The old knight bowed low but held his eyes on the man in front of him. “Ah, Sir Holland. I was just finishing my patrol of our wards. My apologies for keeping you. This old man’s feet aren’t so nimble anymore.”
“Your ward is inside the wheelhouse, old man. And perhaps you’ve noticed that we’re stranded. If an attack happened now—”
“If an attack came now, I trust the saint would be safe in your capable hands. But who is to protect our novitiates?”
King seethed, gritting his teeth and glaring with beady, black eyes. “You insolent,” he started, then he spit and looked at Jael as if he’d not noticed her before. “Who’s this, then? A woman to keep off the morning chill? Mayhap the saint will finally listen when I tell him about your, ‘patrols.’”
Leonhardt did not take kindly to the remark, and her temper showed on her tongue as she interjected, “I’ll forgive you, sir, if you don’t remember me. I was at Herbstfield chapel. My name is—”
“I know what your bloody name is, child. Everyone knows. How else would you be here? And I see you don’t have a shred of shame about it.” He spat again and turned back to Rillion. “Go prove that you’re not useless, Pyke. I want a dozen more men over here. Now.”
“Aye,” replied the old knight, bowing first to his superior and then to Jael, whispering in her ear, “You’d best go, lassie. There are wolves in these woods with a taste for maiden flesh.” With that, he left Leonhardt with a chill in her bones, but she wasn’t about to give up just yet. There was work to be done, an opportunity to prove Holland a fool, to prove herself worthy. She started for the carriage.
King thought differently. “Where in Hell do you think you’re going?”
Jael gestured toward the two stories of double-wide carriage on eight iron-tyred wheels. “You said you needed more men.”
“You’re not a man. You’re a God dammed distraction, and a damned disgrace.” He grabbed her by the sword belt and shoved hard on her abdomen, knocked the wind from her lungs. It was a miracle that Jael didn’t lose her feet. King continued, “The arrogance. You’re just like your father, thinking you deserve to wear that sword. Playing the knight when you’re nothing but a bastard to a dishonoured—”
“I’m not playing!” erupted from her tongue before she knew what she was saying.
Holland smirked. He’d make an example of her, he told Leonhardt, then he called over the men struggling with the saint’s carriage. In a moment, Jael found herself surrounded. She thought of Rillion’s warning, but it was too late now. The wolves were upon her, snickering and sniggering like the girls at church—Sir Holland, their queen. He announced to the crowd in a voice like an actor, “Listen, everyone. We have before us a lady who believes she’ll be knighted to the Saint’s Cross! Look, she even has the sword to prove it!”
“But, sir!” one of the men called out, “Ain’t it on the wrong side?”
“Good luck draw’n that out!” shouted another.
A third joined in, “That’s how she practices her swordplay!” The man made mockery of tugging an imagined sword in and out of its scabbard. The meaning was not lost on Jael, nor on the crowd as they roared their laughter. There were hoots and howls and nasty japes all around—and tears welling at the center. Tears of frustration. Eventually, Jael swallowed her pride and tried to depart, but Holland wouldn’t allow it. He ordered the men not to let her pass. He said that her lesson wasn’t done, that she’d stay until she learned where she belonged. Back at the farmhouse. Back with my mother. Desperation gripped Leonhardt’s heart.
Her left hand fell upon the hilt of her sword. In one fluid motion, Jael bared the blade before the rancorous crowd, flourished the bright steel, and postured how only a trained swordsman would. She thought they might laugh; she hoped that they wouldn’t. “I told you I wasn’t playing, and I meant it. I can draw my sword just fine,” she said, praying a display of her prowess might put the mocking to rest.
Never did Jael imagine that the captain would take her flourish for a threat. He drew his own blade, one identical with hers, beat Leonhardt’s weapon aside, and held her at sword point.
“That was a mistake, girl. I could have your head for that. Hell, I’ve half a mind to lop off your hand, put an end to this foolishness.” He stepped closer and rested his point on the breast of her surcoat, between the eyes of the lion, steel biting the white thread. “Do you still think you deserve to be a knight? Do you?”
Jael cried silently. She refused to give them the satisfaction of hearing it, though she knew there was nowhere to hide the shame evident on her face, no way to keep safe from their judgement. She was naked, vulnerable on that sun baked ship in the center of a storm with wolves and serpents lurking all around her. And they were sneering now, she felt sure, till she looked aside Holland and realized that it was worse than she imagined. Not one was grinning, and everywhere she turned she found solemn, bitter, serious faces. King’s point sunk further, pricking her skin.
“Do you?” he shouted.
Rillion Pyke answered, “Aye, captain. I believe she does.” The old knight was just returning with a few men at his back and a few more trailing behind. Jael recognized Gotthilf toward the front. He was staring at Holland’s sword pressed against her chest, horrified, and many of the others looked the same. It didn’t take long for King to catch on. Smoothly as Leonhardt had drawn her weapon, Holland returned his own to the scabbard at his waist. Without wasting a breath, he ordered the men to work on the wheelhouse. Their murmurs and groans lasted at most a few moments, then they were gone.
Jael looked up to Rillion standing beside her. “Go now, lassie. I think it best if you rest for a while.”
†
Wolves, thought Leonhardt, sitting with her legs dangling over the edge of the maidens’ carriage, examining her father’s sword. Forged Against the Tides of Winter, it read, but in her dream it had slain a wolf. Only in my dream, she thought. In real life, it had been no help against the other novitiates nor the captain of the Guard. She was nothing like her father said, “one to repent for the sins of the world.” She had to be rescued, just like a little girl—like the rest of the maids chattering away behind her, blathering on about hair and clothes and Sir Holland. Suddenly, Jael became aware of the dampness lingering in her shirt and trousers. They chaffed her skin, reminding her of the shape of her body—thick, muscular, ugly. The maidens’ banter seemed less vacuous then. After all, she could not compare with them, but neither could she compete with the men. There was nowhere for her, she realized. It had all been a lie. To her father, to herself. She thought of Zach and the promise she had made. I’m a liar. A pretender. A bastard daughter to a dishonoured knight.
“Sweetling, what’s wrong?” came a gasp from outside the carriage. Without lifting her eyes, Jael knew who it was. Sarah Purwynn, novitiate of the Religious Sisterhood, twenty-eight and eldest daughter of Baron Purwynn whose lands lay just within the domain of the Count of Castle Hibernis. She possessed all of the colors of the north-eastern reaches—milk-pale skin, platinum hair down to her hips, eyes like sapphires—and dressed as befit her noble blood. Each day of their journey she wore flowing gowns of watered silk garnished in gold-leaf or silver, and with different boots to match. Given how often Sarah crossed the caravan from her private coach, Jael imagined her servants must continually be beating the dirt from her clothes. That morning, a mix of dry and wet mud caked over Lady Purwynn’s blued leather boots. Sarah hardly noticed, though, so occupied was she with her armful of fresh quilts. She helped herself onto the edge of the carriage. “Oh, you’re soaked through. What happened, dearling?”
Jael recounted the morning’s events. One by one she told them, and one by one they seemed smaller than the last, each weighing a little less as Sarah defended what she did, what she said, the way she felt in those moments. Jael loved her for that. And in the few days she’d known Lady Purwynn, she thought of her as the mother she could have had.
“Men are such boars. They can�
�t even tie a proper knot. What if you caught a chill? You may still, if we don’t get you out of those wet clothes. Here, wrap yourself in this.” She handed Jael a heavy quilt from her pile. It was patchwork blue and highborn violet, stitched together from discarded noble livery. Silk and cotton and velvet and warm. Leonhardt stripped quickly as her clinging clothes would allow and buried herself inside fresh layers of fabric. Sarah smiled, her eyes like happy half-moons, her cheeks full and homely. “That’s much better. Truly, dearest, I wish you would have stopped by my coach this morning. My servants would have found you something dry and becoming, I’m sure.” She picked up Ricard’s old surcoat from the pile of damp clothes. Looking it over, she tilted her head and frowned. “Even clean, this doesn’t fit you at all. Why don’t you let me take this in for you. It can’t be comfortable running around in a sack.”
It’s not a sack! Jael stopped herself from snapping. Instead, she answered, “You’re too kind, my lady, but I like the way it is. It was my father’s.”
“Was it? Tell me, sweetling, do you love your father.”
Leonhardt puzzled over the question. “Of course I do. Who doesn’t.” Why are asking something like that all of a sudden?
After a pause, Sarah answered, “I don’t.”
There was quiet for a moment, broken by a howling in the distance.
“Why?” asked Jael.
Sarah Purwynn stared into the distance and bit her lip. “Have you ever been in love? No, don’t answer, I can see it on your face. Yes. A man waiting back home perhaps? Or maybe a stranger who passed through town? It doesn’t matter. Listen to me, Jael. I was in love once. Foolishly, wondrously, wonderfully in love. I tried to tell my father. Oh how I tried, but Baron Purwynn had only deaf ears for me. Then he had the gall to be angry when I refused his betrothals. He said I was being willful, as if a woman could will her own heart. And I even tried a few of the boars he put before me. Appalling, the lot of them, with kindly smiles and rotten hearts.” She turned so that they faced one another, eyes locked, and snaked a hand low on Leonhardt’s shoulder under the quilt. “Give him up, dearest. Whoever your love was, he’s just like the rest of them.”
“No,” Jael began, “Zach isn’t—”
Just then, a long yawn sounded from the distance, growing closer, the sucking sound of boots in mud and the endless grumble of exhausted men. They were on their return from the saint’s carriage, every one of them soiled to his knees. A few whistled and waved as they passed the maidens’ carriage. Sarah scowled. “Ugh. Disgusting, filthy boars.”
“Right you are, you noble cunt!” grouched one of the men. Leonhardt recognized him immediately. It was Gareth, former acolyte of Herbstfield chapel, now bound to the Brother Scribes in Pareo. He slurred his words as if he were drunk, though likelier than not, the poet was sober. In drink he drown his sorrow. In waking, he remembered his rage. “We’re mere animals, that’s what you high bloods think of us. Working us till our backs are broken, starting wars and sending us to the slaughter!”
“Such vulgarity! Never have I heard such—”
Jael reached an arm out from under her cover and took Purwynn’s hand. “It’s not you. It’s his empty wineskin. He used to serve at my chapel. Took to drinking when his brother died during the Purge. Our deacon was helping to cure him, but he never could give it up.” She looked down on Gareth and his self-righteous fury. “What would your brother think if he saw you now?”
The former acolyte winced as if she’d slapped him. His cheeks turned red and his eyes dark, and with wrinkled lips he said, “Hans can’t see me now; he’s with the Devil. But I’ll find the truth in the capital. God help me, I’ll find it, and you can go on believing in your faerie tales.” He marched on.
Rain fall. A blast of thunder. Jael shivered under her blanket as horns bellowed from the front. Their departure was imminent. Sarah collected her quilts.
“I think I’ve had a dour time enough, don’t you dearling? It’s time I get back to the coach. You’re welcome to ride with me if you want.”
The offer was tempting, but then she thought of all the men wet and cold and covered in muck. She unwound herself from the patchwork blanket, put on her shift, shirt, trousers, and boots—then finally her surcoat. “No,” she said, her head a mess, though one thought was certain. “There are wolves in these woods, my lady. With them, I can be a maid or I can be a knight.”
Seventh Verse
Jezebel woke to cold sweat on fevered skin, her roughspun linens soaked through to the packed-dirt floor, hard as ice and moist. As she turned from her back to her side, she felt the bite of the dungeon air. She had always heard it was cold in the north, but hearing had not prepared her for the depths of the Pareo’s prison. She shivered and listened for Adam and Adnihilo, heard the weeping and restless chains. They were still with her. She sighed, wondering how many days it had been since they were carted inland and left to wither underground.
It had been evening the last time she saw the sun. Messaii soldiers had escorted them under limewashed stone walls vaster than the mountains of Horeb south of Eemah. And inside—her jaw still ached from gawking—the houses towered like northland trees, branches on mortared trunks looming out from their roots, a canopy of white panels hatched with wood, tiled roofs rimmed with gutters. Her eyes fluttered. In every direction were passersby dressed in bright doublets, gowns, and hose. It was enough to distract her from the weight of her fetters, at least until they passed through the inner wall.
“The Valley of the Temple Rock,” she had overheard some soldiers talking. A ring of pearl white bricks around a central garden, garrisons to the north and south, seven towers like the points of a crown jutting up from the inner ward; and there was the Temple itself, lime washed and adorned with columns and spires and golden, bas-relief doors—extravagances piled high over the centuries atop dark foundations dead to the world.
But those horrors were alive inside the Temple dungeon. Every time the jailor brought their pails of slop she saw the silhouettes in the lamp light: tables armed with prongs and barbs, racks and wheels and wooden wedge horses, iron chairs with leather straps, vices, posts, pillories, crucifixes. She counted their blessings that they had been spared such devices thus far, though she strongly suspected there wouldn’t be many more. Not for her.
Jezebel pressed the blister on her arm and felt it burn as puss ran off onto the ground. She could smell it as well, the stench of death. She tried recall how many sacrifices died that way, how long it took for the corruption to spread. A few days? Yet her fever had been stagnant for more than a month. But now it raged. She would have to act soon. The next time he comes. She would not watch them suffer—not Adam, not Adnihilo—not again, not like she had in the cabin of the ship. The shipmaster and his wormy, yellow grin. Adam screaming, begging for help.
Forgive me, she prayed to whatever Gods whom might be listening. She never thought she’d end up like this, like her mother bargaining with an invisible father. Yet there she was, desperate and widowed, for all her rebelliousness no different than the woman she despised. No. Jezebel realized she did not despise her; she’d never even understood how hurt her mother must have been when she chose to recreate the same anguish. Forgive me, she started, then she stopped, prayed instead, Save them. God, please, save them both.
They needed that miracle if they had any hope of escaping. And she did have a hope, and more—a ploy. For she knew that soon the jailor would arrive. He would totter in on stunted legs, lamp in one hand, red-brown slop in the other, smiling like the simpleton he was. He would waddle closer and drop pails at each of their feet, retrieve an apple from the bag on his belt then the knife from the sheathe that dangled between his legs. It was a crude thing, that knife, shaped from tarnished pewter and torturously noisy against his ring of keys. Their only reprieve from the din was when he would use it to cut chunks from his apple and eat it in front of them, smiling, especially at her.
Jezebel doubted the half-wit had ever stood so clo
se to a woman. Disheveled as she was, he would still leer and lick his lips. It would not take much to lure him close—show some chest, legs, hips—then steal the knife as she unlaced his trousers. Slit his throat. That would be easy; she had practiced, after all. The irony was not lost on her, how she hated that Cain made her kill so many times yet now it was all she could do to keep his sacrifice alive.
The grinding of iron sounded in the dark—a key in the lock, its teeth gnawing on mechanical innards. It was time. Jezebel forced herself up and tugged at her tunic, pulling it tight with her wounded arm behind her. With her free hand she tossed her hair. Her cheeks were flushed with fever, her nipples stiff in the bitter air, but the smell of rotting flesh—she only hoped the jailor’s nose was as keen as the rest of him. The door yawned open and lamp light poured shadows over the dungeon floor: of torturous devices and a man, familiar, in white silk robes and a golden fringe sash, hair slick and black, eyes like a pair of iridescent beetles, his voice full of laughter, malevolence, and evil.
“Hail Ye, Holy Matron, mother of King Solomon. Blessed are we whom received your son in grace. We beg, pray for us that his covenant shan’t be broken, that our sons shall have a place beneath the seat of the Lord!” The bishop shut the door and sauntered forward, his eyes crawling over her body like lice. “And pray for this one too. The whore of Babylon.”
Jezebel spat at the man’s gold velvet sandals.
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