I was trying to ask earlier. If you eat raw meat or carrion as a bear, does it disagree with you as a human?”

  “…I try to avoid eating carrion.”

  “Yes, of course.” Ethan made a note. “What about the size of the meal? If you eat as a human, are you full as a bear? If you eat a large meal as a bear and turn back into a human, what happens to the extra food? And the waste products from the food, how do they scale—”

  Faizen caught Istvhan’s eye. “We’ll be in touch,” he murmured, moving toward the door. “Contact us if you need anything. And try not to go out in the city too much.”

  “All right,” said Ethan, as the door closed behind him. “Let’s talk about your mass.”

  “Uh…” Clara glanced at Istvhan. “I can just pray the rosary for the saint. She doesn’t get upset if there aren’t regular services for Her.”

  Ethan blinked a few times, looking a bit like a frog himself. “Oh! No! Your mass. Your personal mass. Your weight. You’re much larger as a bear. Where does it go, when you’re a human? Where does it come from, when you’re a bear?”

  “It’s part of Saint Ursa’s blessing.”

  “So a miracle, then…” He wrote this down. “Do you have any sensation of getting lighter or heavier when you change?”

  “No,” said Clara, finishing off the last of the bread and starting on the strips of dried fish. “I have the sensation of the bear coming forward or going back in my head. It eclipses everything else.”

  “Oh, fascinating! So the bear is a separate entity?”

  “It feels separate.” Clara glanced at Istvhan again.

  He shrugged helplessly. “I’m just a paladin, Domina. I’ve never been a bear.”

  “Right. Well, I can’t tell you if it’s actually separate or if we’re just trained to think of it as a separate being. It feels like…err…” She waved her hands, clearly searching for a word. “Are you familiar with intrusive thoughts?”

  “Oh yes. You don’t want to think them but then they get thought anyway.”

  “More or less. I don’t have intrusive thoughts. I have an occasional intrusive bear.”

  That was interesting. Istvhan rested his chin on his hand. I suppose we who follow the Saint of Steel think of the battle tide as something separate from us as well. Perhaps if we were bears instead of berserkers, we would treat it the same way.

  Ethan continued to pepper Clara with questions while she systematically worked her way through the fish. “And the change comes on when?...uh-huh…fascinating. And the full moon…nothing. So much for the stories…Do you heal faster? Oh, that’s interesting…”

  Istvhan waited until she had finished eating before he felt obliged to intervene. “Proctor Ethan,” he said. “I thank you for your hospitality. It is very kind. And I am certain that Domina Clara will answer any questions you have over the course of our stay. But we have had a very long day that began very early, and she had been changing form more times in rapid succession than is healthy.”

  “Oh!” Ethan set down his notepad. “Yes, of course. I’m so sorry. You’re just very fascinating, Domina.”

  “So I’m told,” muttered Clara.

  “Please, come this way.”

  He led them down a set of steps, under a low lintel—both Istvhan and Clara ducked—and down a hallway lined with even more jars.

  “So you keep salamanders,” said Istvhan.

  “Not just salamanders. Amphibians are my great love, but I’ve kept a great many animals over the years. When people pass away with a pet no one else knows how to take care of. And in a city like this…” He waved a hand. “Lots of sailors get very unusual pets. Parrots are the least of it. Snakes, lizards, monkeys…gods, do not even talk to me about monkeys. The Rat wants us to live peacefully alongside our fellow creatures, but I do not think He meant monkeys.”

  A noise came from behind Istvhan that sounded very much like a lay sister strangling a laugh.

  The tall galley was much cooler than the rest of the house. It was long and narrow, but fortunately as tall as the name implied. Istvhan straightened up with a sigh of relief and felt the vertebrae in his neck crackle.

  There were no beds as such, but one wall sported a wide built-in bench that ran the length of the galley. The bench was padded and heaped with pillows and folded blankets. The other wall had a fireplace, though no fire had been built, and stacks of firewood lining the wall on either side.

  Ethan knelt in front of the hearth. “It still won’t be terribly warm,” he said apologetically. “This bit is actually below street level, so the wind off the river hits it and the heat from the bakery doesn’t reach this far. But we’ll warm it up a bit, and there’s tons of blankets.”

  “We’ve been sleeping under a wagon,” said Istvhan, “mostly to keep the rain and the frost off. We’re used to being cold at night.”

  Ethan looked appalled. “Good heavens, we can certainly do better than that.”

  “A fire would be heavenly,” said Clara, sitting down on the bench. There were dark circles under her eyes. She kicked off her sandals and slumped against a stack of blankets. “I could fall asleep right here.”

  “Feel free,” said Istvhan. “I don’t think we need to save the world or climb any mountains tonight.

  “Thank St. Ursa.” She stretched out on the bench, leaning back against the stack of blankets. “Wake me when it’s time for dinner. Or breakfast. Or…you know, never mind, maybe I’ll just sleep.”

  Istvhan had planned to watch over her sleep, like a good paladin would in a strange house, but his eyes struggled to stay open. After Ethan padded out, wishing them a good evening, he draped a blanket over Clara, pulled one over himself, and became instantly dead to the world.

  Thirty

  Istvhan woke early, not out of any particular virtue but because he had slept in his chain hauberk, which was a generally terrible idea. He was stiff in muscles that he had forgotten existed. He stared at the ceiling, waiting to see if the gods loved him enough to send a masseuse, preferably a little old woman with a bent back and hands like the claws of death. (In Istvhan’s experience, such women were just this side of divinity.) The gods ignored him. Istvhan sighed and got up.

  He spent most of an hour in the courtyard, stretching and doing sword drills, until at least everything hurt more or less equally, then slung his swordbelt back around his hips and went inside.

  He paused in the doorway of the tall galley, partly to make sure that his head cleared the low lintel, partly because Clara was sitting on the be
nch inside, her head tilted back against the wall, her eyes closed. She had a knotted string in front of her and her lips moved silently as she drew another knot tight.

  Of course, she has no rosary beads. Istvhan wondered if he could find her a set, if that was a gift she could accept from him. Mind you, if you’re trying to seduce her, a rosary is not the sort of gift that makes one think of bed sports.

  Yes, but it would mean something to her. More than just a silly lover’s gift. Something that matters to her like she matters to me.

  Distant warning bells went off in his head at the thought. He straightened, banged his head on the lintel anyway, and Clara’s eyes flew open. She smiled sympathetically as Istvhan rubbed the top of his skull. “I’ve done it twice this morning already.”

  He lowered himself to the bench next to her and stretched his legs out. “Doing well otherwise?”

  “Mmm.” She looked away.

  “Let me see, how is my Domina dictionary coming along…” He raised his hands as if flipping through invisible pages. “Was that ‘I am not doing well, but I don’t wish to complain’?”

  She snorted.

  “Ah! That’s ‘Yes, but how dare you call me out like that.’ I know that one.”

  Clara gave him a reluctant laugh and he felt as if he’d won a prize. “Do you have a dictionary like that for everyone you know?”

  “Only the ones that I care about,” he said.

  She inhaled. He waited, not willing to push any farther.

  “This is going to drive me mad,” she said finally, gesturing around her. Istvhan took it to mean the city, not the room itself, which was inoffensive as rooms went, low doorways aside.

  “The waiting is always hard,” he offered.

  “It’s not just that,” said Clara. “The waiting is miserable, yes, but it’s the fact that I’m not doing anything. I know the Rat’s people will be better at this than I would be. There’s a lot more of them and they’re in positions to know who to ask and how to ask without raising suspicion. I know I’d blunder through like a bull in a cathedral and cause more problems. It’s just…” She let her hands drop into her lap. “It’s hard for me to trust that things are really happening, if I’m not the one doing them.”

  “Ah,” said Istvhan. “You have never had to learn to delegate.”

  “No. There’s only the one of me, traveling.”

  “It’s a useful skill to learn.” He reached out and took her hand, very aware that it in was in her lap and that meant that his fingers were mere inches from somewhere dangerous. He rubbed his thumb across her fingertips, feeling the rasp of calluses, hoping that he was moving slowly enough. Maddeningly seductive is good. Maddeningly pushy is bad. Though it is beginning to seem that I must remind her every day that I am interested, or she finds a way to talk herself out of it, or convince herself that I’ve changed my mind. He wondered if she thought he was fickle, or if she thought so little of herself that she expected men to lose interest after five minutes.

  Clara raised an eyebrow at him. “I don’t have any underlings to delegate things to.”

  “It doesn’t require underlings. Just people you trust.”

  “I don’t have many of those, either.”

  “Ah.” He smiled. “That’s a different matter. You should always have someone you can trust.”

  “I trust my sisters with my life,” she said, looking away.

  “And I trust my brothers. Though many of my brothers are very broken people, so trust becomes a combination of my faith in them and my understanding of what they can and cannot do.”

  She twisted her lips sideways, clearly thinking this through. “I suppose that you’re right. I trust my sisters with my life, but I would not ask the Abbess to pull me up a cliff. She would absolutely wish to, but she’s physically unable. At least as a human.”

  “There, you see? Trust is one part faith and one part predictability.”

  “It seems very cold, when you put it that way.”

  Istvhan raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps. But it also means that we love our friends enough not to put them in situations where they will be called upon to do things that they cannot do.” He lifted their clasped hands a little, let them fall. “Galen, for example. He is my brother-in-arms and I would die for him, but I do not put him in situations where he has to share sleeping quarters with another person.”

  “Mmm. The nightmares?”

  “Not entirely. If you wake him from a nightmare, it can trigger the battle-tide. He’s gotten better—now he is sometimes violent, but he has not gone berserk for some years—but he is very afraid of what he might do, unknowing.”

  Clara shook her head. “All that from the death of a god…”

  “We all paid a price,” he said quietly. “Mine, I think, was very light compared to the others. Stephen lost his will to live for anything but duty, Shane lost his certainty, and Galen lost control. The others...”

  “And what did you lose?”

  He had known that those mild brown eyes could become sharp, but it still unsettled him. Usually he would have deflected such a question, but it seemed like they were past a time for secrets. “I think, perhaps, my ability to let anyone closer than arm’s length. I am amusing and rather too clever for my own good and so it is easy for me to be liked. But once you have had a god inside your soul and lost it, anything more…”

  She nodded.

  “Perhaps that’s why I’m doing this so badly,” he said. “I care for you. We are friends, I think, and perhaps more.”

  Her eyes were shadowed. He did not know whether to say more or scramble to take back what little he had said.

  He could have let it go. A sensible man would have. But he was a paladin, and they were prone to self-flagellation, if not literally, at least metaphorically. “Do you want me to leave you here? I promised that I would.” He paused, and then, Doc Mason’s advice ringing in his head, he added, “I am hoping very much that you will say no.”

  Clara took a deep breath and let it out again. “I must stay calm,” she said. She lifted her free hand and rubbed her sternum. When she is driving herself mad trying to shove all her feelings down, that is where she feels it instead. “I must. It’s not just my life in the balance. But at this point, I think, being alone in a strange city would be just as hard. And the waiting. And who knows that I won’t snap and do something completely mad, like trying to single-handedly raid this colosseum on my own?”

  Relief surged through him with an intensity he hadn’t expected. “Well,” he said. “At least this way, there’d be two of us.”

  She laughed, though she didn’t meet his eyes.

  “It will be all right,” he said. “I know what it’s like to have a feeling so strong it overwhelms you. I’m here.”

  “For how long?” she asked, covering his hand with hers.

  “For as long as you need me,” he said, and there was absolutely no choice after a statement like that but to kiss her.

  His lips were half an inch from hers and then the door to the galley slammed open.

  “Sorry to bother you, I just need to check on Maude,” said Ethan. “Ah, Ser Istvhan! Would you mind holding a toad?”

  Istvhan looked at Clara. Clara looked at Istvhan. She choked back a laugh because the alternative was to scream.

  “I suppose we are all called to serve in our own ways,” said Istvhan, rising to his feet. “Will I get warts?”

  “That,” said Ethan with more venom than Clara had ever heard him express, “is a slanderous myth.” He fumbled around in the space behind the woodpile. “She’s usually down here, let me just…ah, there you are, sweetheart.” He emerged with the largest toad that Clara had ever seen. It was nearly the size of a cat, with enormous golden eyes and a baleful expression.

  “She doesn’t live in a jar, I take it?”

  “Nope. I got her a very nice jar, but she hated it. Prefers to lurk about down here. Let me get a look at you, Maude…yes, good, weight is fine…”


  “The jars are impressive,” said Clara, “but those tubs upstairs amaze me. You must have very fine potters here.”

  “Oh yes,” said Ethan. “The Leeward has the best potters around. Enormous clay banks along the river, you see.” He handed Maude over to Istvhan. She looked disgruntled, but every toad that Clara had ever encountered looked disgruntled, so it probably didn’t signify. “Fortunately, rich people demand perfection and poor people can afford the stuff that doesn’t quite pass muster.”

  The Beast of the Leeward. Clay banks. Istvhan met Clara’s eyes over Ethan’s head. It was the most tenuous of links, barely even circumstantial evidence, and yet…and yet…

  She lost the next few words of their conversation, trying to map the area in her head. The Leeward was across the river and upstream, partly sheltered from the wind off the ocean by a quirk of topography. Many more trees along there than on this side, which received the full brunt. Something could hide there, certainly, but what?

  “Necromancer?” said Ethan, bringing her back to the conversation. “No, I don’t know anything about that. They’re bad, I hear. Very bad. Sorry, here, if you could just hold her here—don’t drop her, they’re not good at being dropped—”

  Two things came clear to Clara simultaneously.

  The first was that if she did not find something to occupy him, Istvhan was going to try to hunt down the rumored necromancer.

  The second was that, god help her, she might go with him.

  I’ve got to get him out of here, she thought. Or distracted, or something. We’ve got days until the Rat’s people come back with information. If he sits here brooding over it, he’ll work himself up to…what was it the Bishop said? A death or glory charge?

  If he did, Clara couldn’t very well let him go alone. One paladin would have no chance. One paladin and a bear still had no chance, but they’d take a lot more of the enemy down when they went.

  If I thought we might succeed… Necromancers were anathema. To die removing one was a trade that any paladin would gladly make. Any nun of St. Ursa as well.