Oh. That.
When she had pulled herself up against the wall after the flue exploded, Syphon reappeared, running something like a finger down her cheek. “This time he just said thank you,” she admitted, leaving out the part where he told her he would repay the favor. “Crickets, I hope he doesn’t really think we were helping him.”
“This time?” Intrigued, he went to the chair across from her, pulling off his baldric and leaning his scabbard and the broom against the arm. Intrigue was better than plain old suspicion, but she wanted neither from him at the moment. “What did he say before?”
Celeste sank deeper into her seat. No, she couldn’t tell him any of the things Syphon had said. Not only would the holy knight think the worst about the entity saying the two werethe same, the rest of it had been a little—no,a lot—embarrassing. “Nothing.”
He didn’t believe her, sitting forward with elbows on knees. “If you’re really as concerned about this as you say, you’ll share everything you know.”
“Iamconcerned,” she insisted, sitting forward herself and wincing. “I’m concerned it may attack a villager next. What if it hurts Kori or Halfrida?” She gasped. “Or one of the children?”
It would be her fault, all her fault, and then? Celeste had so desperately not wanted to hurt anyone. This was not how things were meant to go.
He cocked his head, his face smudged with ash, lines of dried sweat running from his temple to his jaw. There was that penetrating, judgmental look again that questioned everything and made her feel as if maybe she really were lying. Celeste snorted and glared back—why in the Abyss were holy knights so awful?
Though shewaslying to him, at least a little.
Celeste swallowed back her frustration and the growing chill in her chest, averting her eyes and stroking Plum’s wings. “When it first spoke to me, it said—hesaid he was taking back things that were his. I asked his name, and he told me it was Syphon.”
“It has a name?” The knight sat back and blinked. “So, itisa man?”
She shrugged. “As much as he can be, I guess. He said the name was given to him. And he said…” She urged the words out with a groan. “He said he could give me things. He was only trying to trick me, I’m sure, because I told him he had to go back in the jar. He doesn’t want to be locked away, and I really don’t blame him, I wouldn’t want to be locked away either—”
“But evil things should be locked away.”
She looked up into the holy knight’s amber eyes. So sharply they peered back at her, that word,evil, stabbing like a sword and reopening the frigid anger in her heart. “He may be evil, but nothing likes to be imprisoned. You didn’t.”
“I’m not evil.”
“Says you.”
The knight did not take kindly to that. “SaysValcord.”
“Oh, does he?” she snapped so loudly that Plum took flight from her lap, talons digging in as he leapt away.
“Yes, of course.” He was sitting across from her with a confidence she wished he could see because surely arrogance was not a virtue of his god. Then he shrank slightly. “Well, Valcord doesn’t reallysayanything to me directly, but—”
“But cruelty in your god’s name is just fine, isn’t it?”
The knight’s brow furrowed. “I would never be cruel in the name of Valcord.”
She leaned forward, pressing a hand to her knee where the skin stung from Plum’s talons. “But your temple tells you what to do and think, and you just do it, don’t you?”
His mouth opened, but no words came out. Apparently, the gods hadn’t given him an answer yet.
“Did your god send you here? Did he tell you to take back this temple?”
His eyes flicked to the stone floors. “I prayed for guidance, and Valcord responded through Father Theodore.”
“And you’ll do whatever Valcord asks of you through your priests, won’t you?”
“Well, I…Iamin service to them—to him.”
“If he asks you to charge blindly into battle?”
“He has.” His eyes snapped back up. “And I gladly have the scars of that service.”
She scoffed, the anger she had tried to suppress swirling like a blizzard in her lungs. “What if Valcord asks you to tear this temple down?”
