Priest (Ratcatchers Book 1) (5 page)

He prodded the sprig of holly.

“Why is this one white?” he asked, talking about the discolored berry.

“It’s dead,” Gwiddon said.

“Meaning one of the knights is dead?”

“Something like that.”

“How did he die?” Heden asked.

Gwiddon sat up. “We don’t know,” he said with some import.

“Are they some kind of…” Heden thought. “Are they immortal? So what if a knight dies?”

“They’re not immortal,” Gwiddon said. “We think the white berry symbolizes not the death of a knight, which must be a common occurrence up there, but the,” he searched for words. “The permanent reduction of the order. Nine knights to eight. Eight forever more.”

Heden nodded. “So something bad happened up there.”

Gwiddon didn’t say anything. He knew his friend.

“Who’s their patron?”

“I, ah…” Gwiddon thought for a moment. “I forget. You’d recognize the name if I told you. I’m not good with saints.”

“You picked a good job,” Heden said.

“We need someone to go up there and find out what happened. We found an old ritual, very old. Maybe three thousand years. Meant to absolve the Green Order of an unrighteous death.”

“The Green Order specifically?” Heden doubted that.

“This is more than just a dead knight, Heden.”

“But three thousand years? How can there be an order of knights older than the council of Aberdanon?”

“I don’t understand it all. The bishop has an idea, he’ll tell you about it.”

“Not if I tell you to go fuck a pig, he won’t.”

“There is that,” Gwiddon conceded.

Thinking of the wode, Heden found his heart was racing. He was having trouble breathing. Finally he spoke.

“No.”

Gwiddon looked at his friend, sensing the turmoil Heden was holding back. He stayed silent for a moment, said “Okay,” and leaned back in his chair.

“I’m not going back into that meat grinder.”

Gwiddon nodded and fingered his drink. “I understand,” he said.

“Find someone else,” Heden said.

“Who would you recommend?” Gwiddon asked, looking around the empty tavern.

Heden seemed to shrink over the course of the conversation. He was hunched over now and looking down at the table. He wouldn’t make eye contact with his friend. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. Gwiddon turned away.

They both sat there, Heden looking down at nothing. Gwiddon, relaxed, looking out the window. Neither of them said anything.

“Why did you think I might say yes?” Heden finally asked, risking a glance at his friend.

Gwiddon leaned back. “I’ll tell you. The bishop, ah, and I,” he added as an aside, aware that what he thought was inconsequential, “are afraid this order is important. Out there in the forest handing down a tradition for a hundred generations. Not much of that kind of discipline left in the world.”

Heden nodded.

“We need someone who can manage a delicate situation. Someone we can trust to do the right thing, even when that means doing something awful.” Gwiddon chose his words carefully. He knew his audience.

“You were the natural solution.”

“The only solution,” Heden said, a touch of bitterness.

Gwiddon smiled and spread his hands. “As you say.”

Heden sat there looking at the holly.

“I don’t like knights,” Heden said to himself.

“I know,” Gwiddon said, pursing his lips in a thin, affectionate smile. “But you don’t like them for all the right reasons.”

Heden grunted and twirled the holly around. After a moment’s silence, Gwiddon prodded.

“Where’s the girl now?” he asked quietly.

“What?” Heden was sharp in response.

“The girl from the jail,” Gwiddon asked. “I heard from the Captain.”

Heden was impressed that Domnal had told anyone. But Gwiddon was discreet.

Heden didn’t answer. Gwiddon wasn’t really looking for an answer, he knew. He was just making a point.

“What if we gave you help?” he asked, with sympathy.

“Help?” Heden asked, unsure how Gwiddon could help.

“With the forest,” his friend said.

“I don't need any help, dammit.” Heden said, tossing the holly on the table and looking out the window. Gwiddon didn’t understand, and Heden didn’t feel obligated to explain. It wasn’t the forest, terrible as it was, that presented the problem, it was Heden.

“We could give you a coach. Make the journey easier for you.”

“Nothing would make the journey easy for me. Where’s the order now?”

“They've decamped at a priory in the forest. Near a place called Ollghum Keep.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Well, the order doesn't like to make its presence known in towns or cities. People react badly to seeing them.”

“And why is that?”

“They’re some kind of feral fanatics. You'll see when you meet them.”

Heden absorbed this. For reasons he didn’t understand and didn’t want to think about, the idea of facing Vanora again having turned down Gwiddon upset him. Maybe because Gwiddon’s request brought him to Vanora in the first place. Maybe because he didn’t want to seem a coward in front of her. Even if she ever knew he’d turned the bishop down.

“What are you working on?” Heden tried some small talk to distract himself.

“What am
I
working on?” Gwiddon asked, surprised.

“Coming here and telling me about a bunch of knights who live in the forest is a diversion for you.”

Gwiddon smiled and arched an eyebrow. “That’s true.

“Well, we just got word that Feoc was met with all manner of positive response, which is good, but when he tried to leave he found his ship had been impounded, searched for contraband, and he couldn’t get it released for twelve days.”

“Twelve days? Who impounded it?”

Gwiddon shrugged. “The city watch. It doesn’t matter who did it.”

“So now you’re trying to figure out why a foreign government kidnapped your ambassador for twelve days.”

Gwiddon nodded. “Just so.”

“Probably checking to see if he had any other business in Capital. Take his ship, but don’t arrest him. Leaves him free to walk the city. They follow and see who he makes contact with. Those are your spies.”

Gwiddon raised an eyebrow. “Don’t ever talk like that to the bishop, he might dismiss me.”

“No he wouldn’t.”

A door closed at the top of the stairs behind him and Vanora walked delicately downstairs clad in a simple blue dress he’d left for her.

“Heden?” she asked.

Gwiddon looked at the teenage girl, then turned his head slowly to Heden, a huge, wide grin on his face.

Heden looked at his friend and frowned.

“It’s time for you to leave,” Heden said, getting up.

“I imagine it is!” Gwiddon said, smiling riotously. He stood.

As Heden escorted him the short distance to the door, Gwiddon turned back to the girl again, looked over Heden’s shoulder. Realization dawned.

“Wait a moment. Heden…”

Heden opened the door. “Out,” he said. Gwiddon now turned a serious face to his friend bordering on a scowl.

“Oh Heden, please tell me you….”

“I’m not telling you anything, you’re leaving.”

“Okay,” Gwiddon said, and he stepped out onto the porch. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” He looked at his friend for a moment.

“You’re going to accept the assignment,” Gwiddon predicted.

Heden shrugged.

“I’ll talk to the bishop,” he said.

“You should see the abbot before you leave,” Gwiddon offered, extending his hand.

Heden took his friend’s hand. “I'll see the abbot when I get back. I'll see the dwarf before I leave.”

Vanora wandered around the ground floor of the Hammer & Tongs. The floor had been varnished several times in the last three years and never walked on, so her feet stuck to the floor a little when she walked, making little sucking noises when she lifted them.

Heden didn’t make eye contact with her. He closed the door, went back to the table, picked up the glasses from Gwiddon’s visit and walked behind the bar. The heavy sound of his boots seemed very loud to him.

One wall of the T-shaped common room was covered by bookshelves Heden had installed himself, holding several hundred books collecting dust. Vanora stared at them, sometimes reaching out to touch one.

Heden went into the kitchen and a few moments later emerged with a large plate, a hunk of mutton, some vegetables and some fruit. He put the plate on the bar and began slicing the mutton.

“You read all these books?” Vanora asked.

Heden did not reply. He continued preparing his lunch. Vanora gave no indication that she expected a reply.

“Where’d you learn to read?” Vanora asked, her voice light, curious.

Heden took a deep breath. “My father was friends with the prior the next town over. When I was thirteen, he sent me to an abbey as my apprenticeship.”

Heden threw some of the fruit and vegetables on a plate with the mutton, poured himself a beer, and carried the whole thing to a table and sat down. He waited a moment to see if Vanora would probe.

“Did it…” she began, and then tried a different strategy. “Did you mind leaving home?”

Heden thought about it. “I don’t think so. Both my brothers had gone away at the same age, my sisters were both married off at fourteen. I knew the prior and liked him. No, I didn’t mind. I missed my parents but I got over that.”

Heden waited to see if she was going to ask anything else, and then continued.

“The prior was very learned; he’d studied at the university here. He taught me everything he knew. Well,” Heden corrected himself as he grabbed an apple and prepared to bite. “Not everything.” He took a large bite of the apple and finished chewing before he spoke again. “Not most things, now that I think about it. But he taught me to read and write, spoke the teachings of Cavall to me. Set me on the path to being a priest.” At the time, it seemed like everything he knew.

Vanora gave every appearance of not listening. She didn’t look at Heden. With some effort, she pulled one of the larger books out and opened it. She had to cradle it in both of her arms. She frowned at the text.

“That’s a good book,” Heden said, and Vanora glanced at him. She couldn’t tell he’d been watching her. “It’s about a girl who finds out she’s the daughter of a god. It’s got a lot of pictures. Inlaid with real gold on the page.” At this, Vanora appeared to express interest, trying to hold the book and leaf through the pages at the same time. Her brown hair fell over her face. She seemed thin to Heden and he got the impression as he often did with women from the Rose that she needed to eat more.

“I’ll teach you to read it,” Heden said, matter-of-factly. Not an offer, a decision.

Vanora stopped struggling with the book, and just stared at the letters, absorbing what Heden had said. She shrugged and put the book back on the shelf.

Seeming very much at home in this strange inn, she crossed the floor, pulled a chair out, and sat across from Heden. She watched him eat. She raised an eyebrow at what he was eating and the way he ate, but he didn’t seem to notice.

He seemed entirely unselfconscious. As if having a barefoot teenaged whore walking around his inn was normal for him. Something about that bothered her.

“We get priests at the Rose,” she said, crossing her arms. It was cold in the large common room. “They’re just like everyone else. Good priests, bad priests. They can be a lot of fun. Some of them act bothered....” she stopped. She wouldn’t look at Heden. She wasn’t sure what was going on, but she didn’t want to talk about the jail.

“So what do you want with me?”

Heden shrugged while he ate. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Up to you,” he said. “I helped you back at the jail; maybe I’m just trying to see it through. Make sure you end up where you want to be.”

She grunted, skeptical.

“You’re not bothered by what I do?” she asked, studying him for any reaction or belief or attitude. “You didn’t come to the jail because…” she left the question hanging.

Heden sighed and stabbed a slice of mutton with his fork. He didn’t like talking and he was about to do a lot of it.

“A year ago,” he said, not looking at her, “the bishop asked me to go to the jail because there was a boy there who’d been sentenced to be drowned. The church said the boy was possessed by a demon too powerful to cast out. No one there could cure him. No prayer worked. Drowning is the traditional fate for the possessed.”

Heden ate some mutton and talked while he ate, his voice casual like he was describing the act of buying new clothes.

“He was like you,” he said, giving her the merest glance. She was dwarfed by the high backed chair. “He had fits and couldn’t control his body. He’d spit and soil himself and his whole mouth would be torn up, bloody. He’d bitten half his tongue off when he was younger. He’d be fine for days and then have a fit. Lasted hours.”

Without looking at the young girl, Heden was aware he had her full attention.

“Everyone around him,” he took another bite and chewed, “thought he was possessed and so when the church agreed and sentenced him to death, everyone was…relieved. Even his parents, you understand.” He chewed and swallowed and looked at her to gauge her reaction.

Vanora was wide-eyed, fixated on Heden. She was holding her breath. She was mesmerized.

“They sent me there…” Heden paused remembering the meeting with the bishop. “They sent me there because the church, having declared him possessed, was obligated to make sure the boy was killed. But drowning is a terrible way to die.” Heden shook his head, remembering something. “There are good ways to die, believe me. Drowning isn’t one of them.”

Heden stopped eating, drank some beer, and then sat back and looked behind Vanora at the books in his library.

“The bishop called for me and explained the situation. He didn’t ask me to do anything, he just…explained the situation. He’d seen men drowned before, for this same reason, and he talked about how awful it was. He didn’t need to tell me.

“So that’s how it works. I don’t think I said anything. I knew what the bishop wanted. From the church’s point of view the boy had to die, but the bishop didn’t want him to suffer.”

“Where’s the boy now?” Vanora asked, her voice quiet, timid.

Heden looked at her, hard, unflinching, with no expression and said. “Vanora, he’s dead. I killed him.”

The breath exploded out of her and she put her hands to her mouth. She could not bring herself to look away from Heden’s impassive face. Heden looked away for her and continued. He looked out the window, mimicking Gwiddon.

“He was terrified when I got there. Babbling. He wasn’t having a fit, he was just…pissing himself out of desperate fear that he was about to die and there wasn’t anything he could do about it and no one would listen to him and everyone and everything he knew, his parents and the church, all approved. It was a kind of waking nightmare for him.” The words tumbled out. Heden had never told this story to anyone.

“I was with him for an hour. I talked to him, I calmed him down. I told him everything was going to be okay. I told him that his parents loved him; that they wouldn’t let anything bad happen to him. He sobbed, relieved. That was all he wanted to hear, I think.

“I let him think everything was going to be fine and he collapsed, asleep, exhausted. Then I said a certain prayer and that was it. He was gone. Even if…I told myself that even if the church hadn’t been…” he waved a hand vaguely, “the church, even if they’d let him live, his life would have been short and full of pain and I was doing him a mercy. Maybe the bishop thought the same thing.”

Neither of them said anything. Vanora face’s was a conflict of fear of Heden and compassion for him. After a few moments had passed, Heden took a deep breath and continued.

“Two months later,” Heden said, rubbing his hand over the stubble of beard on his face, “I was falling asleep and thinking about what happened. I was thinking about the boy, about his fits. I knew he wasn’t possessed. I think the bishop did too. That’s not how possession works.” He looked at Vanora and said, without expression, “that’s not how demons work. I relived the whole thing in my mind, over and over. What the bishop had said, what I had done. I felt very sad for the boy, but…what was there to do?

“Then I remembered something a friend of mine said. He was smart, smarter than me. He and I and some others were looking over the body of a friend of ours who’d killed himself. He said something then that I didn’t understand. But I never forgot it. He said, ‘I wonder what kind of catastrophic failure the mind is experiencing, to view self-destruction as the only solution.’

“I didn’t understand him. I thought it was in poor taste, but that moment came to me as I was falling asleep. His point of view. Which I thought I’d never get. I got up and came down here and went to the bookcase,” he said nodding at the books Vanora had been examining earlier, “and I pulled out a book he gave me.”

“He was a physician. A kind of godless priest,” Heden smiled at this phrase, and the memory of his friend. “His people are the best physicians in the world. I read through the book, took me weeks. But I found a description of what was happening to the boy. All the same things. Like they’d been there when that boy had a fit and just wrote everything he did down.” For a moment, Heden was lost again, remembering his own wonder at how the words from a people fifteen hundred miles away could so accurately describe a boy they’d never met. He knew the gods had guided him to that moment. “Anyway, there was a cure right there in the book. Some plants, herbs. Instructions on how to prepare them. There’s a little magic involved, not much.

“The next day, I went about collecting the plants. I don’t know why. I’d never encountered anyone like that boy before, no reason to think I would again. Some of the herbs were hard to come by. Anyway I cooked it up, followed the instructions, and then put it away. Packed it in honey to preserve it. Until…yesterday.”

“Yesterday,” Vanora said, it wasn’t a question.

“Yesterday,” Heden repeated. “When I was sent to do to you what I did to him, and for the same reason.” Vanora stared at him. She’d realized what his story meant, her role in it. But him saying it so plainly made it real. Horrible, but at the same time…took some power it had over her away.

“You didn’t,” she said. “You didn’t know what I…”

Heden picked up his drink. “I wasn’t going to kill another boy. Or girl,” he added. “Bishop be damned.” He took a drink.

“Anyway that’s it. Long story. It worked, by the way,” he said, putting the drink down. He smiled at her. Vanora smiled a little for the first time. A quirky smile, older and younger than fifteen. “Praise the Hazarite,” he said. She smiled some more, even though she didn’t know what Heden meant.

“What was your friend’s name?” she asked.

“Khalil,” he said. She nodded.

“I should go,” Vanora said, and seemed apprehensive. “Miss Elowen will be upset.”

Heden shrugged.

Vanora looked at him, waiting for him to say something.

“I don’t think she expected to ever see you again. I doubt she knows you’re alive.”

Vanora looked away and even though Heden wasn’t looking at her, he knew she was trying to avoid crying. Heden was a little proud of himself that being honest with her had worked. He made a mental note to tell the abbot about this.

“You can stay here if you want. You can go. It’s up to you.”

Still not facing him, she snorted once, and nodded. “What would I do here?” she asked. Direct. Heden liked that.

“I don’t know,” Heden admitted. “I’ll think about it. You’ll have some say in the matter in any case and if you don’t like it, there’s always Miss Elowen.”

“Will I…” Vanora began.

“I don’t think so,” Heden said. “I think you’re cured. I think it’s permanent. But if it’s not, I can show you how to brew the stuff yourself. Miss Elowen would be happy to take you back knowing you’re well again.”

“You said there was some magic,” Vanora said, ignoring his comment about her Madam. “You said: ‘there’s a little magic involved, not much.’” She quoted him exactly.

Heden finished his drink, put the glass down, and got up. “That’s true. Priestly magic. A prayer. Whatever else you decide to do, I don’t think the clergy is in your future. You may have to depend on me for it.”

She couldn’t tell if he thought that was a good thing or a bad thing. Heden cleared the table off, disappeared behind a door Vanora presumed went into the kitchen, and returned a few moments later. He didn’t say goodbye, he just walked toward the door, adjusting the fit of his clothes, opened the door and then stood there and looked back.

“I have to go talk to…my boss,” he said, for some reason wanting to avoid mentioning the bishop after his story. “Try to keep out of the cat’s way. Balli earns her keep and at the moment you do not.”

Vanora couldn’t tell if he was joking. She just looked at him as he left her alone in the empty tavern.