“It was an accident!” She threw her hands up, the wyvern flailed and hung onto her shoulder, and Reeve straightened, prepared for an attack. But the witch just dropped her head back and sighed like she was the kind of exhausted he felt after a hard day of training. “I thought I was helping him, but it doesn’t matter because he, er, it, or,the thingis out, and it’s making a mess in the village. I can’t get him back in that jar, but someone with divine arcana can, and I think you’re the only holy person around.”
Reeve pursed his lips. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have murdered the other Valcordian priests.”
“I told you, I—” The witch huffed, fists clenched, but she contained her indignation. “I didn’t kill them, but you’re right, I shouldn’t have let it happen. I shouldn’t have let a lot of things happen, but this time I really did have good intentions, it just went all wrong.” Her shoulders slumped, and she looked up from under dark lashes, moving closer to the barrier. “I need help to do this. I have no power over this thing. Please, Sir Reeve, I need you.”
Need. Reeve’s hold on the jar tightened. He was needed, here, to do this, by her. And no one ever needed Reeve Dawn.
“And anyway,” she said quickly, “don’t you kind of have to? Isn’t this what your god would want? You can’t just walk away from here knowing a great evil that was contained within your temple was let free to wreak havoc on the poor, unsuspecting people here.”
Reeve frowned, guilt being an exceptionally powerful motivator, and his stomach wobbled. “I can’t walk away from hereat all.”
“Oh, right. Well, I plan on letting you out, obviously, but we have to make a deal first. I will dispel the noxscura containing you, but you must promise not to attack me, all right?”
Reeve looked down at the apotrope. It had been forged by people of his faith, and if he could not figure out how to use it on his own, the priests in Bendcrest could, so there was no use for her in that regard. “But I’m meant to fulfill my destiny by vanquishing the evil inhabiting the temple, which is, you know, you,” he said carefully.
She let out a slow, measured breath. He knew that breath, it was the one people used when they were frustrated with him but didn’t want to show it. Father Theodore was almost an expert at covering it up, but Reeve still always knew. “Maybe you could wait a little on the vanquishing? Until after we’ve recaptured theactualthreat to Briarwyke and, presumably, this temple?”
“You wish that we…postpone our battle until this deed is complete?” He lifted the jar.
She nodded. “I won’t use arcana on you so long as you don’t use it on me, and instead, we both do what we can to get the entity back in the apotrope where it belongs.”
He considered the jar a moment longer, then narrowed eyes at her. “Did you release this thing just so I would help you?”
“You weren’t even around when I released it! And I only let it out because I felt bad for it.”
She feltbad? Well, perhaps it made a kind of sense, if it was an evil thing, like her. Yet when he looked on her, evil was not what first came to mind. It might not even be the second thing he thought—it was quickly becoming a distant third, in fact. “This is what caused your injuries, isn’t it?”
The woman shrugged a shoulder with absolutely no confidence, and that told him what he needed to know.
“We shall put aside our conflict to resolve this.”
“Do you…do you swear it? Would you say, like, an oath to your god about not hurting me?”
Reeve swallowed, puffing out his chest. “With credence that the sun will rise, I will not raise my sword against you so long as we have an accord and a shared duty to carry out.”
“Oh, boy,” muttered Sid quietly from the floor.
She brought a hand to her necklace, and the dark arcana in the room began to shift.
“Wait!” Reeve pointed at her. “Are you not also going to swear an oath?”
“Uh…” She ran fingers up the chain around her neck. “Sure. What would you like me to swear it to?”
“To your god,of course.”
She squinted. “I don’t really have one of those.”
This struck Reeve in the way that a person reaching uninvited up someone’s skirt might be struck, which is all at once and totally deserved. He stood uncomfortably with the notion that someone might not have a god, and while it wasn’t entirely new, no one ever really said it to him before. But surely this woman—this witch—prayed to some dark deity at the very least. Though that sort of oath wasn’t ideal either.
“Oh, hey, I can promise on Plum,” she chirped, patting the wyvern. “On pain of being ripped apart by talons and fangs, I won’t cast against you unless you attack first.”
Wyverns were not gods, but neither were horses, and Earlylyte was quite dear to him, so with a hefty sigh, he nodded.
Arcana slithered along the chamber, over the walls and the ceiling and the floorboards, inky and cold. As it crept toward her, Reeve had the momentary desire to protect her from it. That was natural, of course, noxscura was evil, and she was…well, she wassomething.
But then the dark arcana was gone, and for the first time since they had met and engaged in battle, there was no barrier between them. Reeve’s eyes flicked to Sid—he really should have picked up his sword first. Warm arcana danced under his skin as his body prepared itself, but he willed it to remain subdued.
She still had her hands out, tentative fingers spread wide, eyes even wider, chest rising and falling too rapidly to be calm. He would have to do it, to make the first move, so he took a careful step toward her, the apotrope held out.
