Olgun let loose a startled bleat—or the emotional equivalent of a bleat, which was rather like a sudden urge to think about sheep—as Widdershins shot to her feet, pressed her shoulder to the side of the alcove, and began to peer about for guards.
“Because it's stupid,” she repeated, in answer to his unspoken but hardly unfelt question. “He's dead. He's been dead a year! I'm talking to a wall, Olgun. And a door. And possibly a stoop, although I'm not sure, because I've never been clear on the difference between a stoop and a porch. So maybe a porch.
“Who I am not talking to is the only clergyman I ever met who was worth more than a mangy goat!”
An image floated toward the surface of her mind, rippling into focus. An image she didn't care to see.
“An old mangy goat!”
Olgun wouldn't stop; for all her efforts, the vision insisted on crystallizing, and Shins had nowhere to turn.
“An incontinent old mangy goat! An…Oh, figs…”
Once more she slumped to the stoop—or porch—this time with her legs splayed out crookedly before her, the image of a curly haired blonde woman foremost in her thoughts.
“Yes, I spoke to Genevieve a lot after she was gone. That was stupid, too.”
It was petulant, and she knew it before Olgun could point it out, before the words were even out of her mouth. “I know, I know…” A long sigh, then, steaming in the cold. “It wasn't, was it? And she'd be cross with me for saying so. All right, well, we're here anyway, yes?”
She scooted a bit, so that this time she might at least address the mausoleum directly.
“Sorry about that, William. Haven't…really been myself recently.” She chuckled, soft and blatantly forced. “Guess the fact that I'm here proves that, yes? I mean, I'd never been out of sight of Davillon's walls when we met. Now…
“Gods, how the hopping hens did I even get here? I didn't set out for Lourveaux. I just…walked. Didn't plan to come visit you; I decided to when I realized how close we were.”
The back of her head rattled with what could only be called the clearing of a divine throat. Olgun's way, perhaps, of jogging her memory over the fact that it had been his suggestion, one that Shins had dismissed until she realized he wasn't about to give up.
She, of course, acknowledged no such thing and kept speaking, voice growing as brittle as the slender icicles hanging overhead.
“I had to get out. I had to, I…don't think you'd have been very proud of me, William. I messed things up. I tried to take care of everybody, I swear I did!” Her shoulders, indeed her whole body, had begun to shake, through no influence whatsoever of the winter chill. “But I let them all down. Robin, Renard…Oh, gods…Julien…”
Whatever was about to break loose, whatever torrent of whitewater emotion might have overspilled the dam in that moment, for good or for ill, never had its chance. Her reverie, her fragility, shattered as though they, too, were stained glass, at the crunch of a footstep on the frost-covered stone behind her.
A footstep belonging to someone that Olgun hadn't warned her about!
“Maurice?!”
“Is this just how you normally greet people, Widdershins?” His words were tight, strangled, and more than a touch manic. “Because I have to confess that I assumed the last time was a fluke. I mean, it felt like a fluke to me. Did it feel like a fluke to you? I thought it was a fluke. But now I'm not so sure, and the ground is really cold, and I'm starting to have trouble breathing with you there, and that blade is awfully close to my face, when you think about it, so could you please let me up and say hello like a normal person?”
Her expression dazed and vaguely wide-eyed, not unlike a deer suddenly face-to-face with a shark, Widdershins rose. Maurice—Brother Maurice, properly, Order of Saint Bertrand and former assistant to the deceased archbishop of Chevareaux—practically inflated with a huge and desperate gasp. Whether it was relief that her knee was off his sternum, or that her rapier was no longer a mouse-stride from his eye, or both, was unclear. And, ultimately, unimportant, as the deep influx of winter air prompted a red-faced, chest-clutching coughing fit that lasted the better part of two minutes.
He looked very much as she remembered him: straw-colored hair cut in a tonsure; soft, but not remotely weak or decadent, features. The coarse brown of his traditional monk's robe was largely hidden beneath a thick white coat. His only adornment was the Eternal Eye, ultimate symbol of the Hallowed Pact, representing all 147 recognized gods of Galice.
And it stood out, primarily because—in utter disregard for the monastic traditions of simplicity and severity—it was crafted not from wood or ceramic or pewter, but from a silver that seemed to gleam without benefit of any sun in the sky.
Widdershins didn't even have to ask. She'd seen it before—not one like it, but that precise icon. For a moment her eyes flickered back to the stone façade of the mausoleum, and she could not quite repress a grin.
“He'd approve,” she said softly, then merely shrugged at the monk's questioning blink. “Sorry about that,” she said instead, though her tone suggested less genuine contrition than amused indifference. You snuck up on me.”
“Oh, I'm—”
“Why the happy hopping horses did you sneak up on me?”
“Well, I wasn't entirely sure you were who I—”
“For that matter,” Shins broke in again, brain finally catching up with the circumstances and her eyes beginning to narrow in suspicion, “how did you sneak up on me?”
“Uh, I'm not entirely sure what you…”
The indignant thief was, however, not listening to him at all anymore, but something else entirely.
“Oh, I see,” she grumbled. “And this by you was funny, yes? Just because you knew he wasn't a threat wouldn't make him any less dead if I'd stuck something sharp through something squishy! I—Oh.” She cast Maurice a tentative smile, genuinely apologetic now, when she finally noticed the gradual widening of his eyes and growing pallor of his face.
“We'll talk about this later,” she murmured from an upturned corner of her mouth. Then, more loudly, “Uh, I'm not sure exactly how much you know about—”
“Not here, in the cold, please. The caretaker's hut isn't far from here. We can get out of the wind, have some hot tea…”
“And get me out of sight of the guards?”
It was Maurice's turn for a tentative, almost-sickly smile. “I could vouch for you, certainly, but there would be a lot of questions—you, um, didn't make your entrance in any proper manner, or I'd have been informed—and I'd just as soon not try to explain you right now. If I even could.”
Shins chuckled. “All right. After you.”
Nervously glancing back over his shoulder, as though afraid she might simply up and vanish, the monk guided her along the cemetery's many smaller footpaths, winding to one side of this crypt and behind that one, avoiding the main thoroughfares as often as he might. More than once he strode ahead to check that their way was clear, then held his visitor back until the nearby armsmen had moved on.
After the third such occasion, Shins padded up to stand directly behind her host, almost silent on the snow. “What's with all the guards, Maurice?” she whispered.
“Widdershins…I realize that you and I are acquainted, but it really would be more proper to call me ‘Brother Maurice.’ At least when on holy ground such as this.”
“William didn't feel it was improper,” she said pointedly. And then, “What's with all the guards, Maurice?”
The monk glowered for a moment, then simply sighed and turned once more into the dancing flurries. “Just in case any of the unrest should happen to pass into the cemetery.”
“Unrest?”
Maurice's jaw dropped; she could tell from behind him. “Did you not notice the protesters shouting on every major street corner? The scrawled slogans and flyleaves that crop up all over? The city's had a bear of a time keeping up; they clean one block, the next just—”
“I avoided major street corners
,” she said with a shrug. “And major streets, in general. Beyond that? Just looked like Davillon to me, except even richer and more pretentious.”
“Lourveaux,” he insisted through gritted teeth, “is not Davillon. This is not normal here.”
“Right. So why the ‘unrest,’ then?”
“We'll get to that. That's another ‘out of the cold’ conversation.”
Their voices fell. The wind picked up.
Shins waited until it was quite clear he wasn't about to say more, then asked, “So what's the real reason for the guards?”
Maurice jumped as though he'd just discovered a mole in his small clothes. “What?!”
“Come on, Brother Maurice. You're a monk, and a devout one at that. I could hear it in your voice and see it in your posture if you were planning to lie to someone tomorrow.”
“I wasn't lying,” he protested in a soft grumble. “I was just…waiting to tell you everything.”
“Stop waiting.”
Another sigh. “Fine. The guards…” He turned aside as a particularly brisk breeze hurled a few random flakes into his hood. “For the same reason I was so cautious approaching you,” he said, voice raised just enough for her to hear him over the gusts. “We've had a number of…suspicious characters here on and off over the past few months.”
“And you're sure they weren't just family members visiting the tomb of Lord Suspicious Character IV, or something?”
“We aren't complete fools here, Widdershins. Don't say it.”
“I wasn't going to. Too easy.”
Inside her head, Olgun was quietly having hysterics.
“They managed to pass themselves off as mourners initially,” Maurice admitted. He drew them both to a halt, took a long moment to peer both ways down a main road, struggling to see through the gray, and then continued once more. “But we figured out fairly swiftly that the same group of people were rotating through. This fellow one day, that fellow the next, and so forth. I've no idea what they're doing here—there's been no vandalism or robbery—and we haven't the right to do anything but escort them out if they're here improperly.
“But…”
A long silence stretched between them.
“I think one of your sentences slipped its leash,” she said finally.
He offered another sallow grin, then pointed through the snow to a small building—the same size as the more modest mausoleums but far less ornate. She nodded, and they both headed toward the door.
“But,” Maurice continued, producing a large, iron key from within his robe, “I couldn't help notice that most of them have been spotted not too terribly far from His Eminence de Laurent's tomb. Could certainly be coincidence, and his is far from the richest mausoleum here, so I can't even say for sure…”
The monk continued, unlocking the door with a heavy clonk, ushering his guest inside, and locking it once more with equal volume, but Widdershins wasn't hearing his words anymore. The groundskeeper's abode nicely retained the heat, and a small pile of embers still smoldered in the fireplace, but the refugee from Davillon felt a greater chill here than she had outside.
People—not a lot of people, but enough—knew that Widdershins and the archbishop had grown close, however briefly. If someone was watching for signs of her…
Was it possible? “Olgun? I'm being paranoid, right?”
His fretting, worried reply didn't precisely calm her down.
“Right. Make this snappy, Maurice,” she said more loudly, spinning and nearly colliding with the startled young monk, two steaming mugs of tea in his hands. “I'm not going to be staying in Lourveaux very long.”
Maurice blinked, twice, but apparently their first encounter, last year in Davillon, had rendered him at least partially immune to the confusion suffered by so many individuals who spoke to her. He merely nodded and placed the two mugs on the table.
Widdershins took a seat on one side of it—an old, simple, but remarkably well-preserved piece of carpentry, with lightly padded chairs to match—while Maurice took the other.
“I know about you,” he said, sipping gingerly at his tea. “You and, ah, Olgun.”
No real shock, there. Shins wrapped her fingers around her own teacup, more to warm them than out of any desire for a drink. “I'd wondered if William had the chance to tell you.”
“He didn't, exactly. He…died very shortly after you left.”
Two pairs of eyes gazed down at the table, then, rather than at each other.
“But,” he continued gamely, “His Eminence and I had discussed some of his suppositions before he sent me to fetch you. Then, more recently, when Bishop Sicard came from Davillon to tell us about your…more recent troubles, the diocese asked me to consult. They knew I'd already met you, and much of the bishop's testimony was…difficult for some of them to believe.”
“I was there,” she said, voice suddenly small. “It's still difficult for me to believe.”
Maurice began to reach across the table. “I'm truly sorry for your—”
Ceramic cracked in Widdershins's hands, leaking a steady dribble of tea onto the wood.
“Right,” he said, drawing back. “Anyway, Sicard's story filled in the remaining gaps, or at least enough for me to have a basic idea of your situation.”
“And does it bother you?”
“It might,” he confessed, “had it clearly not bothered His Eminence. He trusted you, though—and Olgun, apparently. I can do no less.”
“Thank you for that,” she said, and meant it. “I…Wait. Didn't he also want you to transfer orders and become a priest yourself? I seem to recall…”
“I'm a servant, Widdershins. I don't want to lead anyone.”
“Maybe that means you should.”
This time, their eyes did meet; Maurice looked away first. Mumbling something Shins couldn't quite catch, he rose and returned with a towel to wipe up the spill. She, though she felt a faint pang of guilt for the teacup—it looked old—allowed him to do so without offering to help.
For a time, then, they spoke little of import. Maurice shared the latest news and rumor from Davillon, carried to Lourveaux by travelers who had left far more recently than Shins, but little of it interested her, or concerned anyone she knew. She, in turn, offered a brief account of her past six months, wandering Galice, but omitted most of the details—of the towns through which she'd passed, the threats she'd avoided, the few daring thefts that had allowed her to pay her way. And certainly she said nothing of her reasons for leaving Davillon at all.
So tired was she, so accustomed to being tired, that it wasn't until Olgun gently prodded her that she realized her eyelids had begun to drift shut, that she was on her dozenth yawn of the past hour.
“I'm sorry,” she began, “I—”
“There's room for two here,” Maurice offered. “Decently, I promise.”
“Oh, thank you. I was so worried you were going to misbehave.”
“Widdershins—”
“Thank you, Maurice. But no. I really need to go.”
He rose, and for the first time she saw a flicker of iron in his expression. “It's dark. It's freezing. Whatever you fear, it won't find you here over one night.”
“I…” She stumbled, then, slightly but notably, as a wave of exhaustion drained much of her remaining strength from her limbs. “Oh, don't you dare!”
Olgun's stern response—accompanied by a second wave of fatigue—felt very much like one of her father's “If you won't take care of yourself, you'll just have to live with how I do it” lectures from her childhood.
Surrendering—sullen, cursing up what for her was a storm and for others might qualify as a single raindrop, but resigned—she allowed Maurice to show her to her bed.
“So tell me about this ‘unrest.’”
“Gah!” Maurice bolted upright, startled from a deep sleep, and promptly rolled off the side of his narrow cot in a muddle of sheets and gangly limbs. The hut reverberated with the dull thump of monk against floor. br />
Widdershins leaned idly against the wardrobe, the only other piece of furniture in the room, ankles and arms both crossed. It was the same spot she'd occupied—the same pose—since she'd finished packing up her few possessions in preparation to leave, over half an hour gone by. It was still almost that long again until dawn would peek in the windows to see if it might be welcome for breakfast, but the young woman had grown tired of waiting.
After another moment of tangled thrashing with no sign of an emergent Maurice, however, Shins felt a gentle, probing suggestion in her gut.
“Oh, come on, Olgun! It's a bedsheet and a three-foot fall! I'm sure even he can handle…Oh, fine.” She pushed herself away from the wall, took two steps from the wardrobe, and abruptly froze.
“Um, Maurice?”
The thrashing ceased. “Yes?” The reply was oddly muffled, less by the weight of the linens, Shins guessed, than embarrassment.
“Do you need help?”
“It wouldn't be unappreciated….”
“And,” she continued, giving voice to the question that had stopped her in her tracks, “are you dressed?”
A moment. Two.
“I don't think I'll be needing any assistance, thank you.”
The thief snorted and made a point of both stomping her feet and slamming the door so her host would know he was once more alone in his bedchamber.
By the time he emerged, she had taken an identical leaning posture, this time against the pantry. He was, thankfully, fully clad now—not in his traditional coarse robe, as she'd anticipated, but heavy, functional tunic and trousers.
“I didn't know you even owned normal clothes. Olgun, did you know he owned normal clothes? Don't monks burst into flame or turn into frogs or something if they own more than a robe, worn sandals, and a length of string?”
“Widdershins…”
“Two lengths of string, then, is it? The Church has gotten more relaxed, yes?”
“Did you want to talk about what's going on in Lourveaux right now or didn't you?” Maurice asked, his tone almost desperate.