Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit

“Not playing servant to a recondeur.”

His downy cheeks flushed. “The lady—the Sinduria—believes I’ll be allowed to stay with you wherever they send you next. She’ll set up some way for me to get messages back and forth.”

My head swam with heat and fear. Thalassa had sworn to help. Gods, she had asked my forgiveness and threatened to break with my father, and I’d scarcely given her a thought. But she would have sent Jullian before she knew where I was going. “No. You cannot stay. It would be a comfort…more than you know…but after tomorrow, they won’t allow it. I won’t allow it.”

But tonight…Somehow Jullian’s presence moved me to decision. To action, however useless.

“Who has come with you to Palinur? Brother Victor, I know, and you said the abbot…”

“Father Abbot and Brother Victor have been summoned to appear before the hierarch tomorrow at Terce. Brother Gildas and I accompanied them. We’re staying at a priory here in the city. When he left Gillarine, Father Abbot spoke to the brothers as if he weren’t coming back. He gave the care of the lighthouse to Father Prior—”

“Nemesio? Is he mad?” I threw the bone onto my half-filled plate, the last bites of meat still attached. “Nemesio likely betrayed him to the hierarch!”

“Prior Nemesio helped build the lighthouse with his own hands.” Though he kept his voice low, the boy could have cracked nuts in his jaw. “His father and brother are carpenters, villeins of an edane with great landholdings in Morian. We’d not have half the tools and seeds were it not for him. He would never betray the abbot. Never. You don’t know us at all.”

Clearly not. How easy it was to look backward and see myself as young and stupid and unforgivably self-absorbed. Had I aged so much these few weeks? The boy’s deepest grievance sat before me as bald as a monk.

“And you don’t know me, either, do you?” I said, wiping my greasy fingers on the table linen. “A traitor to god and king, you think. Not the wounded soul you rescued at the sanctuary gate.”

“Aye. I don’t know why Father Abbot thinks one like you could help us.” He began twiddling his eating knife. “He said I was to obey you on my soul’s life.”

His chin jutted bravely, but his eyes flicked from his knife to my hands as if hell’s fire might come shooting from my fingers. Best he never see Silos’s tricks.

I sighed and reached for his wrist, stilling the dangerous play of the knife. If I were to trust him at my back, I preferred him to think me a man and not a monster. “Listen to me, Jullian. Surely some men must come to Gillarine with all sincerity, believing Iero has called them to your life…your good and holy life…and then chafe at the rules and break them and not understand why. Eventually they realize that they are meant for other things—to marry and have children, perhaps, or to farm their own ground, or to soldier for their king. All good and holy things, too. It just takes them some time and grief to discover the truth of what the god intends. That could happen, could it not? That has happened at Gillarine, I’m sure.”

“But you never intended to be our brother—”

I held up my hand to hush him. Why was it this boy demanded such painful honesty? I had lived my whole life believing what others said of me, while screaming to the world and to myself that I didn’t care. Now a half-grown innocent forced me to seek explanations I had never bothered to unravel.

“I’m not speaking of my stay at Gillarine. You’re right about that. I was hungry, cold, and wounded, and I needed sanctuary, which you and your kind brothers gave me. But this other matter…I did not come to pureblood life of my own choice, but was born to it, and so one could say the god meant me for that life. Yet from my earliest days, before I could even consider such things, I chafed…sorely…at our rules and did not understand why. For good or ill, I’ve broken every one of them, much as a failed monk might do while wrestling with his destiny. Many of my deeds are simply my own wickedness, and people are right…you are right…to condemn me for them. But my choice to be a recondeur…Jullian, the belief is so strong in me—just as fierce as your belief in the abbot and his lighthouse—that the gods or fate or destiny must surely intend me for other things than this. Likely not the monastery either, to be sure…but something…and I have to keep searching for it, else I must admit I’m mad as well as sinful and deem my whole life a waste. I am not ready to do that. Not yet.” Though the glass was rapidly emptying.

He held quiet and stared at his greasy plate, littered with bones and scraps. Then, abruptly, he jumped up from his stool and vanished into the bedchamber. When he came out again, he carried a large canvas bag.

“Jullian, please don’t leave. I need your help to—”

He plopped the heavy bag into my lap. “Are you to ask your grandfather our questions tonight?” he said, still resentful. “Father Abbot said that’s what you would do.”

The surety of this assertion confounded me, for only as I sat here talking to the boy had I accepted that I must speak to the madman before I left this house. “I wasn’t—Not exactly. I—”

“Father Abbot said I was to tell you that he trusts you. Open it.”

Skeptical, I drew open the bag. In my lap lay my grandfather’s book of maps.

I was dumbfounded. Luviar believed these pages held the key to preserving the knowledge of the world through two centuries of darkness, and he had just entrusted them to the hands of a liar and a thief, a traitor to god and king, a prisoner incapable of escaping his own house.

I felt Luviar’s cool gray eyes on me, as if he stood beside Jullian, and I imagined the arch of his brow and the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. What kind of magic did a man wield to unravel men’s souls and mold them to his bidding? Here at the nadir of fortune, the abbot had granted me a moment of profound grace. In thanks, I would have done whatever he bade me.

Wrestling with time and possibility, I smoothed the leather binding and reshaped my plan. “I must speak with my grandfather before I leave this house tomorrow. If you’ll help me get out of this apartment for a little while tonight so I can do that, I’ll take this with me. I can’t promise. But I’ll try to get Father Abbot’s answers as well as my own.”

Though he did not smile, Jullian jerked his head. His mortal judgment had been stayed, but I was not sure for how long. He put his hands on his slender hips. “So tell me what to do…”

Protocol granted even a recondeur bound to the Monster of Evanore privacy for anything involving bodily intimacy. Thus, if someone in my father’s house took the wild notion to visit a violent renegade in the middle of the night, he or she would hold off long enough for me to finish bathing. Jullian was smaller than Lukas, so it was only natural that it would take him longer than Lukas to haul enough hot water from the kitchen. I would have perhaps an hour.

“…so if anyone comes, just say I’m unclothed and you’ll bring word when you have me dressed again. You must be firm and sure. No wavering. No apology. You must think like a servant of Samele’s Temple. Though not a pureblood like my guards, you would consider yourself above the house servants. Can you do that?”

“I think so.”

“Be sure, Jullian, for if you’re caught…”

“The Sinduria told me the consequences if I’m caught helping you. And I told her that I would do whatever was needed for Iero’s work.” His thin shoulders were stiff and square.

I had not thought I had a smile left in me, but the image of this Karish aspirant with a cracking voice and downy lip saying such a thing to a high priestess of Samele could not but make my face twitch. “And my sister truly arranged this…approved of your helping me?”