Divine Service

Fantasy short. A young man goes from noble to cleric.

22k, rated M, pre-M/M, a god and his new cleric. Jeeves and Wooster-inspired. This work is also available as an eBook, and has a GoodReads and a StoryGraph entry.

Theodore Halloran is coming into himself; Godfrey Digbett III seems to be coming into nothing but trouble.

Perhaps one might amend the troubles of the other.

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Part I

“You’ve never asked me who your father was,” said Mrs Hanni Halloran, née Halloran, for she had never been married, in truth.

Initially, her son did not answer her. He was sitting straight-backed upon a stool, blacking Lord Panatty’s shoes with quick, expert movements of his hand, coaxing the boots back to a bright shine that almost made Hanni’s eyes ache, to look right at them in the afternoon light.

It was a warm summer’s day, sun shining in from the southern window and the Vellumdry heat permeating the whole of the cottage. It was somewhat cooler upstairs, but the ceilings were really too low to accommodate her standing to pursue her work, and so she remained at her worktable in the middle of the room, her mistress’ dress laid out upon it. It was not so arduous a repair — the dress’ ruffles had torn in places, and she had only to neatly sew them back into place. Simple work, but fiddly, requiring a steady hand and neat twists of the wrist to keep the threads out of sight. Her skill as a seamstress was held in good renown.

Theodore Halloran, at fourteen years old, was beginning to come into himself. He seemed to grow taller by the hour, no longer the quiet, unassuming figure that might slip behind his mother’s back, unseen — not that Teddy ever did. He had always been an unfailingly polite boy, but possessed of a confidence and a steel-hard spine, never hiding from anything. His shoulders were broadening, too, his jaw beginning to show a harder angle even now, his eyes shadowed by the depth of his brow.

She fancied, at times, that she saw notes of her father in the face of her son — in the breadth of his strong shoulders, in his workman’s hands, in his nose, the nose which she had, too. Other times, she looked at her son and saw a creature she would never imagine was her blood relation, had she not given birth to him. He had such an uncanny way about him, sometimes.

“You’ve always told people you were a widow, Mother,” Teddy said, in a gentler voice than Hanni felt that she deserved. He could be like that, gentle. He always had been, with her. Somehow, it was a shock whenever she heard it, as though she were waiting in dread for the day her lovely son became something else entirely. “I felt if you wished to tell me something different, you would do.”

“Told people,” Hanni repeated. She was terrified, for some reason. She didn’t know why. She felt very cold, despite the warmth of her room, and watching her son’s hard nose, his jutting brow, his hair knotted sternly into the tightest bun she could imagine behind his head, she wondered if his eyes were still the steely blue she had seen when he was born, or if perhaps they had changed colour overnight. Were they violet, now, the violet of yet unplundered knowledge? “You never believed it, then.”

Teddy — her Teddy, still her Teddy, her boy, for now — looked up from Lord Panatty’s boot as he set it gently aside, meeting her gaze. He looked solemn, but not expectant; curious, but not demanding.

“If you will forgive me for saying so, for you are my mother, and I love you very much,” he said lowly, in that neat, clipped little voice that serving lords and ladies had given him, so refined, her son, so polished, “you’ve never shown a great deal of conviction in it yourself. You needn’t tell me now, if it brings you unease — your hands are shaking.”

“So they are,” Hanni said, setting down her needle and looking at her fingers, marked over with little scars and marks — not like Teddy’s hands, which were strong and broad and used for all manner of things, but with no blemishes at all. Teddy never scarred, not ever. “But I must tell you, some time.”

Teddy nodded his head in his calm, reasonable manner, standing to his feet, and she watched silently as he went to the kettle steaming over the fire, removing it and setting about making some tea for her. He put honey in it, as he always did when she was drinking it, and he walked up to her, gently put the mug into her hands, and cupped her hands in his. Soon, he would be taller than she was — soon, she would have to look up into his face, and he would be tall, and strong, not her little boy any longer.

“I grew up,” Hanni began, settling slowly into the chair beside the fire, and watching as Teddy brought over his stool, that he might look at her attentively as she spoke, “in a farming village, named Outcra, outside of Seville City. That’s some weeks’ travel, nearly a month if you have a cart to move with, more if you walk unaided, to our southeast. When I got to be your age, my mother and father sent me into the city, that I might make something of myself, and they took me to the Temple of Oghma, which is the biggest in the kingdom, even in the world, they say.”

Teddy said nothing. He kept watching her, his expression unchanging — his eyes were kind, she thought, he had very kind eyes, and like this, she could see them.

“I was to be a serving girl, assisting the priests, the librarians, everybody — I started off turning down the beds in the clergy’s quarters, but then they trusted me to do more of the outward facing things, you know. I tidied the library, cleaned off the shelves, set the fires in the priests’ offices and workrooms, and then in the scholars’. I was twenty-two when your father came to Seville City.

“I had no idea who he was. We, the staff, were to call him “your grace”, and not to look up at his face — he was a very tall man, I think just a scratch closer to seven feet than to six. For all that, he wasn’t intimidating, even at the outset — he had a very quiet step, and I was told he smiled often, and I regularly heard him laughing softly in the corridors. Not a… He was not a very loud man, didn’t make a great amount of noise, but he was good-natured, you see? He had humour in him. The priests, though, were a little uncomfortable with it, from what I heard — they felt he ought be more serious, for whatever reason.

“We, the junior service staff, weren’t allowed anywhere near him, and of course, when he or another high-ranking member of the service passed us by, we were to turn our faces to the corridor wall, or slip out of sight entirely.

“But Mrs Janeka, the head housekeeper, became ill with the Rusian Flu, and had to be confined to her bed for some weeks, and she chose me — me! — to service his quarters, and his office, which was attached. The Temple of Oghma is gigantic beyond measure — you’ve been into the temple in Merryweather, of course, which is very big, but the Seville one is gargantuan, with a great many spires and complicated corridors, and hidden rooms besides, not even counting the servants’ corridors. When I first went to his grace’s rooms, I had to follow written directions to find them, for I had to follow a great many corridors, take strange turnings, even turning back upon my steps at times.

“I came upon corridors I’d never even seen before, but were just as clean as the rest of the temple, so I made a note of it, in case they were to be amongst my duties. There was so much art upon the walls here, Teddy, it was… Every portrait, every tapestry, rubbed edges with another, so that the stone might as well have been plastered and papered, and I confess that I slowed my steps on my way, looking with awe at all of them — some of them were dreadful pieces, moralistic ones, you know, showing godly punishments, but most were…

“Paintings of queens and kings; paintings of blood-spattered warriors standing over their foes; drawings of instruments or complicated devices; tapestries depicting strange and foreign beasts; most of all, though, it was the landscapes that arrested me.

“I stopped stockstill in the corridor before a glass window, and I looked at a great painting wrought in oils, as wide across as this wall here, and as tall, too: it was a pastoral piece, depicting the soft greens of a meadow, the swirling shapes of the flowers that sprouted up from the grass, and ahead of that, crystal waters that were so clear, that shimmered so brightly, I felt that perhaps I was looking through but another window, although I could see the hard swirls of the oil. I wished to touch them, and even felt my hand raise in line with my belly before I stopped myself — to touch the art! Unthinkable! What if I damaged it, smudged it, ruined it with my unclean hands?”

Hanni stared into her tea, taken away with how vividly the memory came to her, how it had all been flooding back in recent years, in recent months, how she dreamed… Her tea, a clear brown turned gold with the honey poured in, reflected her face, as yet mostly unlined. She was still young, really, although she didn’t feel it. She felt as though she had lived lifetimes.

“Beside me, he said, “Do you like the art?” and I gasped, immediately bowing my head and turning to face the window behind me. I shook, my shoulders trembling, and in the reflection upon the glass, I saw his face. He was smiling slightly, a delicate curve of his lips, a gentle one, and he met my gaze in my mirror image.

“My apologies, your grace,” I said. “I should not have — ” but he interrupted me, gently laying his hand upon my shoulder and turning me once more, to face the painting. I did not fight him — I was terrified, certain he was going to call for the chief of staff to come for me, or to have me beaten, or even thrown from my post. He took up my hand in his — he had very slender hands, a scribe’s hands, despite his height and the breadth of his shoulders, there was a delicacy in them one could never have expected — and he laid my hand upon the painting, brushing the tips of my fingers over the swirls and layers of oil. His hand did not linger, pulling away, but I felt the ghost of it linger on the back of it, for his flesh had felt slightly cooler than mine did.

“It did not feel as hard as I expected. No colour came off upon my fingers, but there was a tackiness to it, almost like touching fresh leather still wet from the tan, a sort of give.

“This is unvarnished,” his grace said to me. “The oil is not yet cured — the painting is only six months old.”

“And it isn’t dry?” I whispered, although I didn’t mean to say a word.

“Almost,” he said. “But not quite. You see, oil paint is not merely pigment — the oils are mixed in with a liquid, but as you know, oil and water never truly meld together, not forever. The solvent dries away, until the oil remains, but the oil is not dry — it’s cured. It toughens, hardens.”

“Like ham?”

“Like leather.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, and I dared turn my head, looking at his face. I had seen but a sliver of it before, seemingly only the violet shade of his eyes in the glass, but now I saw it all, saw the smile of his lips, his long hair, his bristled jaw. He looked like no scribe I had ever seen. I looked down almost immediately, bowing my head again, clasping my hands. “Pray forgive me, your grace,” I said. “My name is Hanni, and I’m to service your rooms while Mrs Janeka is abed.”

“It’s an improvement,” he said, and I had to stifle my gasp. “Mrs Janeka does not care for art. Come.”

“He led me to his office, which was a large room, with its own great fireplace, a desk, a dining table big enough for four, even, and then against the walls were a great many bookshelves. Leaning against these were instruments in their stands, and a few stacked canvases, not yet in frames. A fresh canvas rested upon the easel, beside the windows.

“For a few moments I stood in place, frozen, but his grace returned to his desk, beginning to carefully make notes upon a piece of parchment. I thought, at the time, that he was writing from his head, but now and then his eyes would seem to go somewhere else entirely, somewhere far beyond his little apartment, his gaze staring unto… His grace was a scribe: he wrote down, more often than not, words dictated to him. That I could not hear them meant nothing.

“I tidied his rooms, cleaned out his fireplace as best I could, attended his bedchamber in the next room — it had windows on three sides, more of a greenhouse than a bedroom, with naught in it but wardrobes against the back wall and a great bed made up with blue silk sheets. He had no posters, no head board, even, and the room smelled of ozone, but the heat did not feel stale, or old, and nor did the air in it. It felt fresh, but concentrated, warm in a way that made me want to lie down and bask like a snake on a stone.

“When I finished my work, his grace requested that I come in the morning to make up his fire, early in the morning, before he rose, and then asked that I return at about the same time as I had that day, later in the morning, to perform the rest of my duties. When Mrs Janeka recovered, she said that she had too many duties upon her back to return to his grace’s service, and said I ought keep up with them. She did not seem angry about it, but I remember even then, there was a sort of reticence about her, about the way she clasped her hands — she was a strict woman, very particular and severe, but not an unfair one, and she did care for her staff, more than the butler, who assumed many of the serving girls only wanted…”

Hanni felt her lips taper off in what they said, and in the distance she could hear the toll of the chapel bell in the Blot square: already, Teddy was on his feet and taking up his master’s boots, drawing on his coat. She hadn’t noticed him stand.

“I’ll return before sunset,” he said, “his lordship will be riding today, but I won’t be a member of the party, I merely have some work to pursue in the house before I come back. Mrs Windham promised me a chicken from her coop to cook tonight, if you like, Mother.”

“You’re a good boy, Teddy,” Hanni said, standing to her feet and setting her drained mug aside. “Please do.”

She stood on the doorstep of their little cottage, set on the hillock over one of the old dwarf tunnels, now long-since collapsed, and watched him move down the path as an easy, dignified pace — not slow, but not hurrying. Teddy did not hurry: it seemed, at times, he could move at speeds one could scarcely imagine, but one would never see him harried. It wasn’t in his nature.

A sudden chill settled over her, and Hanni huddled slightly in her shawl, despite the heat of the sun still resting upon her hair like a warm hand, cupping her cheeks, settling over her skin. Looking away from her son, she looked out over the edge of the hillock, instead, and looked at a green, green meadow, and waters so crystal clear, that shone so beautifully, it was hard to believe they were anything more than oil on canvas.

A breeze rushed over the surface, rippling over the water, spoiling the illusion, and Hanni’s smile couldn’t decide whether to be nostalgic or bitter as she stepped back inside.

* * *

“Your boots, my lord,” Theodore Halloran said, already moving to crouch, and Lord Panatty leaned back in his armchair, allowing Halloran to ease the boot up his calf, nimbly buckling them into place.

“Gods, Halloran,” Panatty said, peering down. “How do you manage to make them shine like that? I’m liable to blind Lord Canty!”

“I endeavour only to do my best, lord,” Halloran said mildly. “My mother taught me the axiom that there is no sense in leaving a job half-finished.”

“Well, it certainly isn’t that,” Panatty said, putting out his other foot. He was an elderly man, approaching seventy, but age did not see fit to make him slow his pace at all, and he rode thrice each week, often running upon the house grounds with the dogs, wrestling with them upon the grass. Halloran had become quite adept at removing the grass stains from his clothes. “Good man, Halloran.”

“My thanks, lord.”

Halloran stood to his feet, taking up his lordship’s coat, and as he helped the old man on with it — he was tall enough for that, now, for Lord Panatty was far from strapping even in youth, let alone now — Panatty met his gaze in the mirror.

“Uh, Halloran,” he said.

“My lord?”

“My, ah, my great nephew is visiting, in the tow of my sister’s ghastly family. He’s eight or nine, I believe, bit touched in the head, if you take my meaning. Keep an eye on him if he crosses your path, would you?” Panatty’s expression was serious, but there was no condescension upon his face — it occurred to Halloran, in a distant way, that Panatty was showing him a surprising trust in this moment. Perhaps he would be satisfied, if he held the man in more regard.

“Very good, my lord,” Halloran said, with a slight inclination of his head, and he stepped aside as Lord Panatty cheerfully moved out into the corridor. He did not move to look when he heard the slight sound of a scuffle, and the metal clatter of dishes hitting the ground.

“Watch where you’re going! By the gods, you stupid boy — ” He heard Panatty snap, heard the familiar sound of flesh on flesh — “An open hand,” he had heard Panatty say before, “nothing too severe.” — and a low hiss of pain.

Halloran waited until he heard Panatty’s steps retreat, and then he drifted from the room and knelt in the corridor to assist one of the kitchen boys, a slightly chubby child of seven or eight named Worthy, settle the platters back atop one another. Halloran did not allow him to take them up again — they were obviously too heavy for him to carry with any sense of balance, but the cook didn’t pay much heed to such things — and carried them with Worthy walking alongside him.

“Do you need balm on your cheek?” Halloran asked, simply.

“No, thank you, Mr Halloran,” Worthy mumbled, and to the boy’s credit, he wasn’t reaching up to rub at it: it was swiftly turning a bright, cherry red, but no blood had been drawn, and Halloran fancied the slap had been light enough that it wouldn’t bruise.

“Polish these at the table, and carry them one at a time now,” Halloran said, setting them down on the low table and beginning to turn them over to check them. Satisfied, he set about laying out the tea set from the other shelf, beginning to pour a ice lemon tea from the cold cupboard. “Better to make multiple journeys or ask someone to help you than to risk dropping them again — the silver dents badly when it does dent.”

“Yes, sir. I really didn’t mean to, sir, just that I couldn’t see him coming until he was right there.”

“Her ladyship told you not to be too slow about it, didn’t she?”

“Yessir,” Worthy mumbled ashamedly. Halloran saw no sense in shouting at the serving boys for the speed of their work — better to allow them pursue it slowly, and get it quite correct, than berate them into speed, that they should falter. This was not, however, the sort of criticism one could make of Lady Panatty without losing the security of one’s employment.

“Good lad, Worthy. Take it as slowly as you need, Lady Panatty will not be home until late evening,” Halloran said, and stepped out onto the grounds. He kept his head high as he moved down the back stairway and into the yard, moving to let free the dogs from behind their gate: immediately, they rushed in the direction of the stables, where one of the stable girls gave Halloran a grateful salute at saving her the walk she had just been making across the lawn.

Walking down the cobbled path — Halloran wore polished shoes, not the boots of the outside workers or the staff that worked downstairs, and they wouldn’t stand moving across the lawn — he made his way to the picnic area beside the fountain, and gently set the tray of tea things upon the table.

“Thank you, Halloran,” Lady Regina said crisply, leaning forward from her book, and Halloran inclined his head as he poured. His lordship’s sister was staying in the house until the summer had come to its end, and the woman was difficult indeed, but Halloran didn’t see the sense in dwelling on it. “Godfrey!” she snapped, her voice carrying over the lawn, and Halloran followed her gaze to the speck of boy rolling upon the floor with one of the hunting dogs, come astray from the rest of the pack. “Godfrey, come here immediately!”

Godfrey Haverforth Digbett III did not run in the dignified fashion that befitted his station. Tumbling over his too-long legs, he stumbled twice in the grass as he rushed back, breathing heavily, swaying as he moved, and Halloran watched the disapproval on the Lady’s face as she watched him with something not at all unlike scorn writ in her expression.

“Yes, Aunt Regina!” he called back breathlessly, and as he jogged over the dog went yipping to join the rest of his counterparts. Halloran thinned his lips slightly at the boy’s appearance, grass stains all over his white shirt’s back, his shoes scuffed, mud staining his cheek. Halloran did not wait for Lady Regina’s prompt before he took the handkerchief from his pocket, dousing it in the ice water, gently wiping it away. “Thanks awfully,” the boy said, looking up at Halloran with his blue eyes wide. He was a healthy-looking boy, a bright rosiness in his cheeks, and he had extremely wide, brown eyes, ones that caught the sunlight and showed themselves flecked with gold and green at the base of their irises. His hair was a mess, but a mess Halloran did not feel equipped to tackle, and so he stepped back. “Oh, you brought us tea! That’s very good of you, Halloran, thanks ever so.”

“It is no trouble, sir,” Halloran said, and watched as Godfrey poured his own tea, almost losing his grip upon the pot before catching it again, and managing not quite to spill any upon the table. Lady Regina’s scowl twisted her lips. “Might I get you anything to eat, my lady? Dinner is to be served at eight o’clock, and I had noticed your ladyship had not yet luncheoned.”

“You’re very observant, Halloran,” Regina said, with a steel edge of almost-disapproval to her tone, and Halloran smoothed out his features, forcing himself not to react. “Yes, if you would. Something cold from the kitchen will do.”

“Very good, my lady,” Halloran said, bowing slightly at the waist, and he took up the tray from the table, leaving the two mugs and the pot. Godfrey swiftly drained his, rushing to take up with Halloran’s step.

“Godfrey, where are you going?”

“To get a book from inside, Aunt,” Godfrey said immediately, a note of plea in his voice.

“Change your clothes before you come back out,” Regina said sharply, and Godfrey nodded, walking very quickly beside Halloran with his head down. A skinny boy of nine, Godfrey was already lanky, if not tall, and he looked so profoundly forlorn, staring down at his own unpolished shoes, that Halloran found himself touched.

“Has anyone ever told you, Halloran, that you have a very large head?”

Halloran considered the question, his sympathy rapidly evaporating. “No, sir,” he said, somewhat darkly.

“It’s a dashed marvellous head,” Godfrey said quickly, apparently very sensitive to this marginal alteration in tone, his eyes becoming so wide as to be like dinnerplates. “Very well-chiselled, as it were — a handsome head. The sort one might make a bust out of.”

“A large bust,” Halloran said bluntly, and he watched as the boy flushed brightly, rubbing the back of his neck.

“I do apologise, Halloran,” Godfrey said. “I’m dashed bored here. I’m not to read anything exciting, or to do anything interesting, and there’s no boys to play with except for the serving boys, and I shouldn’t like to distract any of them lest my uncle beat them for the sin of it.”

Halloran did not allow his eyebrows to raise, keeping his face a blank mask, but he did allow, in a quiet voice, “Perhaps a sensible caution, Mr Digbett.”

“All of my friends are back in Deepwood,” he said miserably. “My mother thought that the fresh air would do me good, but I don’t see what makes the fresh air here any fresher than the air there. I think perhaps she just wanted to see the back of me.”

“Panatty House has a prodigious library, sir,” Halloran said.

“I’m not to step foot within it without my governess in tow,” Godfrey said, dejected. “My uncle seems to think I’m as liable to devour the books as read them, or set the place alight. Perhaps I would, if any of them were worth burning!”

Halloran shot the boy a severe look, and Godfrey immediately crumpled, blanching terribly.

“Just a joke, Halloran.”

“As you say, sir.”

“Sometimes I find myself saying the most ridiculous things without thinking much about them, as I know I ought. Does that ever happen to you?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, I suppose it wouldn’t do,” Godfrey said to the ground. “Knowing as much as you do. Do you ever think that perhaps you know everything, Halloran?”

“No, sir.”

“I think that perhaps you do,” Godfrey said, with a tone of something like accusation, and Halloran felt his lip twitch.

“Very good, sir,” Halloran said, and opened the door for the boy, letting him past. As he crossed the threshold, Halloran heard the sharp, biting call of the boy’s governess — a feline woman quite appropriately named Thundering Roar — from the top of the stairs, and watched him wince.

“Thanks again, Halloran,” Godfrey said, and with the resigned expression of a man walking to the gallows, stepped solemnly over the threshold. Halloran closed the door neatly behind him and returned to the kitchens.

* * *

“When,” Hanni said as she stepped back inside, hanging up her cloak upon the back of the door, “is Lady Regina returning to Deepwood?”

“Toward the end of Blotting,” Teddy said, leaning that she might kiss his cheek as she came to his shoulder. He had defeathered the chicken very adeptly, wrapping it with herbs and setting it upon a bed of roots and tubers, setting it neatly inside the oven.

“Another month?” Hanni asked, despairingly.

“Longer,” Teddy said, “if the summer lingers.”

“Gods,” Hanni groaned, and fell back into her chair as Teddy handed her a mug of steaming tea, which had been waiting for her on the table.

“She’s quarrelling with Lady Panatty?”

“Quarrelling?” Hanni repeated. “The woman’s eviscerating her. There’ll be no more flesh on her bones if Lady Regina keeps flaying her like this, and it isn’t as though Lord Panatty will step in.”

“I am given to understand Lord Panatty is somewhat intimidated by his sister,” Teddy said, closing the door and stoking the fire — the last of the sun’s colour was beginning to seep out of the sky, peach giving way to violet giving way to black.

“Who isn’t?”

Teddy exhaled through his nose, his lips twitching, and Hanni raised her eyebrows. “Her great nephew has accompanied her from Deepwood,” Teddy supplied, by way of explanation. “Lord Panatty seems to think the boy is especially dim-witted, but he did not appear so to me. Merely clumsy, on his feet or with his words. Between his governess and the Lady Regina, it is no wonder to me, Mother, that he’s so unsteady.”

“Kathy said Lord Panatty gave her boy Worthy a hard slap today.”

Teddy’s ever so slight smile turned into an expression of grim disapproval, and he nodded. “He did,” Teddy said. “Lord Panatty ran into him, and he dropped his plate of silver. Would you like to go upstairs to rest? I can wash these feathers myself.”

Hanni shook her head. “I didn’t finish my story earlier,” she said.

“I don’t wish to press you.”

“You should. This is your father we’re talking about.”

“I should care for a man I’ve never met more than my own mother?” Teddy asked, even as he set a blanket in her lap, and she watched him as he moved to rinse the feathers from the chicken in water, putting them on thread to dry.

“Well,” Hanni said, fingering the mug idly. “I served his grace as best I might. Kept regular hours, turned down his bed each morning, made his fires. He kept his quarters remarkably tidy, you know, more than any lord or lady I’ve ever known of. Sometimes, when I would step into his quarters, even if it was not yet light, I would find him sat at his desk, taking his uncanny dictation, or I would find him sat at the easel, painting landscapes the likes of which I had never seen. He did not use oils, but a watery paint he made himself, and sometimes I fancied the colours he used were ones I had never seen the like of in nature, until I saw him blend them into some blossom or riverbed, and then it was as though my eyes had been opened to the existence of them.

“He often talked, when I was in his quarters and he was painting. At first, I rather thought perhaps he was talking to himself, but he asked me my opinion from time to time — he would talk about art, and artists, and he would tell me about the different art displayed around the temple, who had made it, with what they had made it, why they had made it, who had commissioned it.

“I asked him once, why he told me all that. He said it was because the priests didn’t understand art, not really — they only understood books and learning, and budged only a little for the grace of music, and only because that, too, could be written down. Art couldn’t be, you see. You might describe a painting, but you describe it on a page in such a way that it might be reproduced. He missed his own temple, he said, rather than Oghma’s, although he knew the work he was pursuing was important.”

Hanni drained her mug, drawing her knees up into the chair, and watched Teddy’s back as he continued threading feathers neatly upon the needle, moving quickly, easily, nimbly.

“He asked me to model for him, and I refused. I told him I wouldn’t take my clothes off for him, no matter that he was a man of great importance, and that I was insulted he should ask. He sort of… Stared at me, his mouth agape, and then he laughed softly, and said he had no thought of me doing so. He wanted to paint me as I was.

“So, he did. I sort of stood before the window, upon a stool that the light could catch me right, and posed with my hands clasped over my belly, and my head held high. He said I had a regal bearing.

“You must understand that it was not… I did not tumble into bed with him. It wasn’t until two years later that we ever… And he said he would marry me. Proposed that he would, and I told him he was a fool six times over before I let him slide a band onto my finger.”

“Why didn’t you?” Teddy asked, turning to face her, even as he continued threading the feathers at a speed Hanni never could have, even sewing all her life. He never cut himself on jagged quills or snapped pieces, for the speed he worked at, either.

“He wasn’t just a scribe, you know,” Hanni said. “He was… He was a very dedicated servant of Oghma. More than that, he was… I didn’t know, when first I began to serve him, when he first painted me, let alone the first time he reached to hold my hand. It wasn’t until the first night we kissed, two years, several months, after I had met him that I came to his quarters at my usual hour, and he gestured me in, but was in conversation with another man.

“Veritum,” the man called him. “Lord Veritum.”

Teddy was silent. In the distance tolled the chapel bell in the village — Veritum’s Chapel, his sigil, a lit candle over a watchful eye, carved upon the bell. It had struck her as a sweet sound, when first she had come to Blot.

Veritum was a lesser deity of knowledge, of literature as much as anything else — some thought of him as a facet of Oghma, in other kingdoms, so Hanni had been told, but she knew him as but a brother in a family of overlapping interests. Had known him.

“It was a stupid fancy of mine,” Hanni said. “To be distracted the way that I, to distract him, I… But for four months after, I stayed. I slept in his bed, a few times, after he had proposed to me — I did mean to marry him, if he wished to marry me.”

“Why didn’t you?” Teddy asked, for a second time. His tone was even.

“I came to his chamber once, in the evening. He wished me to dine with him, but I was not the only guest at the table. Ashamed, I thought perhaps I had come on the wrong night, but Veritum took me by the hand and brought me to sit beside him, and introduced me.”

“To Lord Oghma?”

Hanni didn’t ask how he knew it. Halloran knew things at time — of course he would.

“Yes,” she said. “My hands moved so tremulously that twice over I dropped my fork, and once my wine glass. His lordship was gracious and polite, asked me questions, made genteel conversation, complimented my wit and my knowledge of art. Admirable, I believe was the word he used for me. I was an admirable example.

“He finished his meal with us, stood, patted Veritum on the shoulder as he shook his hand… and told him in no uncertain terms that he did not approve of such distractions as these.” She still remembered the vibration in his voice as he had said it — it was not a statement, but a godly decree, and it had rung through her chest, made her heart palpitate, made her so faint she had nearly fallen.

Hanni’s breaths hitched in her throat, and she put her hand over her mouth, breathing through her nose as she looked into the base of the fire.

“Veritum told me to pay it no heed,” she said, not looking at Teddy. “Bade me stay with him, ignore what his brother had said, and… I didn’t even bid him farewell.

“I handed in my resignation, said that I wanted very much to return to my parents’ steadings, for my parents were coming on in age, and I went there. I told them that the man that had… I told them he was a scribe in the temple, that we had been planning to marry, but that he had died.

“When you were three, I wrote to the temple in Merryweather, asking if I might come to work there as a serving woman, and they agreed, but once we came to town, Sister Riorda placed the deed to this house on the table before me, and said that it had been held in trust for me at the Veritum Chapel here in Blot, at such a time as I arrived, and that she had arranged for me to join the staff at Panatty House.

“I was such a fool. I thought perhaps he had thought me lost, gone, but he knew where I was the entirety of the time, even knew where I might go next. I haven’t seen him since before you were born, but…”

She trailed off, looking to Teddy, waiting for him to say something, anything. There was a far away look in his eyes she’d never seen before, one that made her blood run cold and her heart jump up to her throat, but then he seemed to flip back into awareness, and looked at her properly. His gaze was dark.

“Excuse me, Mother,” he said finally. “I’m going to hang these up to dry.”

No more word was said about it.

* * *

“How do you know so much, Ted?” asked Ualton Wicks, the senior footman. It was late evening, and he was watching in delight at the trick Halloran had been showing him to fold the tablecloths in quick time.

“I read improving books,” Halloran replied, gesturing for Wicks to copy him. “You might try it yourself.”

“Don’t know how you find the time,” Wicks said mournfully. “S’pose it’s easy, being able to do everything so quick as you can. I find it right hard to read, me — I can, like, but the words don’t half swim ahead of me, and sometimes a page’ll take me an hour. Wish I could read fast.”

“Experience will do where books will not,” Halloran murmured, and nodded his approval when Wicks showed him his technique. Wicks had been worried, as of late, about the speed he went about his work did, and ensuring everything was perfect when he did it — all the household staff were.

At twenty, Halloran had come into himself: his shoulders were broad, his body squarely built and strong, and his jaw had hardened, taking away some of the exaggeration in his nose, his brow, but not softening them. He was Lord Panatty’s valet, now, had been since that spring, when Mr Zara had succumbed to his own ailing age.

Lord Panatty was getting crueller, as the years went by. Very little of this was laid on Halloran’s back, for it was difficult for anyone to aim criticism in such a way that might hit, but the other household staff increasingly avoided his gaze as much as possible, and even attempts at perfection weren’t quite easy to reach.

Wicks was anxious about this, Halloran knew, without ever having been told — Panatty had chastised him twice in the past week, and he had been made to work in the stables that morning, assisting the stablehands in mucking them out. Panatty hadn’t even allowed him to change his uniform, and the stench had clung so badly to his shoes that Halloran had insisted Wicks throw them out.

“Don’t know why you stay here,” Wicks said, softer now, his voice darker. “I wouldn’t, if I had a brain like yours. You could join the priesthood, or be one of them magical scholars.”

Halloran had been attending classes in magic in Vellum, the village over the bridge, on every day off for the past year. He did not see fit to share this with Wicks: the younger man would only spread it about the staff, and Halloran didn’t wish to be the subject of gossip. The classes in Vellum were cheaper than those in Merryweather City, but they were not cheap, and he had no wish for speculation as to what mysterious benefactor might be paying for his tutelage.

“There are ways we ought conduct ourselves for the benefit of our betters,” Halloran said, taking a step forward and reaching out, adjusting the set of Wicks’ jerkin before fixing the collar of his shirt. Ashamed, Wicks looked down, but Halloran kept his tone even as he said, “But that is not to say our betters always know better. Class separation is for our benefit as much as it is theirs: the upper classes are insensible without us, and blind to the fact. Make yourself invaluable, Wicks, and guide those you serve to where they ought be. Not where they wish to be.”

Wicks stared at him, his lips parted, his eyes wide, and then he nodded his head.

Halloran watched him go, and felt a strange certainty in his chest, looking about the footman’s hall, that it would be the last time he saw it. He packed the things he had left about Panatty House — some books, his uniforms, spare boots, and returned home. He sat beside the fire with his mother, playing the viol as she sang, until the knock — expected by Halloran if not her — came to interrupt them.

That evening, word came of the draft — Seville’s war with what remained of the orc armies to the northeast of Seville had been worsening, as the orc battalions became bolder, and King Raúl would not suffer orcs.

“You knew this was coming,” his mother said as he set his travelling pack, already made up, against the door. “You knew. Do you often know the future?”

“I won’t begin the journey until morning,” Halloran said gently, picking up the viol again and settling it against his lap, holding the bow loosely in one hand. His tutelage in the instrument had been freely provided by Veritum’s Chapel priests ever since he was a young boy: the instrument itself had been a gift on his sixteenth birthday. He had not pressed his mother as to where she had gotten it from, but he noticed how she gazed at the etchings upon its back, sometimes, as though it were an instrument long familiar to her. “The first cart east does not leave until the fifteenth hour tomorrow.”

“The messenger didn’t say that,” she said, her voice quavering. His mother looked afraid, and his chest ached horribly.

“Will you sing?” Halloran asked, keeping his voice soft.

She nodded, and he put his bow once more to the strings.

“You should take it with you,” she said before they retired to their beds. “The viol. It is yours, after all.”

“Very well,” Halloran said.

He left it on the table beside a farewell letter before the sun rose, and began the walk to Merryweather’s barracks, that he might make it before the first train left.

* * *

“Gosh, look, Magatha,” Godfrey said, somewhat desperately, as he climbed through the window to rest upon what was not strictly a balcony, but was in fact little more than a window shelf. It made it rather difficult for the girl to hang about his neck, as she seemed rather intent on doing, for there wasn’t space for two in a window box.

“Oh, Godfrey, what?”

Magatha rested her elbows upon the window ledge, looking out over the trees to the path at the base of the valley, and then went quiet.

They were soldiers, all in uniform, and they marched in line with one another, in neat little boxed queues of men. Godfrey had always thought it dreadfully stupid, the way his toy soldiers ended up organised, had thought it impossible that they should move in formation like that, but watching these ones, he saw it was possible indeed.

“How many of them do you think will die?” Godfrey asked softly.

“All of them, I expect,” Magatha said. “Look, most of them are human, or elves, from the look of things. They’ll be no match for orcs.”

Godfrey felt his chest pang.

“Don’t look so worried,” Magatha said snootily. “You’re only fifteen, they’ll hardly sign you up, and the war will be over before you’re twenty. It’s a voluntary draft now, anyway — all of those people chose to join up.”

“Why ever would one do that?”

“Because some people are brave, Godfrey.”

“Do you think me dreadfully cowardly? I just don’t suppose I should like to kill someone unless I really thought he deserved it. I don’t know that that’s the essence of cowardice.”

“The orcs do deserve it,” Magatha said.

“Gosh,” Godfrey said, watching the soldiers move forward. “All of them?”

“Yes,” Magatha said. “Now, do be brave and come inside, Godfrey, and I’ll show you something utterly marvellous.” She beckoned to him with open arms in a tone he rather distrusted, and Godfrey elected to be brave by scaling the drainpipe down to the yard, and rushing away from the house as fast as he was able.

Magatha Gainsly was the granddaughter of his Great Aunt Regina, and the old woman seemed rather set on the idea that he and Magatha should marry. Godfrey could think of a great many things he would rather do, various methods of expiry among them. Dashing through the trees on ungainly feet — although on a steep incline such as this one, tumbling down the valleyside only made him move rather faster — he came to a clumsy stop at the edge of the path, watching the soldiers pass.

“Where are you coming from?” he asked, falling into line with one outer member of the procession, and she glanced at him, but did not break her stride.

“Merryweather,” she said. “Why, are you going to enlist?”

“I don’t know,” Godfrey said. “Do you think I ought?”

“Mr Digbett,” came a voice from some rows behind the other soldier, and Godfrey peered up in slack-jawed amazement at the moving form of one of the servants from his Uncle Alfraid’s home in Blot, now a great deal larger than when Godfrey had last seen him.

“Gosh,” he proclaimed. “You’ve rather grown into your head.”

“Not quite, Mr Digbett,” the young man said, with more good nature from his naturally stern features than Godfrey would have expected. “You ought not attempt to enlist.”

“Why ever not? I’m dreadfully brave, you know.”

“I have no doubt,” he said. He got a funny sort of look on his face, and his eyes, goodness, had they always been such a delicate shade of purple? It was but a flash, only lasting a moment, but it arrested something in Godfrey, made him stumble. “But that isn’t for you, Mr Digbett.”

“With all due respect, and I think you’re a wonderfully good chap, although I can’t quite recall your name, do you perhaps know what is for me? I’m afraid I’m lost as to what it might be.”

“Music,” the soldier said. “Music, and improving books. Go to the temple of Veritum in Rudswand town a mile back. They’ll know what to give you.”

“What, you left instructions for me?” Godfrey asked, and the servant’s unsmiling face — he did remember it as being distinctly unsmiling, although not in a frightening way, those years ago — showed a very slight smile.

“Goodbye, Mr Digbett,” he said, facing forward.

Standing stock still, Godfrey let him pass, and watched the rest of the procession move onward. The skin on the back of his neck prickled quite strangely, and he looked back up the hill, to the house. On the breeze, from up the skill, he could hear Magatha calling him.

Rudswand was rather more than a mile, actually — it was closer to three.

It was better than Magatha.

* * *

“Who was that boy?” asked Elinor when they made camp, and Halloran looked up from his boots as he polished them to a shine, meeting her gaze.

“Godfrey Digbett? I served his grand uncle.”

“What was all that about the temple of Veritum?”

“He’s too young for the army.”

“But why there?”

“It’s the proper place for him.”

“How do you know?”

Halloran said nothing, pressing his lips loosely together and meeting her gaze. He watched her shiver, and the sight did not trigger any real emotion in him — if it did, it was distant, distant, and far away. The ghost of a feeling that he might once have felt in all its glory.

“Your eyes are the funniest colour, you know,” she said, but turned away from him.

Looking to the fire, Halloran was quiet, and Knew of things to come.

Part II

Sergeant Halloran was a dark silhouette on edge of the fort wall, a shadow against a pale grey sky. Looking out over the battlefield, which was still smoking in places, the turned-up, red earth all the redder with blood, it was impossible to glean any feeling from the blankness of his expression.

One who stood up on the wall with him, one who leaned far over to get a glimpse at his eyes — difficult as it was, with the depth of his sockets, so often held in shadow — one would see the darkness of the purple colour in them, and perhaps wonder if it were truly the battlefield he was looking at, or something else entirely, beyond one’s own understanding.

Sergeant Halloran was a problem-solver within the Sevillian Army, marching against the orcish forces — they were led by their great war general, an old, heavy-tusked orc woman named Grasha’ark. The very borders of Seville had been built upon war with the orcs to the north-east: fifteen hundred years ago, General Kor had fallen to the marching armies of the first King of Seville, and over the years, there had been skirmishes here and there, but nothing like this for centuries.

Three years of this, of the orcs trying to cross the Bone Plains into Seville, and now Seville had advanced from within its own borders, stealing what little they had allowed the orcs to keep, all those years ago.

It wouldn’t be that much longer now — Sergeant Halloran had said so, quietly, one night by the fire this week, all the while calmly polishing his boots. When Sergeant Halloran said something like that, it was usually correct, and his clairvoyance was well-known — and the subject of some caution — amongst the soldiers and the commanders alike.

On the battlefield, blows barely ever seemed to hit him, for he knew where they would land before they struck; his tactics could allow the platoon to infiltrate even the most heavily populated stronghold quickly and silently, slaughtering its guards before they so much knew the Sevillian forces had reached them; soldiers murmured to one another that Halloran knew the name of every corpse he stepped over, whether it was from their army or the other.

“Coin for your thoughts, Halloran?” asked General Hawk, one of the elvish commanders, a tall woman that exuded a sense of magical power, leaving an electric hum on the air about her.

“Tonight,” Halloran said quietly.

“Tonight?” Hawk asked, and she looked out over the field, staring into the far distance, at the other end of the plains. “Tonight it ends?”

“General,” Halloran said, “do you know any Orcish?”

“Horrid language,” she said. “Harsh, brash noise for harsh, brash beasts. These aren’t reasonable creatures, Halloran — orcs seek nothing more than to seize that which they might crush between their hulking fingers, and they thirst for war. Their language wouldn’t do us any good.”

“As you say, General,” Halloran said, in that curious way he had — Halloran, somehow, could be completely polite and deferent, whilst simultaneously tonelessly communicated how much he disapproved of you and your ideas. Hawk frowned, feeling her chest give an uncomfortable shift beneath her armour, but Halloran was already bowing his head to her, stepping away. “Do excuse me.”

“Excused,” she said to the sergeant’s retreating back, descending the stairs, and she glanced to the other soldiers, each of whom was watching him with as much care as she was herself.

* * *

The rain came down in what might be called, if one were a romantic, silver sheets. Godfrey Digbett III was most certainly a romantic, but given that he was under the rain in question, what he would call it was, “Dashed wet.”

The evening was settling in, and although he ordinarily rode to Rudswand’s temple, three days a week, this morning he had walked, owing to the distinct loveliness of the morning. That lovely morning had passed the mantle onto an average afternoon, and now, a dismal evening.

He had conjured a shield of invisible force over his head, shielding him from the water as it streamed down, pouring from the edges of his conjured umbrella with great force about his feet, and the path was sodden beneath his feet. Owing to the rain, he had chosen to wear his armour home rather than the clothes he had walked to the temple with, and he imagined he looked a dashed sight with it, too, what with his satchel and the lute upon his back, and the dagger still resting upon his thigh.

It was not unheard of for bandits to set upon individual travellers in the Deepwood, but it was very rare, and ordinarily they were quite reasonable sorts who didn’t really wish to do any harm to anybody — goblins looking for something to eat or a little coin to spend; poor urchins down on their luck; would-be adventurers looking for a little starting capital. Godfrey had not yet met the bandit who wouldn’t be swayed by a bright smile and a cheerful word.

Well, he’d met one or two.

Five, if he counted very strictly. Perhaps even six, really, but that last one had surely been a misunderstanding.

Tonight, though, who would stoop to banditry on a night like this? Dashed awful time for thievery — how would one see who one was robbing?

Miserably, Godfrey squelched forth along the path, until the lights of Moricious House showed in the distance. It was a stark and intimidating building — the late Lord Moricious had been a necromancer of some renown, and still told stories about his escapades when it suited him. It wasn’t the necromancy that rather unnerved Godfrey, though, but the unfortunate presence of his great aunt — Lady Regina Moricious — and his second cousin twice removed, Magatha.

Magatha, who was tall and pale and willowy, and also had a flair for necromancy. Her parents lived in Seville City, and according to Magatha, the city was a dreadful place full of too much life — Godfrey was rather of the opposite opinion, and thought the city was a lovely place to spend one’s time, but it had been somewhat difficult to barter his way into being permitted to flee there.

Despite the necromancy — Godfrey had had the opportunity to have a few looks into it, being tutored by Veritum’s priests, but still found something about it just a bit icky — Godfrey genuinely liked his cousin quite a bit, so long as she wasn’t set upon marrying him, which at the moment, she was not.

Magatha was engaged to a rather lovely half-elf girl, a daughter of the most illustrious Goldleafs of Shallwood some ways east, and they were getting along swimmingly, particularly when they met over the pool on the grounds, which they often did. This meant she was rather safe to engage with in a way she ordinarily was not, for engaging would not lead to the dreaded engagement.

Godfrey was under the impression — and he did not think it was an inaccurate one, no matter what other individuals might have said about the matter — that the universe was rather conspiring to get him married off to some girl or boy or some someone, anyway, and he rather detested the universe for it.

Of course, the real worry was not the universe conspiring against him — Godfrey supposed given the size of the universe, it was rather the universe’s prerogative who it might conspire against, and he oughtn’t take personal offence. But his Great Aunt Regina, her conspiration against him — or at least, her conspiration toward the act of his getting married, which certainly felt like conspiration against him, no matter words such as “for your own good” — he took very personally indeed.

Or, at least, he tried not to take it, but it was dashed difficult to avoid, when one lived in the same home as the woman.

With nineteen years under the proverbial belt, he was soon to be of age, and then he would be off to Seville City to settle in the little house that his parents kept there, an apartment they did not use, for the Digbetts actually lived in Crystalweather, and were very loathe to leave it. They liked the sea air, apparently.

Godfrey rather hated the house in Crystalweather. It was much too big, certainly, and too far removed from everything, and while he liked elves immensely — Crystalweather was primarily an elvish city, as was the surrounding area — he rather struggled with telling if the elves he was talking with at any one time actually liked him, or just found him amusing, like a toy.

“Godfrey,” came the call as he stepped over the threshold, and Godfrey winced, closing the door gently beside him. “Godfrey, where have you been?”

“Rudswand, Aunt,” he called back, and he waved off the footman that came to help him off with his armour, initially flattening the shield he’d been conjuring over his head and shaking some water droplets from his hand, scrunching up his face at the rather uncomfortable feeling of all the water seeped into his armour steaming off it.

“You’re getting very good at that, sir,” said the footman. “No scalds at all, this time.”

“You’re very kind, Jopley,” Godfrey said absentmindedly, and allowed himself to be pulled aside, that the footman might begin to unbuckle his armour.

“Oh, Godfrey,” said Magatha from the top of the stairs. “Don’t you look dashing?”

“Not at all, Magatha,” Godfrey replied, looking to her for sympathy as she came down toward him, reaching out to pat at his still damp hair. “I have not been dashing at all — I have been plodding is what I have been doing. Have you seen all this rain? I might as well have swum here.”

“The river does flow this way,” Magatha said. “You might have been quicker.”

Helping him off with his satchel and his lute, she set them aside, and Godfrey shook himself off in his undershirt once Jopley had taken off his leather jerkin and braces, hanging them to dry out properly as Godfrey pulled his woollen overshirt back over his head.

“Still in your armour,” Aunt Regina said. “Did you walk home like that?”

“Sort of squelched home, really,” Godfrey said, setting aside his boots. “It’s raining, you know.”

“I could not care less about the weather, Godfrey.”

“Oh. Fair enough, really, when one isn’t out in it.”

“I care about your reputation.”

“What reputation is that?”

“Your reputation, Godfrey. What will people think of you, walking home in the rain in armour?”

“Er, well, I suppose that I’d be a bit harder to injure.”

“Godfrey.”

“Aunt?”

“Do you think anyone will ever marry you if they think you some sort of — some sort of bard?” She pronounced the word as though it were poisonous merely to say, as though she were making sure it didn’t bounce off her tongue or scratch itself on her teeth on the way out.

Godfrey considered the value in saying, “Goodness, I hope not.”

He thought this was perhaps not quite worth the value of his life.

“Erm, well,” he said. “I’m not strictly a bard.”

This was true, in the sense that he wasn’t very strict about it. Aunt Regina glowered at him.

“I ought to bathe,” Godfrey said hurriedly, picking up his satchel and his lute and moving up the stairs, tripping only twice on the rug. “Do excuse me.”

He felt his aunt’s gaze on his back as he went.

* * *

On a flat field drenched in moonlight, Sergeant Halloran stood with his head raised, his hands clasped in front of his chest. On these, the Bone Plains, fragments of thick, white bone poked up from the earth, rising as it did to the surface in the summer months, even when the land wasn’t trod over and over again by hundreds of booted feet.

The last of the slaughters on this land had occurred long before Halloran’s mother’s great grandmother was born, but the ground remembered. Halloran remembered, by extension, and he tasted the thick, coppery stench of blood on the hair, mixed with the charcoal burn of bodies, the sound of orcish children screaming, crying.

Grasha’ark stood before him, her hands on her hips. She was an old woman, scarred and strong, one tusk snapped and crumbling, and she said to him, in her own tongue, “My people say you speak Orcish.”

“I do,” said Halloran. “My people say you won’t stop.”

“Why should I stop?” Grasha’ark. “We stand on Orcish land — for miles around, we stand on Orcish land. Your king has taken the farmland, taken the waterways, taken everything that could nourish us. Your king takes, and takes, and takes, and we have nothing but our blades. You’d ask us not to use them?”

“I would,” Halloran said. “Your army is reduced to all but nothing. Tonight, with our final push, your last soldiers will be slaughtered — and what will you die for?”

“We will die anyway, under your king’s push,” said Grasha’ark, her voice dark and low. “At least this way, it will be a swift one.”

“If you would relent,” Halloran said, “even in some small manner, I could go to the Oghmian Temple south of here, I could counsel — ”

“We do not relent,” said the orc woman, grave.

“You will die.”

“Yes.”

“But before the temples — ”

“You would have my people grovel?” Grasha’ark asked, raising her scarred, bloodied brows. “To the descendants of those who slaughtered us, who would slaughter us now again, you would have us get to our knees, and beg?”

Halloran clenched his jaw, and Grasha’ark stepped forward, closer to him, towering over him as she did, and then she reached with one of her great hands, tilting up his chin, so that she could better look at his face.

“Some of my children,” she said, “think that you are a god. Would you be a god of war, Hallora’an?” She pronounced the last sound as many orcs would in their own names, and he made no complaint. “Would you be the god of kings who send children like you to war, to slaughter children like mine?”

“If I had the power — ”

“You don’t.” Grasha’ark slapped his cheek — it was a hard blow, but there was no disrespect in it, and Halloran did not flinch: she nodded her approval. “You thought this war would make you a man. Stupid child. I will see you on the battlefield.”

“You will not,” Halloran said. “I will not be part of this any longer.”

“Coward,” said Grasha’ark, already walking way. “Finish what you started. I’ll kill every member of your army until you strike me down. You don’t get to walk away, Hallora’an, not now.”

Halloran clenched his hands at his sides. “Is that what honour is to you?”

“There is no honour here,” was the retort, and Halloran nodded, turning back and walking back to his own side.

* * *

“You don’t have to leave, you know,” Magatha said, hovering in the doorway of Godfrey’s bedroom, and Godfrey gave her a good-natured smile as he kept packing his clothes into his travelling trunk. “We love having you here, Godfrey, and I’ll miss you terribly.”

The priests at the temple of Veritum had organised for him to make some connections with the Oghmian Temple in Seville, and he would be working alongside some of the priests there in moving through some of the nearby ruins, finding old texts to return to the libraries, and he’d be able to practise music, too — real music, with people that participated. He was rather desperately excited about it — his parents had a house in Seville City, one he’d be able to settle himself in in the meantime.

His own house. Not legally, strictly, but his parents never left Crystalweather, and he doubted they’d leave it merely to ensure he didn’t stay in Seville City — and in her last letter, anyway, his mother had been pleased that he was going to actually do something with his life.

Granted, she would have preferred him to follow in her side of the family’s footsteps, and pursue necromancy, but he just found it… icky.

“Ah, but I’m of age, now, Magatha,” Godfrey said idly. He was already dressed in his travelling clothes, his armour and his lute set into his shoulder pack, and all was ready for him in Seville City. “I should like to make my own sort of way, you know, make music and such forth.”

“Wouldn’t you rather just get married?”

Godfrey was very grateful to be facing away from his cousin, that he had a moment or two to school his expression, and he said, doing his best to inject some sort of enthusiasm into his voice, “Well, you know, I might find some sort of wife.”

“You’d better. Grandmama says if you aren’t married by the time you’re thirty, she’ll take matters into her own hands.”

“Well,” Godfrey said. “That’s a long time away.”

Not long enough.

Aunt Regina had always been somewhat preoccupied with the idea of Godfrey getting married. Godfrey liked very much to attempt to see the best in people where he could, but with Aunt Regina it was not always easy — he had always been of the reluctant impression that she had rather lost faith in him by the time he was eight years old, and that she wanted him married off as soon as possible, so that she could start over from scratch with whatever children resulted.

He did not much like the idea of having children.

He had rather enjoyed the experience of being a child — the experience of being a parent had, admittedly, seemed easier, what with the apparent necessity of one’s absence, but still not appealing in the way being a child was.

And then, there was the process of obtaining one.

Distasteful.

Deeply distasteful.

Especially because Aunt Regina was so very concerned with Godfrey marrying a woman, and marrying anybody seemed like quite an unpleasant premise, but marrying a woman, being… intimate, with a woman —

Godfrey remembered a few dozen occasions, in the past three or four years, where other noble girls had done their best to convince him they would be more than adequate fiancées — the Digbetts had a good deal of property, and quite a bit of money besides, and that was the sort of thing some people thought was very important, particularly as Godfrey had no siblings to speak of.

There were few things in the world, he expected, as deeply unpleasant as some handsome young woman putting her lips against yours and sliding her hand under the belt — the solution to which, apparently, was not tightening one’s belt as far as it would go, as he had ended up with some unsightly marks banding his navel.

And it didn’t work, anyway. They just tried to find the buckle.

“This is ridiculous,” Aunt Regina said as Godfrey descended the stairs, and Godfrey forced a bright smile onto his face.

“Well, Aunt, you know, it’s important for a man to find a profession — ”

“Fishing books out of wells and singing songs about it isn’t a profession!”

“A vocation, then,” Godfrey said.

“You’ll never find a wife like this,” Aunt Regina said sharply, and Godfrey — wisely, he thought — kept his mouth shut in response to that particular statement, gently setting his travelling trunk down beside the door. “What if you die on one of these stupid flights of fancy?”

“Well, that is a question,” Godfrey said. “The Oghmians preach that when we die, you know, there’s this sort of great library, and the sum of our knowledge in life is transferred into it, so that the afterlife is really sort of, ah, sort of a complete summation of all the knowledge on the planet, and — ”

“Godfrey.”

“Yes, Aunt?”

“Do shut up.”

“Alright.”

“I don’t see why you can’t get married before embarking on this insane endeavour.”

“Well, you know, a good wife is hard to find — I must be off! You know, I’ll, ah, I’ll write.”

“You’d better,” Aunt Regina glowered at him, and Godfrey nodded, swallowing the great lump in his throat.

“Yes,” he said. “Well.”

He sprinted to the waiting coach. He’d never run that fast before.

* * *

They were surprised when he resigned his post.

“You laid the killing blow against the enemy commander,” said Captain Gunder as Halloran stood before him, staring down at his papers. Halloran had more than served his time in his majesty’s forces, and they had no hold on him now. “And you would leave? Halloran, already you’ve sped through the ranks — given any length of time — ”

“It is not my wish that I should be a soldier, Captain,” Halloran said softly.

Captain Gunder looked to General Hawk beside him, the both of them looking some middle distance between baffled and stunned, and Hawk said, “You’d rather be a serving boy? That’s what you were in Merryweather, isn’t it? In service of your king, Halloran, you’ve a duty to dedicate yourself here.”

“I am dedicated to my mother first, General, and to the gods,” Halloran said softly. “My duty to the king need not be performed with an axe in my hands.”

It was a deflection, perhaps. He dwelled on it quite particularly as he began the journey back to Merryweather. He remembered quite keenly the pull he had felt to join the army in the first place, a sudden notion he did not entirely comprehend, a pull as though a thread had been noosed about his throat.

Only in retrospect did he understand the extent to which it had come from without, rather than from within.

It left a terribly bad taste in his mouth, and yet there was a notion in Halloran’s mind, still half-formed, that it only sat so ill with him because he had been on the receiving end of it. In all his life, how many times had he gently pushed some hapless noble toward an outcome they neither expected nor desired, that it should teach them the proper lesson, or somehow improve them?

Even as naught more than a valet, how many nobles had he gently pushed toward a marriage that would better suit them than the ones they had foolishly selected? How many times, indeed, had he advised one junior member of the household in one matter or another, in what lessons might be most useful to them, in the best way to handle a particularly furious member of the household? How many times had he elected for a practical lesson — by engineering the absence of some crucial object or person, by ensuring a certain combination of factors?

There were more strings about people than they often realised.

It was not to say one ought puppet those around one — one certainly could, but that wasn’t the point. It was merely that, at times, one needed to tug them gently in the correct direction, ideally without their noticing the string.

And yet, what good was it?

In the household in Merryweather, Lord Panatty ruled, could act with impunity, throw about his servants, shout his orders across the household — and here, in the army, one acted upon the whims of the king.

Lord Veritum was waiting for him, as he crossed the border into Merryweather’s general vicinity, and began to walk up the path through the Verdal Wood, toward Merryweather proper.

He was tall, Halloran’s mother had been correct about that. Lord Veritum was six feet and eight, broad and square, his skin the colour of parchment paper, his hair as black as ink: his eyes were a startling violet, and shone like cut amethyst under the sunlight that filtered down through the trees.

“You recognise me?” he asked.

“I do,” said Halloran. “I recognise, too, your fingerprints upon my movements, these past years.”

“There were lessons you needed to learn,” Veritum said. “You learned them in the army.”

“How to wield an axe?”

“No,” Veritum said. He spoke quietly, thoughtfully, but there was a resonance to his voice that cut through the quiet of the wood, a strange resonance that felt like it should overpower Halloran’s ears, but didn’t, strangely. “What do you think that war was for?”

“To crush orcs under the king’s heel,” Halloran said darkly. “For no reason other than that they no longer feared his boot.”

“A king is no different to any other noble,” his father said. “And yet here you walk back to the household of your Lord Panatty — do you think he would not happily allow you to another war, even send you off for one, if it benefitted him?”

“Are we approaching a point?”

“We are. The noble is the enemy of art, Theodore. He does not see beauty in anything he could not put a price on. He hoards his wealth as he sacrifices life — such things are only natural to him. And the wealth he should hoard most of all is that of knowledge. You know, I hope, that the Oghmian order is devoted to the freedom of knowledge, hm? The Oghmians preach that every man, woman, and child should be able to read if they wish to; that each and every one of them should be permitted the opportunity to learn to play an instrument, to use tools, to gather any knowledge or skill he might desire.

“Oghma and I see eye-to-eye in this matter — my domain is truth, you know. It is why I so enjoy art, for there is truth in it: it is why the noble is my enemy, also, for he would lie to all the world, if he thought it should help him keep his riches.”

Halloran took this in, his lips pressed loosely together. “There is a natural order to the world,” he said. “A separation between the upper and lower classes, between lords and their servants. Is that not what Oghma believes?”

“There is,” Lord Veritum allowed. “Just as there is a separation between predator and prey, between parasite and host.” When Halloran was silent, he went on, “You could be more, you know. You should be more.”

“And the separation between god and man?” Halloran asked. “What say you to that?”

It was Lord Veritum who was quiet now. They walked on in the quiet, the wet autumn leaves wetly crunching beneath their feet, the sound soft, but of a regular rhythm. Halloran did not wish to return to the service of Lord Panatty, that much was true, and he felt as though he were on the cusp of something strange, a threshold he knew not the precise nature of.

“I was not always a god,” Veritum said softly. “Your mother reminded me of that.”

“What did Lord Oghma remind you of?”

“That we have higher duties than love,” he said. “And that there are greater powers, too.”

“Pithily answered,” Halloran said. “A shame you aren’t a god of wit. Is that what you would have me be? A deity?”

“I would not have you be anything you did not wish to be,” said Veritum. “Already, there is a belief in you that borders on the divine — you would need only to take hold of it to make your ascension. They would forget the young man once a valet in their household, the sergeant on the battlefield. He would become a fleeting, half-recollected thing, not solid enough to be a spirit. He would cease to be a he, but an it: a notion of quiet competence, perhaps. Of skill, of natural knowledge. A faith in the people.”

“That is what my domain should be?” Halloran asked quietly. “People?”

“Common people,” said Veritum. “Common knowledge.”

“Common knowledge,” Halloran repeated softly, surprised by how easily the phrase settled on his tongue. “If only such a thing existed.”

His father smiled. “It could,” he said.

* * *

There were a great many shrines in the streets of Seville City.

There were the Draconic priests, of course, devoted to the worship of the legendary dragons that some said had created the planet as they knew it, but there were a great many temples and shrines dedicated to other gods and goddesses, to spirits and divinities. In the temple of Oghma, there were devotions not merely to Oghma, but also to other gods within Oghma’s circle — to Veritum, a god of truth, of music, of art; to Ganilla, a goddess of the written word; to Ruste, a goddess of scribes and secretaries…

He examined each shrine in the hall of devotions with curiosity and interest as he stepped down it, making his way slowly toward the library, but one small devotion, tucked into the shadow between two columns, made him take pause.

On a simple, wooden table were a pair of carved wooden hands, the sort of thing Aunt Regina might have in her boudoir to hang her jewellery from, and from their fingers were hung some emblems, dried flowers, and the like. Carved into the surface of one of the amulets, Godfrey could see the symbol, the silhouette of a figure bent over, apparently at work.

He had thought he knew all of the gods in Oghma’s circle.

“Leaving a prayer to Halloran?” asked one of the postulants as she passed by, raising her eyebrows. There was something flirtatious in her smile, and Godfrey smiled weakly back, and prayed she didn’t step any closer. “He isn’t for the likes of you, Mr Digbett.”

“Halloran,” Godfrey repeated, and suddenly remembered, all at once — Halloran was a divinity commonly worshiped below stairs, and abruptly he recollected all the many times he had gone through servants’ quarters and seen their prayers to Halloran, their candles lit for him, that he should assist them in going about their duties, in learning that which they would need. He remembered, once upon a time, fleeing his aunt’s ordinary sharp lectures.

He remembered lingering by a shrine to Halloran just inside the doorway before his nanny had set upon him — he shuddered at the thought — and it had brought him, at the time, a moment of… peace. It had not at all been the first moment he had felt inadequate, but it had, he thought, been the first time he felt he might not feel that way forever.

The postulant was very close to him now, and Godfrey swallowed, leaning back and away from her, leaning on the wooden altar to keep from falling over in his hurry to move back.

He did not know why he did it, exactly. He did do some quick thinking, at times, but it didn’t always work, and a lot of the time when women got this close to him he panicked and didn’t really know how to get himself out of it, so easy as it was to cause offence, and so unlikely as they often were to take no for an answer.

In the moment, he felt strangely, unfamiliarly calm.

“Oh, High Priest Cantor,” he said, looking over her shoulder, and as she rapidly jumped back from him, putting more of a physical distance between them, and Godfrey sped as rapidly as he dared toward the high priest’s office, skidding slightly on the polished floors as he went.

Part III

No band played.

The music that filled the room came from one harpist upon a raised platform to the edge of the room. He was exhausted, because he had been riding all night coming directly from the Olaff family’s soirée some many miles to the south, and yet for all his head occasionally threatened to bob forward, his fingers did not once falter on the strings. His instrument was the only way he might earn income, and he couldn’t afford to make an error.

In parallel to the movement of the harpist’s hands, Halloran brushed his fingers over a serving girl’s shoulder as she passed, so that she, too, looked the harpist’s way, and saw the way his eyes closed for a moment.

Halloran watched silently as she murmured in the ear of another serving boy, a viol player, watched him jump up to join the harpist in duet, and for a moment, he was injected with some additional wakefulness, and the serving girl set some coffee beside him, that he shot her a grateful look.

Halloran exhaled, and looked to the room.

It was not unlike how he had experienced parties such as these when he had been a valet: gentlemen and ladies passed him by without seeing him, without even realising they were bypassing him except for that they had moved past an obstacle. No one met his eye, nor even seemed to realise he had them: they glanced at him, paid him scarce little heed, and forgot him as soon as they turned away.

He reached out to steady a young girl as she stumbled with her serving tray, holding her for a moment as she took command of herself, and then proceeded to move gracefully through the crowd; he pushed one lord toward a lady, that she wouldn’t notice the scuff on the footman’s shoe and berate him for it; he took pity on a young noblewoman beset by two interested young men, and affected them to stumble into one another and fall down the stairs, so that she might experience a moment’s peace.

Lord Panatty and Lady Moricious were each at this particular engagement, and Halloran heard them talking together as he reached out and adjusted the set of a young woman’s shirt cuffs, ensuring they were perfectly in place before her mistress could scold her for their being disturbed by her labour.

“He shall soon be thirty,” Lady Moricious was saying. “I shall not stand for it any longer, Alfraid, he cannot avoid his responsibilities forever.”

“I’m surprised you’ve allowed him this folly for so long as you have,” said Panatty. “He would be a bachelor all his life, if he was allowed.”

“He isn’t,” said Lady Moricious.

Halloran moved past them both, unrecognised, unseen.

In these past years, his altars had become more ornate. No longer were they always but simple wood tables, upon which were scattered trinkets and basic offerings — certainly, there were such rustic altars dedicated to his worship, but they were no longer the only ones he saw.

This was a large manor house in the midst of a city, and hundreds of servants worked within these walls, walking these corridors, serving the nobles that lived here or passed through: the altar saw a great deal of use, and was lovingly attended.

Made of black marble, a bowl of oil was lit in its centre, a few candles lit, too: there had become a habit of writing one’s weaknesses upon a piece of paper, and tossing them over a fire, that Halloran might assist in their polishing away from one’s person. Upon this altar were a few offerings — a honey cake, a rabbit’s foot, a bottle of boot polish.

The last made Halloran softly smile.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” came a low voice from behind him.

“I have been devoting myself to my duties,” was Halloran’s response.

“They’re meant to be devoted to you,” said his father. “Not you to them.”

“Were I not devoted to them, I would not see the point in their being devoted to me.”

“And yet you have made no transcendent appearance, you have selected no representative, pushed for no temple. You remain all but invisible to those who would worship you.”

Halloran’s fingers brushed over the boot polish’s glass cannister. “A good servant is invisible, Veritum. You ought know that.”

He felt the shift in the air as Veritum stepped closer to him, felt the other man at his shoulder. He did not need to turn and examine his father’s expression to see the disapproval in his expression. “You aren’t a servant any longer,” he said quietly.

“Aren’t I?”

“It is Lord Oghma’s worship that brought education to the people,” Veritum said in a quiet voice, quiet enough that Halloran almost couldn’t hear him over the sound of music and chattering voices upstairs. “The people in this land were quite illiterate, before he ascended — and look now, what his worship has achieved. There is no farmhand for miles around that cannot read. This is the circle of gods to whom we each belong: through this education, we give them power.”

“How much power?” Halloran asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“How much power do we give them if we would still have them call us Lord? What is the point of a farmhand’s literacy when he cannot afford a book?”

“There are libraries all through this kingdom,” Veritum said, his voice sharpening somewhat. “Travelling booksellers, travelling carts, who would charge pittance for a book, or trade it for goods.”

“Yes. And the time to read them?”

“What?”

“What farmhand has the time to read them? He wakes at four, he feeds his animals, milks them, checks the coop, mucks out the barn, works the plough, tills his field, fetches water from the well, attends his children, cooks his evening meal, perhaps takes a drink at the alehouse, until he finally is abed, exhausted, come midnight’s toll — when does he read?”

“Perhaps he would have time,” said Veritum, “if he read a book instead of drinking ale in the public house.”

“Perhaps,” Halloran said. His voice sounded cold to his own ears, and he could feel the frown dragging at his mouth, but he did not turn to look at Veritum, did not want to look at whatever expression he wore on his own face.

“You will be no god without servants,” said Veritum.

“You say that, but we stand before my altar.”

“You’re satisfied with this? Being some unseen demigod, whispering in servants’ ears and steadying trays of canapés? If you really want to help these people, to whom you are so attached, you need servants, priests, true devotees — you need shrines, temples. You need someone to build them.”

“They’ll be built of their own accord,” said Halloran. “Eventually.”

“By your serving girls and farmhands,” was the wry response. “Tell me, Halloran — when will they have the time?”

Halloran had no good response to this. By the time he turned his head, his father had disappeared.

One branded one’s servants. However intentionally, one branded them — there needed to be some sort of physical mark upon their skin, if one was to use them as a mouthpiece, if one was to communicate with them in a way that amounted to language without cracking open their heads, without drowning them in the immensity of one’s divinity.

How could he put himself to his devotees, that they should educate themselves, to be permitted the right to move beyond service, and force one such devotee into service themselves?

Exhaling, he rose up the stairs again, and once more moved through the people he found there.

* * *

Godfrey sat cross-legged on the floor of the travelling cart, idly paging through the records the Oghmian priests had made of the walls of the ruins they’d been moving through. He didn’t often get brought along on journeys like this — ordinarily, they’d ask him to escort a train and ask as a sort of additional security, which was all well and good, but ordinarily meant a good deal of sitting about or just quietly toddling along. This trip southward had been for an archaeological concern, where a series of underground tunnels had been uncovered by a small quake caused by the magical college, and he’d been able to assist in taking up the books discovered, in copying down the symbols and drawings on the ruin walls, and so on and so forth.

It was rather nice, to feel useful.

It wasn’t as though the priests thought he was entirely stupid, because if they really thought him truly stupid, they’d not bring him along at all, but Godfrey did often get the impression they thought he was terribly soft in the head, or perhaps that he was —

Lacking, in some way.

No one ever said it, of course. That would be a dreadfully impolite thing to say, even coming from a priest, and Godfrey still was a gentleman, no matter that he so devoted himself to music and to assisting the temples, but —

But it was implied, at times.

“Oh, Mr Digbett, you don’t have to come with us, why don’t you sit down?” and all the words were to do with his having a bit of rest, but all the meaning seemed to be that he was terribly irritating and that they wanted him well out of the way.

He’d had it sometimes, even on this trip, but coming along at all had been pleasant. Nice. A shame he couldn’t pursue this sort of thing all the time, a shame indeed.

“You know, that isn’t written in Common, nor in any of the languages of this region,” said one of the priests, Gardun, a tired man who was ordinarily kind enough to Godfrey, if not particularly patient. Most of them were trying to sleep, nodding off, although the sun was beginning to rise over their heads. “You won’t be able to understand it.”

“Oh, this?” Godfrey asked, holding up the page. “Gosh, no, it certainly isn’t Common — it’s one of the Orcish scripts, and this is a prayer to the dragons.”

Gardun stared at him. “What?”

“Oh, well, you know, it’s, erm, at least a thousand years old, I suppose — from before the Kingdom of Seville was about, or most of the other human and elven settlements, certainly, ha. It would have been mostly Orcs. Sorry, I’d have said — I thought you all knew this sort of thing at a glance. I’m sure you’ll have some people at the Seville Temple who know Orcish. This isn’t even one of the very ancient dialects, or I’d not be able to make head nor tail of it.”

“Why do you?”

“Oh, I, ah, I learned. I learned from the priests at the nearby chapel to Veritum, you know — leant a lot of Orcish drinking songs, histories, poetry, what. Thought at the time it might help.”

In flat tones, Gardun said, “You thought learning Orcish drinking songs would help King Raúl defeat their forces?”

“I suppose I thought a bit of learning might be the difference between the necessity of, er, of defeat. Not really a fighter, I suppose — more of a lover.”

It sounded sheepish as he said it — everything Godfrey said sounded sheepish, as a rule. He’d witnessed the act of assertion his whole life, but actually being assertive had never been something he’d especially got the hang of, and he was beginning to suspect it was not a skill he’d soon learn. Gardun was giving him a funny look that Godfrey rather hated the weight of, and wished he might be able to avoid, perhaps by leaping onto the ground and being swallowed up by it.

Rifling through his bag, he tried to find another book to bury himself in, examining the etchings from the temple having somewhat lost its appeal, and he found the collection of talismans he’d picked up in Olfsen Town — he liked the different designs one might found, and he collected them all in jars in his little house in Seville City, a house he was increasingly desperate to get back to.

His skin felt all hot all over from the embarrassment, and he touched his thumb over a carved piece of stone marked with a silhouette of a kneeling figure — Halloran’s symbol.

He’s embarrassed not to have known Orcish by sight, came the thought unbidden, the sudden realisation, an uncomfortable epiphany. You have drawn attention to his ignorance, and that of the other priests — he is undermining you to punish you.

Godfrey leaned his head back against the cart’s edge, and held the symbol loosely between his hands, stroking his thumb over its carved surface, feeling the texture of the stone under his touch. He rather missed the Temple of Veritum — there was a shrine to Veritum in Seville’s central square, but the nearest dedicated temple to Veritum was some miles out of the city, and everyone was primarily dedicated to Oghma. Not that there was anything wrong with Oghma, of course, dashed excellent god that he was, and very important, of course, but the priority within Oghmian devotion was to books and reading, and whilst Godfrey quite understood the importance of both, and rather enjoyed them —

Well.

He did miss art as an object of one’s focus, and music actually played and sung, instead of written upon a page.

He’d argued that with Gardun, recently, as much as Godfrey could really argue about anything — he supposed what he’d actually done was raise a sort of weak, token protest, and then run away to do something else.

“When music is written upon the page, it is recorded, static: it is perfect.”

“Oh, but, Gardun, really, that’s hardly the point of music — why, what’s the point of music if there isn’t a missed note now and then, or a fellow singing whose voice cracks rather on the high notes, or if one hasn’t the opportunity to forget the words and change them on the sly? That’s the, ah, that’s the living part of music, you know.”

“But imperfect,” Gardun had said sharply.

“Well,” Godfrey had said, “that’s life.”

A very foul look he’d received for his troubles, saying that.

He did have more respect within the temple than he had done, when first he’d come to Seville City, and that was the important thing — he was being trusted to come on a few more of the archaeological journeys and such forth, but really, he wasn’t certain that the temple was necessarily the way forward. After all, he wasn’t going to become a sworn brother himself, to join the priesthood, and recently he’d been writing a good bit of his own music, and it had been doing quite well within the city.

When not journeying hither and thither, he played all sorts of instruments in the city, and sang his own songs and sang very old ones, besides — there was quite the enthusiasm around singing songs a lot of the old folks remembered from when they were little children, but that had rather faded from the public memory in the meantime, and it was quite delightful when some terribly ancient old woman asked if he knew a sliver of song, and he could spend some days rifling through the archives in the Temple of Oghma looking for something that matched, so that he might copy it out and learn it for her.

It didn’t pay quite so well, of course.

Old women in alehouses didn’t really have the same sort of coin to throw about that the Temple of Oghma did, but he was rather thinking of asking for sponsorship from the Temple of Veritum to act as a sort of scribe — that was what Veritum was technically the god of, of truth, and his symbol was on a lot of histories and the like, but he was known for art and music as well — and go about the kingdom writing down the songs he heard and the music people played, and pay his way in with the locals by giving them music of their own.

He thought they might rather go for it.

He liked to travel. It was always so much more difficult for his aunt’s letters to find him, when he was toddling off about the kingdom, and away from the capital — her letters had been more intent as of recent, and rather demanding that he should soon visit the Moricious family home in the Velvack Forest, or at least begin meeting some young women within the bounds of Seville City, but the latter letters, he always pretended to lose, and the former, he had repeatedly demurred on, saying he was going to be…

Well.

Just about anywhere else.

In ten years, he’d not seen his Aunt Regina.

He wondered if he ought feel worse for avoiding her.

When they came into the city, he assisted the priests in unloading their books and etchings, as well as the carefully packed pots and such forth they were transporting from the ruins, up into the archival rooms in the library, but truth be told, he was dashed grateful when one of the monks patted him on the shoulder and suggested he might be better off going home and getting some rest, no matter how condescending she was about it.

He didn’t get any rest, in the end.

Aunt Regina was waiting for him.

* * *

“You’re alright,” Worthy was saying quietly, gently tugging Wicks’ hands closer to him by their wrists, keeping the palms up, the backs of his hands against the table. Wicks’ lips were twisted in a pained expression, his eyes tight-closed. Worthy’s hands were not the clumsy things he’d had as a little boy — they were steady now, steady and strong, and Halloran watched as they daubed a balm over Wicks’ burned fingers, the green-tinted cream fading to white as it touched against the shiny skin, soaking up the new pus from the blisters.

He’d designed that cream himself — he’d been scarcely seventeen when Halloran had murmured in his mother’s ear that they were calling for new novices at the Merryweather Draconic Temple, and she’d gotten the idea to send him off there. It suited him better than being a serving boy, and he looked well in the uniform of a Draconic Priest, although the white was a punishing colour on him, and made his ruddy cheeks look all the redder.

“These are bad burns,” Worthy said softly. “It’s good that you called for me when you did.”

“Stumbled in the kitchen and fell against the stovetop,” Wicks said quietly. “Lord Panatty’s bell was ringing.”

Halloran watched the solemn expression on Worthy’s face, watched his lips purse, and then he looked to the expression on Wicks’ own, the dead look in his eyes, his lips twisted in the ghost of a frown, his expression beyond dejected, beyond resigned.

Both had dedications to Halloran in their homes — Worthy had his talisman hung over his and his wife’s bed; Wicks had a dedication to Halloran on his side table, and regularly attended his shrine in the servants’ hall of the Panatty household. Which of them might Halloran enslave, and have be his mouthpiece on the planet Bio?

His prayers came from further afield than once they did.

No longer did they come only from within the bounds of the Kingdom of Seville — increasingly, he heard prayers and dedications come from Beletia, from Ariala, even from farther afield, from Gros, from Gonthor. It was only through word of mouth that they passed, really, that servants visiting one kingdom saw a god dedicated to them, and brought him home with them, but Halloran knew that this was nothing compared to what one might do when one had a real servant, one who was dedicated to you, first and foremost —

And he did miss talking with people.

Oh, he could murmur advice in their ears, give them small epiphanies, but it wasn’t to say that people would always follow it, and he wished, at times, something more material might be done, that he might do something…

He walked the familiar path away from the Panatty lands and out toward the Crystal Lake, moving through the open door. His mother had fallen asleep in her chair beside the fire, and Halloran sank down into the seat across from her, watching her chest rise and fall, watching the expression of quiet peace on her face, her needlework loosely held in her lap.

She remembered him, at least. She had not, as so many had, forgotten that he had ever been a man at all…

And yet he could not reach out and touch her, cup her cheek and tell her softly that she ought to bed. Were he to whisper her in ear, she would only suddenly awaken, and think of the consideration as one of her own, from the recesses of her mind.

That, selfishly, was a reason in itself to take a divine servant — were he to have such a representative, were he to be believed in more widely, he might freely pass between the corporeal and incorporeal without fear of losing his place entirely, without fear of overspending his energies, that he should die and fade into dust as so many young gods did.

The chain was not only on one’s servant, after all — one chained oneself, was bound to the corporeal, to the real, to belief…

Halloran closed his own eyes, and in her sleep, his mother sighed. He listened to the crackle of the fire, and the rhythm of her breathing, and slept.

* * *

All of Godfrey’s things were already packed, white cloth over the furniture, over many of his instruments. The documents in his office, a variety of songs he had been attempting to forensically reconstruct and pieces of music he had been attempting to reconstruct, swathes of lyrics he had been attempting to translate into or out of Common, and many more that he had just been trying to work his way through, attempting to conduct a timeline as to which musical flares had shown up first, had all been tossed willynilly into one great document trunk. He had taken one look in the box and hurriedly shut it again, because the state of the chaos within had wounded him.

He’d never had a particularly organised office, but everything had had a sort of order to it, ensuring that things were separated out into what was most important, and had been spread out on different work surfaces to ensure they couldn’t get muddled up. It would take him days to sort it all out again.

“You’re coming back to Moricious House,” his aunt was saying, “and you shall be attending the gala there. And you will be married before the year is out.”

“My work — ”

“Your work,” Aunt Regina cut him off sharply, “is to continue the Digbett line. You cannot be a bachelor with a lute on your back forever, Godfrey! Have you any idea how humiliating it is for the family?”

“Not hardly, no,” Godfrey said quietly. “Since I began my work in Seville, I’ve been given two awards by King Raúl for my work for the Temple of Oghma, and many awards besides for my research in — ”

“Awards do not a bloodline continue,” Aunt Regina said coldly, and Godfrey was silent, staring out of the window. When he said nothing, she snapped, “Do you think sulking well-befits a nobleman?”

“Better than marriage would.” He said it very quietly, gravely, but Aunt Regina had hearing keen enough to hear beyond the grave, and not only because she came from a household of necromancers.

The silence that rippled between them was not unlike the painful thickness that settled on the air before a storm, and as he would brace himself for the sudden onslaught of wind and thunder and all that business, Godfrey braced himself for the raise of his aunt’s voice, the thunderous roar of her shout.

When it came, it washed over him like a hard rain.

* * *

As Halloran moved into Veritum’s Chapel, there was no need for him to shake off the punishing weight of the rain outside, for it fell directly through him, and he remained quite dry. His steps were silent upon the stone floor of the chapel’s entrance hall, moving into its central chamber, which was currently almost empty; in the next room, he could hear the sound of a music lesson in progress, of a priest encouraging a student to use her bow with more enthusiasm.

Halloran was to meet his father upstairs, but it was still a good twenty minutes to the hour, and he had no need to rush.

Seated on one of the stone pews, which were carved with a different artwork on every seat, a familiar figure was crumpled forward, lanky-limbed and folded into an awkward position, his head between his knobbly knees. In the candlelight, Halloran could see him tremble.

He would be attending the soirée at the Moricious household this evening — various young bachelorettes had been called from all about Seville, and numerous of the surrounding kingdoms too, and Halloran had heard many of the servants gossiping that Lady Moricious was quite intent on finding her grandnephew a wife.

Many of them had their own suspicions as to why he had not married before — individuals had posited that perhaps he had a secret spouse squirrelled away somewhere, that perhaps he had some dreadful secret. The simple truth — that young Mr Digbett was disinclined to the attentions of young ladies, and did not wish to marry one — was rarely brought up in conversation, owing to how uninteresting it was as a topic of conversation.

The servants did discuss it, of course — most of the lords and ladies would not dare, lest Lady Moricious hear them.

Halloran looked down at Godfrey, stepping closer, looked at the way his fingers were tangled in his hair, dragging at the roots in a way that must have been quite painful, and he listened to the poetry in his voice: Godfrey Digbett, it could be said of him, never bothered with a prayer that didn’t rhyme.

He asked for nothing. It was a prayer of thanks for what had already been given, and that was all. No matter that he was looking at a nobleman, Halloran’s heart panged, and he looked to the chapel doors as they opened, as Magatha Gainsly stepped inside with her oil cloak thrown over her head, her boots spattered with mud from outside.

“There you are!” she said. “Everyone thought you’d disappeared, we’ve all been looking for you! Come on, Godfrey, the party’s going to start in a little over an hour!”

Halloran waited for the objection to come from Godfrey’s mouth, for him to tell his cousin he wouldn’t be attending. He could see the desperation in his eyes, feel the need to escape radiate from him as heat from a flame, but then he raised his head, and there was such a solemn look on his face that Halloran was reminded of the face of a man condemned, ready to meet his executioner.

Strange, how often Godfrey Digbett seemed to have that look about him.

“Alright, Magatha,” he said quietly, and ushered down the oil cloak, performing an easy, artful piece of magic, conjuring a magical umbrella over the both of their heads.

“Gosh, I always forget you can do that,” she said, and in the tone of one attempting to be encouraging, even though it was plain she could see her cousin’s low mood, she went on, “You know, a few girls are already clamouring over you, just because of your singing voice and the title, you know. Add in the magic, and you’ll be married off in no time.”

She faltered, realising this was perhaps the wrong thing to say: Godfrey looked more than slightly green.

“Come on, Magatha,” he said quietly. “Let us off.”

When Halloran ascended the stairs, into the small room that housed the ladder to the bell tower, he found that he was not alone, and he closed the door behind him before he bowed his head.

“Lord Oghma,” he said quietly. “My apologies, I did not know you’d be joining us.”

“You were looking at the Digbett boy,” said Oghma. “My people don’t know what to make of him. Smart as a whip, but dull as stone. A strange combination.”

“He’s never been unintelligent,” Halloran said quietly. “Merely that he struggles to find his focus.”

“Ah, of course,” Oghma said, in a light, easy tone, confident as he said, “You knew him when you were each boys, didn’t you?”

“In passing.”

“You miss it, don’t you?” Oghma asked knowingly. “Having regrets?”

“How did you pick your first servant?”

“That was a long time ago,” Oghma said. “In a different time.” He didn’t like that Halloran had changed the terms of conversation, that he had adjusted the dynamic between them, but Halloran could see that he respected it, that on some level, he was pleased to be challenged. “She was a noble girl, had been teaching peasants to read — it was illegal, at the time. Not for them to read, precisely, but there were a great many texts forbidden to the lower castes — this was not here in Seville, of course. They were to hang her, and I decided I would keep her instead — she could do what she did in my name.”

When Halloran nodded his head, but said nothing, Oghma said, “Lord Veritum tells me you are reticent to take a servant of your own. That you do not wish to hold a mortal in chains.”

“No.”

“It is mortality itself that chains them, Halloran,” Oghma murmured. “In many ways, we set them free.”

“Ah, you’re here, both of you,” said Halloran’s father as he entered. “Good.”

“What do you want, Veritum?” Oghma asked.

“Less something I want, more something I’ll do,” Veritum said. “Come tomorrow, I shall be married, Oghma.”

The look that passed between father and uncle was perhaps not one that Halloran ought have taken such pleasure in, and for this reason, he hid the smile on his face. Some hundred miles away, looking out over crystal waters, his mother smiled instead.

* * *

Godfrey Digbett had been drunk in his life.

It had ordinarily been with fellows from school, or in recent years, from kindly people in an alehouse who insisted on his drinking with them, and he usually only allowed himself to become pleasantly steeped in drink at the very worst. He stumbled over his words even more than usual, and stumbled over his feet quite a bit more than was standard, too — he slurred a little, and perhaps he laughed more loudly, but he was not a particularly obnoxious drunk.

He had never before been drunk enough to forget the night around him, never been drunk enough that his vision occasionally darkened at its edges, nor that the floor shifted beneath him as though he were sailing on it.

Right now, he was very drunk indeed.

Dahlia Olliery had kissed him, earlier, had tugged him into a side passage and pressed their mouths together, and he hadn’t been able to push her off without pushing very hard, and he never felt able to do that, because as soon as he left a bruise or knocked a lady off balance, it looked quite awful, as though he were some man bullying and throwing his weight around, and not merely trying to go about his day without his tongue touching someone else’s. He’d sort of gone limp and pretended to faint, and then fled when she’d gone for help.

Margolise Pandan had touched him as she passed, tried to whisper in his ear; Kia Fogan had tried to get him to dance with her, and kept pulling his hand down below the small of her bank; other girls had tried to touch him, or encouraged him to touch them.

“I know she’s told them to try to be a bit seductive,” Magatha had said earlier, before he’d started drinking, “but I don’t know that they need to be so obvious.”

He’d drunk four measures of elven whiskey in succession, after that, and he would keep drinking until his skin was wholly numb. He looked quite the state, he was certain, and could hardly give a whit.

Godfrey hardly knew how he’d managed to escape. Quite a few of his aunt’s servants had been told, he was certain, to keep him within the great hall rather than let him sidle off, and several times, when he’d tried to slip down passages, his uncle’s servants had stopped him instead, and corpses that they were, Godfrey had fallen over himself trying to get away from them.

This was a servants’ passage, and thus unmanned: he tumbled down the steps into the cellar on his arse, and ended up on his knees on the stone floor, leaning against a little stone altar, with a little bottle of mead clutched in his hands. His tongue was so numb with drink he scarcely tasted the sweetness anymore, and he pressed his forehead against the cool stone of the little shrine, squeezing his eyes very tightly shut and trying his best not to actually wail, in case he alerted someone as to where he was.

He didn’t see what at all could be appealing about him as a husband.

He was handsome, he was informed, although he rather wished he wasn’t, if it led to nonsense like this; the Digbett family was possessed of a good deal of money and quite a bit of holdings in terms of land; he was a musician, which was appealing, but two different young women had said it was lovely if he played music at home, and abhorrent to consider him travelling to do so, or playing for poor people, who didn’t appreciate what they were listening to.

Drinking heavily from the bottle, he swallowed down the sweet nectar, and stared into the middle distance, wishing he could drown in it.

Godfrey had tried rather desperately not to think of what marriage would consist of, until now. The horror of sharing a bed with a woman and being rather forced to be intimate with her had overshadowed the rest, but that was hardly to be the only punishment — he would be forced to put aside his musicology in favour of playing the perfect music favoured by noble people; he would have to have servants, to have people in his house trying to wait on him or put his clothes on him; he would have to be —

The reality of someday becoming Lord Digbett settled slowly onto his shoulders, with all the inevitability of a boot crushing a wasp, and he squeezed tightly at the neck of the bottle, feeling the tears hot on his cheeks as he leaned against the table beside him.

It was an altar.

The altar was dedicated to Halloran, he realised, which only made sense, what with his being in the servants’ main hall, for this dedication to be present here.

Godfrey had never asked for anything from a god before, not that he remembered. It seemed to him to be a somewhat impolite thing to do — after all, he was quite well off, and he was never hungry or thirsty, and he had been able to pursue his music, and there must be all sorts of people trying to bend the ear of each god almost all the time. They must be all but beset with requests and prayers and whatnot, and Godfrey did not much like to ask for anything, if he might suffice without it — he didn’t like to bother anybody.

But —

But he wanted to ask somebody. Anybody.

Anybody at all, anybody that would listen, anybody that could save him from this —

He really was very drunk.

He must have mumbled prayers in circles for some time, before he finally raised himself to his feet, and stumbled back up the stairs. He took a wrong turning, walking up a second narrow set of steps before realising he’d walked past the little door he’d escaped through — he didn’t know the servants’ corridors at Moricious House terribly well, for even as a boy, he’d avoided them, what with their often being full of wandering corpses — but he managed to turn himself around, finding the grand staircase that led back down into the great hall.

There were so many, many people.

Outside, over the sound of the music — a harpist who was playing very well, but who seemed even bored of his own playing — he could hear the clatter of great, big rain drops on the house rooves and windows, and the sound of thunder, too. There were so many people gathered in the ballroom, noblewomen and noblemen, charming young ladies and handsome gentlemen, all sorts of people — people who were all hoping he might find a good wife, that he should marry, and be pleased.

The moment the lightning struck him, he was quite sober, and saw everything.

* * *

“Him?” his father said beside him, and Halloran didn’t move his hand from where he’d fisted his fingers in Godfrey Digbett’s hair, his body gone rigid, his eyes wide. A few people were glancing up the stairs toward him, but they saw only Godfrey himself, head cleaved open and filled with knowledge beyond his ability to digest. Halloran and Veritum were quite invisible. “You would be a god of common people, and select a lord as your servant?”

“I am fostering future equality,” Halloran said mildly, and pushed Godfrey forward.

He couldn’t stop talking.

He was drunk as a fish, surely wouldn’t remember any of this when the time came, and Halloran felt the exhaustion set deep into his bones as Godfrey began to babble to anyone who approached him, speaking freely, without hesitation or inhibition, and as much as it left Halloran fatigued, he knew that this was the way forward.

They were scrambling away from him, by the time Godfrey had made his way to the centre of the room, and grimly, Halloran smiled.

“You’ve ruined his life,” Veritum wonderingly.

“You wouldn’t think that if you’d heard his prayer,” Halloran replied, and watched the chaos unfold.

When Godfrey made his final pronouncement, and collapsed to the floor with his wrists steaming with the brand imprinted on them, Halloran followed after the servants that carried him up to one of the bedrooms to recover.

“Why him?” his father asked him again, walking beside him. “He’s an idiot.”

“He isn’t.”

“None of those nobles respects him!”

“I don’t need them to.”

“Halloran — ”

“I’ve made my selection, Veritum. Leave me to it, if you would.”

Godfrey would be unconscious for hours, if not days. Even had he not been drunk, the weight of Knowing that Halloran had channelled into him would have left him utterly exhausted, but he would still dream.

He dreamt that he was still drunk, and in the dream, when he looked at Halloran, his eyes were heavily lidded and his lips were parted. As Halloran seated himself in a chair at the edge of his bed, reaching out and brushing his fingers against his cheek, to see that they were not feverish — a sign that outside of the dream, he needed the blanket drawing back from his body — Godfrey peered at him, perplexed.

“Do I know you?” he asked. “I feel like I ought.”

“You do now,” said Halloran, and slid his hand around Godfrey’s wrist, pressing on the symbol he had branded there, a twin on the other side. He hadn’t gone so far as to place his symbol on Godfrey’s neck or his face, but he had wanted it visible, wanted it impossible to hide, and now, Godfrey stared down at his own hand, tilting it up so he could see the band about his wrist, the symbol of a kneeling man emblazoned over the inside of it, touching against the heel of his hand.

“You’ve an awfully big head,” Godfrey whispered tipsily, his hand turning in Halloran’s grip to squeeze his wrist back. It was a gentle movement, almost shy, but Halloran twisted free of it, and pushed both of Godfrey’s hands back into his lap. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“Once before,” Halloran said quietly.

“And very handsome,” Godfrey said. “Has anybody ever tried to marry you?”

“No.”

“Dashed lucky. I’m going to be married soon.”

“No,” Halloran said. “You aren’t.”

“I’m not?” Halloran had never before seen such desperate, earnest hope in someone else’s face. Godfrey leaned toward him without quite pulling himself from his state reclining on the pillows, his lips parted, his eyes very wide. “But — But there’s a party, you see, and my Aunt — ”

“You won’t be getting married, Mr Digbett,” Halloran said softly. “My mark brands your wrists — you cannot give yourself to another in matrimony, not now. You’re mine until such as a time as I choose to release you.”

Godfrey stared down at his wrists, at the silver-shining chain banding his wrists, the black symbols emblazoned over top of them. He didn’t quite comprehend it, not yet, and then he said, breathlessly, “Halloran?”

“I do not mean to deprive you entirely of your liberty,” Halloran said softly. “But I would not share your devotion with a wife, or a husband.”

There were tears on Godfrey’s cheeks, and Halloran had to remind himself it was just his dream to keep from reaching out to brush them away, retaining a still form, his hands folded in his lap.

“Thanks awfully,” Godfrey whispered. “I’ve never asked for anything from a god before, you know.”

“You will ask,” Halloran said, in a tone he wasn’t certain he wanted to be command or not. “If you have need of my assistance.”

Softly, sounding confused, disoriented, Godfry asked, “Isn’t that what I’m meant to say to you?”

“You will be exhausted for some time to come,” Halloran said. “I shall leave you to rest.”

Godfrey meant to object, Halloran thought, but Halloran pushed him into a deeper sleep before he could.

* * *

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Magatha said softly, and Godfrey groaned, shifting his head on the pillow. His head was all but split with a painful headache, and he felt a soft, cold flannel laid against his forehead, which soothed the threatening migraine a little bit, at least. The lights were very bright, and he kept his eyes tightly closed. “Oh, don’t — Don’t try to get up, Godfrey, just sit still.”

“Got drunk,” Godfrey mumbled. “You know, Magatha, I had the most… the strangest dream. There was a very handsome man, and he touched my cheek, and said… said I’d not have to get married…”

He was slurring his words — he still felt somewhat drunk, and Magatha hushed him, touching his hair.

“You don’t remember, do you?” Magatha asked quietly. “Oh, Godfrey.”

“Remember?” He didn’t think he did remember. He remembered being quite dreadfully drunk, and getting lost moving in the servants’ corridors — he remembered his dream, remembered the handsome man being gentle with him, and he remembered that man, he did, remembered that he’d been a servant at Uncle Alfraid’s house, once, but he was also Halloran, the god. Dreams had that sort of strange logic, at times, where things could be one thing and another all at once. “I think I was… struck by lightning,” he said softly. “When I was at the top of the stairs. Gosh, an awful pain it was, I must say, like a great whip crack all down my spine, inside my head…”

Beside him, he could hear Magatha breathing softly.

“Oh,” she said. “You… Oh, Godfrey.”

“Where is Aunt Regina?”

“She’s talking with people downstairs, still,” Magatha said. “You — You said such things, Godfrey. You were telling everybody about… Don’t you remember?”

“Not hardly.”

“You were telling everyone that Rauri Pui had had an affair with Morganalise Auden and her husband, and that Morganalise had been embezzling money from the orphanage’s coffers, that… Oh, I can’t even recollect all the specifics, Godfrey, but it was as though you knew every secret everybody had ever had, and you were just saying them where everybody could hear, and then you collapsed — we were frightened you’d had some sort of stroke, and that you were going to fall dead.

“And you said… You said, um.” Magatha’s voice was very quiet, solemn and grave and serious, and he’d never heard her voice sound quite like that before, so terribly cold and sad and uncertain. “You said you had been selected for Halloran’s service, and that he would see that service done, in no uncertain terms. That he would have you devoted, and loyal, and committed to no other but him.” She trailed off. “That’s, ah, those are the specifics I recall, anyway — something about speaking his word on the planet Bio, too, and all that sort of thing. That was the gist of it.”

Godfrey laughed softly, drunkenly. Perhaps he ought to have been terrified, horrified, but he wasn’t. He remembered the man in his dream, and seemed to recall something to do with not denying his liberty.

Magatha almost sounded offended when she demanded, “What are you laughing at?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” Godfrey said dizzily, dazedly. “Just — don’t they sound to you like wedding vows?”

Outside, after days on end of falling rain, the storm began to taper off. Satisfied for the time being, Halloran made his way home.

* * *

It had been ten years since she’d seen Teddy’s face, and when she laid eyes on him, Hanni let out a gasping sound, reaching for him as he stepped over the threshold, and she reached up, touching his cheeks, sobbing as she fell against his chest.

Teddy was so very tall, now, so much taller than he had been, even as a man, and she couldn’t contain her tears as he hugged her tightly, pressing kisses to the top of her head, his arms wrapped about her, hers around his.

“Oh, my baby,” she whispered. “Oh, I feared I’d never lay eyes on you again.”

“I’ve been watching you,” Teddy whispered. “I never abandoned you, Mother, I promise. I wouldn’t.”

Behind them, she could hear the movement of Veritum’s feet upon the floor, heard the chair creak as he sank into it. He was gratifyingly, comfortingly solid, come to the house by the Crystal Lake.

He’d been worried Teddy wouldn’t pick a servant at all. It wasn’t the only reason he was proposing again, he’d told her, but it was reason enough in itself — he had been the reason she raised their son alone, but not the reason she never saw him again. A divine ceremony elevated one’s spouse, even if not to full ascension — it all seemed like so much nonsense to Hanni, theological matters that weren’t of her concern, but if marrying Veritum meant seeing Halloran, she was more than willing.

He’d offered to leave, once the ceremony was through.

She’d forbade him from even thinking of it, from ever leaving again, and they’d talked the whole night through, about art, about music, and most of all, about Teddy.

Teddy.

“Veritum said you found someone,” Hanni whispered, leaning back and reaching up to cup Teddy’s cheeks, stroking his jaw with her thumbs. “A cleric.”

“Godfrey Digbett,” Teddy said. “He begged for any god who would listen to save him.”

“Save him from what?”

“Destiny,” Teddy said. “Or — expectation. They’re not precisely the same.” His eyes, when she looked up at his face, were so, so purple, and she had to blink away for a moment, until they had faded back to blue.

“You left your viol,” she said softly. “Will you play for us?”

“For us,” Teddy repeated softly, and looked from her to Veritum, but smiled, nodded his head. When he played, it was the like of music as she had never heard, and she wept at the sound of it, even as her cheeks ached from smiling.

* * *

Godfrey was humming to himself as he packed his bags. It was not a song he remembered knowing before now — in his head, he heard the sound of a bow on strings, and he hummed in tune with the melody without any thought about it, before beginning to harmonise with it instead, that the melody from his own mouth should complement the one he heard, instead of simply adding to it.

“More of your music?” asked Aunt Regina sharply from the doorway.

Even if she wanted to go against the will of one of the gods, which even Regina Moricious was not willing to do, no woman who might have married him would dare attempt it now. He’d never felt quite so entirely safe in the world.

“Oh, not my music, Aunt,” Godfrey said good-naturedly. “Someone else’s.”

He’d been sleep-walking, last night, something which he had never done before in all his life, but in the process, he had sorted out all the pages of music in his office trunk, and he had all but sobbed with gratitude when he’d woken up, had gone down to Halloran’s shrine and poured out how happy he was for something like an hour.

“I hope you’re happy,” she said spitefully.

“Do you know,” Godfrey said softly, as much to himself as to her, “I rather think I am.”

The song came to an artful end, and when the next one began, Godfrey picked up his lute, lying back on the bed and playing along with it. The chains emblazoned on his wrists shone silver under the light from the rising sun, and strangely enough, they made him feel quite at liberty.

As he heard his aunt move furiously down the corridor, he smiled to himself, and continued to play.

FIN