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Chapter Two: Confessions in the Dark

Her scream jolted Ryn from a sound sleep. His hand went for a sword that wasn’t there.

Gods be damned, not again. He flung the sheet away and groped in the dark for his trousers.

Josalind cried out again, less a scream this time than a stream of babble muffled by the oak that separated them. Ryn found the door with his forehead, then stumbled out into the hall. “Sergeant!”

Havlock came down the corridor. The swaying lantern in his hand cast churning shadows. Irate curses chased him from the crew’s berth. “I am going to have her gagged and strapped to the damned bed.”

“Just unlock the door,” Ryn said.

Havlock shoved the lantern at him and complied with a grumble. He pulled the bolt and yanked the door open. 

The ship chose that moment to crest a wave larger than most and plunge into its trough. Ryn shifted footing to keep balance, so his attention wasn’t wholly on Josalind’s small cabin as the scattered light flooded in. 

But it appeared for a moment that Josalind’s cot, even Josalind herself, floated a good foot in the air.

The ship hit the bottom of the trough. The lamp swung in Ryn’s hand, driving the shadows into a mad dance. When his vision corrected, everything lay where it should, including Josalind. 

A trick of the eye. She must have been thrown up by the plunge of the ship. Nothing else made sense.

She thrashed about, tangled in her sheets, mumbling nonsense. Ryn hung the lamp on the hook over the cot, sat, and took her by the shoulders. Her flesh blazed fever hot, dry as toast.

“I’m telling you, it’s some kind of falling sickness,” Havlock said. 

Ryn fought to hold her still and ignored the spray of spittle that struck his face as she screeched again. “If it were, she wouldn’t be able to speak when the fits take her.” 

“You call that speech?”

Ryn gave her a shake. “Josalind.”

She startled awake, wide-eyed and confused. Her expression shifted quick to anger. She flung him off with surprising strength. “Spit, spunk, and arse boils—why’d you do that?”

Havlock snickered. “There’s gratitude for you.”

Ryn wiped his face dry. He’d never met a woman outside of a brothel with such a foul tongue and found it oddly endearing. “You were having another nightmare. A worse one.”

I was trying to understand, so they’d leave me the Hells alone.”

“Understand what, missy?” Havlock asked. Ryn could hear the skepticism in the sergeant’s voice. It mirrored his own.

She fixed Havlock with a wary scowl. “That’s none of your damned business.”

“It is on this ship,” he said.

“Please, Sergeant.” Ryn gestured with his head for the man to leave them. Havlock grumbled under his breath as he drew the door shut.

“Understand what?” Ryn asked, once he’d gone.

Josalind’s attention had drifted to some point far beyond the ship, perhaps even the sea it sailed. “What the voices say.”

Voices. He didn’t know if it made her foolish, brave, or just mad to confess something so dangerous without any apparent concern for how he might take it. “What do they say?” he asked, trapped by sudden fascination.

“That Xangtemias’s skull was hidden.”

Of all the things he thought she might say, that came nowhere close to any of them. “Xang’s skull was destroyed with the rest of him—Aegias’s paladins saw to it,” he said, in that gentle way best suited to hysterical children and lunatics. 

“What if they couldn’t destroy any of his bones?” Josalind said. “They tried—I saw it. With fire and acid and even a grist mill. But Xangtemias wasn’t born natural.” A manic giggle tore out of her. “The evil old salt will rise again and have us all.”

Nonsense, it had to be. And yet, Ryn couldn’t deny the prickly chill that needled his spine. “It was just a dream.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Is that all they are when I hear you in the night—just dreams?”

His temper began to simmer. “There’s a sharp difference between things I’ve done that haunt me and some flight of fancy.” He rose and clenched his fists to still their tremble, surprised and annoyed that her comment had rattled him so. “Get some sleep.”

Josalind relaxed back onto her cot and turned her face to the wall. “While we can.”

Havlock waited outside. “She’s bat mad for certain. The sisters will have their hands full.”

 Ryn couldn’t shake that image of her cot floating. “Did you see it, when you first opened the door?”

The sergeant frowned. “What?”

“Nothing,” Ryn said. The eyes did play tricks sometimes.

 

#

 

They reached an accord after that. When the voices tormented Josalind, Ryn would meet Havlock outside her door. It would have been simpler if the sergeant just left him the key, but Havlock wouldn’t hear of it. “Best we maintain at least the illusion of propriety, don’t you think, sir?” 

Ryn would go in and sit with Josalind. Those first two nights, they said little. Ryn found it enough to just sit there, together in the dark. She obviously did, too. Misery did indeed need company.

Then came the night where her hand found his.

Ryn savored the simple human touch. He could scarcely remember the last time he’d been with a woman. Being this close, this alone, faced with the grim unknown of Dragon’s Claw, plagued him with the ache of need. But he didn’t presume to ask for more. He didn’t even expect her to speak. 

“It scares me so much—sometimes I feel tired of living.” She sounded so fragile in the dark, so brittle and thin. A lost soul who craved an anchor for her sanity but had given up on finding one.

Ryn squeezed her hand—a feeble gesture, given the suffering that laced her words. “What does?”

“The silence is the worst—the silence that comes after his knife falls.” Her hand began to tremble. “He’s slaughtered thousands by his own hand with that same black knife. Babes mostly. There’s something richer about the souls of the most innocent, something more powerful.”

The weight of the dark left Ryn eager to light the lamp, but her trembling hand held him fast. “You mean Xang.”

“He takes no pleasure in any of it. He takes nothing at all. It’s all just a means to an end—the end is all that matters.”

“All that did matter,” Ryn said, with sudden earnest. “Xang is seven centuries dead. Aegias killed him with the Sword. Whatever horrors he did are in the past. They’ve got no bearing on the present.”

She clutched his hand so tightly that it ached. “You don’t understand. I don’t just see him in the past, I see him in the future. Him and his priests, spilling blood on black altars across the Kingdoms.” She gave a wet sniff. Only then did Ryn realize she wept quietly in the dark.

He wanted to tell her how these were just dreams, imaginings. But sitting there blinded by shadow as the ship rode the chop of a restless sea, Ryn couldn’t muster the will for it. Any denial of his, any attempt to make light of the burden these visions inflicted on her, sounded too hollow to warrant being spoken aloud.

The next night, Josalind’s visions cornered her again. His dreams of Sablewood did, too, as if they’d conspired together. Her screams tangled with his own so that Havlock ended up pounding on both their doors, threatening gags all around.

This time as they sat together, Ryn took Josalind’s trembling hand and cupped it between his own. “This future, with Xang’s altars across the Kingdoms—do you really believe it will come to pass?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I see so much that I can’t make sense of.” Hard-edged frustration colored her words. “You must think me mad.”

“Well, that wouldn’t be very charitable, would it?” Ryn said, in a lame effort to lighten the mood. He drew a deep breath. “I know what it is to be haunted by things you can’t escape.” Granted, his sins and her visions weren’t cut from the same cloth, but he felt compelled to share something so she didn’t feel so obviously alone.

“I know.” He flinched in surprise when her fingers found his jaw. “I hear your pain.”

A question hung on that word, pain, one which Ryn lacked the heart to answer. He swallowed tightly. “Good people died because of me—let’s leave it at that.” 

“Let’s not.”

It surprised him, how easily he yielded to her gentle insistence. Still, it took a while to muster the will to speak past the hot slag in his throat.

“Sablewood is a village upriver from Camblas Mills,” he said at last. “There’s an abbey there with a reliquary that draws pilgrims. I was second-in-command of the garrison. My commander…he was my friend. We’d trained together at the temple.”

This time, Josalind took and squeezed his hand. “What was his name?”

“Quintan.”

“What happened?”

We were on the edge of the Frosted Wood, so there’s always a threat—”

“From grenlich.”

Ryn nodded. “With how hard the winter was, we knew they’d come raiding for food. Quintan and I both wanted to station men in the village, but our abbot wouldn’t hear of it, said it was their lord’s duty, but that myopic old fool didn’t have the men or the sense to take steps.” 

A sudden fit of the shakes took him then, threatening to blow up into a full-on episode of the Dread. His lungs had shriveled to husks that couldn’t draw a decent breath.

“When the grenlich attacked, Quintan wanted to help, but the abbot wouldn’t let you,” Josalind said, like she already knew.

“Quintan knew all the bastard cared about was his own hide,” Ryn said. “He said our first duty was to the Clerisy’s flock, not that pile of dusty junk in the reliquary. Half the men were ready to follow him. The other half weren’t sure and I . . . ”

“You put your duty first.”

“The abbot ordered me to take command. The garrison was going to turn on itself. I had to do something before half the men mutinied against the rest, but Quintan wouldn’t concede.”

Instead, he’d just stood there with that hard, unfathomable look in his eye and said: Blind obedience can damn a man as surely as disloyalty, Ryn.

Quintan had drawn first. Ryn had only meant to knock him senseless with the flat of his blade when the opportunity came. He told Josalind of that awful sense of helplessness when his heel had slipped in a patch of ice, how his body careened out of control, sword arm swinging like a pendulum, the tip of his blade dipping under Quintan’s jaw. There had been no sensation of impact, no tug of resistance in his hand. A dark spray had erupted from Quintan’s throat as if reality itself had torn.

“I killed him.” Ryn saw again, his friend staggering toward him, hand clutched against his throat, eyes wide with shock. Quintan had tried to speak, but only a gurgle made it past the bubbly froth that caked his lips. Then he fell. 

“After that, the men fell into line.” Ryn could barely speak now past the jagged fire, but he had to, he couldn’t stop himself. “Because of me, Sablewood was left to fend for itself. It’s not just Quintan—I bear the blood of everyone who died that night.”

“But—”

“I DO.” He slammed his fist against the bulkhead. “I always will.” 

The shakes had deepened into painful shudders that wound his guts so tight he wanted to weep. He sucked in a ragged breath. “And the best part? They promoted me—after I’d killed Quintan and left a village to the grenlich, they gave me a promotion.”

“But…but why then are you here?” she asked.

He chuckled with bitter scorn. “I punched Her Ladyship, the Grand Inquisitar for all of Morlandia, in the face.”

“You didn’t!”

“I didn’t care to be lauded for putting duty before friendship, or the way she maligned Quintan’s memory before the whole garrison.” Ryn had never experienced such a red haze of fury. He couldn’t remember actually hitting the twisted bitch, only the flare of pain in his knuckles, followed by the sight of Her Ladyship, wobbling on hands and knees and drooling blood with two fewer teeth than before. 

The telling had left him strangely spent, exhausted even. He didn’t care to tell her about the Dread—the crippling anxiety attacks that now tormented him. The Dread caught him on any morning that he woke from a dream of Sablewood and heard the Clerisy’s bells ringing from whatever chapel, abbey, or cathedral lay within earshot. Sablewood’s abbey bells had rung the alarm on that hellish night. They would haunt him forever.

Josalind said nothing more, which left him both grateful and anxious, certain his admission had tarnished whatever impression she had of him. The gentle way she touched his jaw again before drawing away quashed that fear as soon as it had come. He found himself wondering, not for the first time, what his father would have to say about all this—the man he had defied to become a palatar in the first place, the man who had disowned him as a result.

No, I don’t want to know.

“The first oath a palatar swears is to his Order, to uphold the Virtues in Aegias’s name,” he said softly. “In the spirit of that, those people trusted us to protect them and do for them when others could not or would not. The Clerisy milks this to polish its own image, encourages palatars everywhere to be charitable in its name. But in the end, all it cares about is our obedience. Quintan should have had the authority to countermand the abbot that night. I should have had the courage to back him.”

“Why did you even become a palatar?” Josalind asked.

Ryn took a while to gather his thoughts. “Aegias said anyone, man or woman, should feel ashamed to die without having contributed to a greater good before their own self-interest,” he said at last. “That always resonated with me. But my father only ever cared about collecting the wealth and favor that would earn our family a title. I came to realize I wanted no part in that.”

“So…you became a palatar to serve others and do something nobler.”

“Yes.” His father, of course, had only seen it as betrayal by his firstborn. 

“Do you still want to be one?” 

This time, the answer burst from Ryn’s lips with sharp certainty. “No, not the way the Clerisy would have us.”

“The Clerisy’s way is the only way.”

“That’s right.” Ryn often wondered what Aegias would say, if he could see the world his legend had shaped.

“You’re a rebel, then.”

Ryn scoffed. “A malcontent, perhaps, hardly a rebel.” He gave a curt shake of his head. “I’m no sterling example of what a palatar should be, not anymore.”

“By your measure, or the Clerisy’s?”

“Both.” The Clerisy and the demands it put on palatars couldn’t be blamed for his failings. He gave her knee a squeeze. “Promise me something.”

“What?”

“What you said last night, about sometimes feeling tired of living—don’t lose hope.” The prospect of her denying herself the chance to escape her affliction was just too tragic to consider. “So long as you’re alive, there’s still hope.” 

Josalind took so long to answer he didn’t expect her to. “I won’t, so long as you promise me something, too.”

“And what’s that?”

“That you will forgive yourself.” 

Ryn patted her knee as an affirmation rather than lie to her. He didn’t deserve forgiveness and never would. Blood didn’t just stain his hands. It crusted his soul.

They settled again into silence, hands once more held between them, providing the anchor they both sorely needed.

Next Chapter: Chapter Three: Dragon’s Claw