Blessing

Strength is found in the hands of those who shield the weak.

Those who stand firm in their faith...

Let those who deny my strength and my glory be consumed by the power they sought to defy.

—Black Testament of Azaroth

The horse knew the way better than I did. I just held on and let grief do the steering.

Only one road led to town, and only one reason anyone would drag a bound girl and a bag of stolen church silver down it: to sell both before sunrise. If I were them, I'd stop first at the old chapel half a mile out—shelter, and far enough from prying eyes.

I saw the light before I saw the building.

Sneak in. Free her. Simple.

Except I'm a priest. I can only talk with them.

"Burn them in their sleep."

The voice arrived without warning, low and almost bored, like it was offering directions rather than murder.I ignored it.

I found her, Lucienne. Bound, dressed in something ceremonial and wrong, small in a way she'd never once seemed to me before.

I went in through the broken wall.

"Take my hand. We finish them together."

I didn't. I couldn't. I've killed beasts. I have never once, in my entire life, killed a man, and some stubborn, useless part of me still believed I wouldn't have to.

So I talked instead. I always talk. It's the only thing I've ever been good at.

They didn't answer.

So I begged instead. Asked them to let her go, to forgive her for whatever they thought this was punishment for, because she'd done nothing—nothing—to deserve being on her knees in front of seven hooded strangers with a blade already drawn. When begging failed, I prayed. Out loud, right there in the open, because prayer was the only weapon a priest actually carries.

I don't remember what I said. I remember it wasn't enough.

After that, there's a gap. A door in my memory that I still haven't found the courage to open all the way.

When I came back to myself, my throat was raw, like I'd been screaming for longer than I had any memory of. Whatever words had come out of me in that gap were already gone, used up and put back somewhere I couldn't reach anymore.

The first thing I actually understood was the blood. Hers. Too much of it, spread too wide, in a shape I refused to finish looking at.

This is the world I live in now, I thought, with the calm of someone standing very close to the edge of something. This is what's left after love. Maybe this was always going to be her fate. Maybe I did everything I could.

I actually believed that, for about four seconds.

"How, indeed, can you accept it?"

The voice again. Patient. Amused, almost.

"How does someone that young die in front of you, and you carry a sword, and do nothing? Where is your god in this? Where is his blessing now?"

A pause, deliberate as a knife being turned.

"Is this the entire shape of your faith? Does your blood not boil? Or have you already made peace with a god whose justice simply doesn't arrive on time?"

I didn't care anymore who was speaking. I only cared that they were right.

"No," I said.

My grip on the sword went white-knuckled.

"I won't accept it. I will not accept it."

"Then let me offer you an alternative," the voice said, warmer now, almost gentle, in the way a trap is gentle right up until it isn't. "If your god won't act, find someone who will. Take my hand. I'll give you the strength he never did."

My right hand was already holding a sword. So I gave her my left.

The burn started at my shoulder and ran down to my palm like something being written into my skin rather than felt by it. She told me the words to speak. I didn't ask what they'd cost.

I jumped, breaking through the ceiling. Clouds scattered overhead and the moon came through, full and indifferent.

"I am the servant of the demon Nixie and by the power she has granted me, you will all be judged."

Something broke through my left shoulder—a wing, torn and half-formed, but enough to hold me in the air. Below me, the group hauling supplies toward the city looked up .

I dropped at them engulfing the whole area in flames.

Their screaming should have horrified me. Instead, something in my chest opened up and drank it. Each cry made the fire in my wing burn a little hotter, a little steadier. I understood, distantly and without any real alarm, that this was how the power grew.

One of them stepped forward from the flames, untouched, and screamed, "I WILL KILL YOU!"

I knew him instantly. Still hooded. Still one of the seven who'd taken her.

He pulled a grimoire from his coat and began chanting, and the spells that followed hit like they'd been built specifically to kill something like me. I ducked behind the wing—useless as a shield, it turned out, against magic clearly designed for demons.

But my holy magic hadn't left. If anything, it worked better now, folding around his attacks and turning them aside like it had been waiting its whole life for a fight worth having.

I threw a wave of fire from the wing. He raised a hand, and a shield bloomed into existence between us—

—and then began to writhe. Boils erupted across its surface like something inside it was trying to escape.

I didn't wait to find out what. I drove my sword through the middle of it, through the shield, through him.

The whole thing took less time than it takes to say it did.

I had never killed a man in cold blood before that moment. I want to tell you I felt something appropriately enormous. Mostly, I just felt cold.

I pulled back his hood.

It was the husband. The one building the house at the edge of the village. The one who'd told me, politely and then not so politely, that he already had a god.

His face, in death, was peaceful in a way that made no sense at all.

The others were still burning. Still screaming, though by every law I understood, they should have been dead already. So I went to each of them, one at a time, and put my sword through their hearts until the fire finally agreed to go out.

By the last one, the anger had drained out of me completely. What was left in its place was worse.

I buried each of them near the chapel, said what prayer I could still remember how to mean, and only afterward realized that just one of them had actually belonged to the hooded seven.

The rest were accomplices. Hired hands. People with names and debts and reasons that had nothing to do with any of this.

Or maybe that's just what I needed to believe, so I could keep walking.

I never found the scroll.

I rode back to the village at first light, already bracing for whatever I'd find there.

I was right to brace for it.