He cleared his throat then, drawing brows together. “May I ask you a question?”
He already had, but she thought there would be little use in pointing that out. Chuckling, she nodded.
“Is this the reason you’re evil?”
Celeste’s astonishment stuck in her throat with a squeak. Reeve was still looking at her so earnestly, as if he had no idea how cutting what he’d just said could be. Plum could even sense the tension and took off from her lap, but his flapping wings disturbed neither of them.
Then Reeve’s look faltered, like he was slowly latching onto his own words and hearing them for the first time. She knew he was about to take it all back, to stumble over an apology and walk away from the conversation, but she didn’t want him to. “What would you say if I told you that it was?”
Reeve brightened again, then hesitated. To be fair, she had laid out a trap, but the only way for him to figure it out was to trigger it. “I would say that’s not, um…I wouldn’t condone it, but it might make some sense. I know that it can be difficult when you’re not…well, when no one really needs you around.”
Celeste twirled the flower Plum brought her between her fingers, wanting her hands to be busy. No one needed her now, it was true, but then did anyone ever? She glanced away from Reeve to see Earlylyte still munching along the fence line, a lone horse in an abandoned temple’s courtyard, then back to the single knight sent to recover the holy place all on his own. “May I askyoua question, Sir Reeve?”
Though there was fear in his widening eyes, he nodded.
“Why exactly are you here?”
“I was sent here,” he said simply.
“Right, by your god and your temple.” She was more careful, not wanting to sound as accusatory as she had been before. “But you came by yourself. Were you ordered to make a new life? To leave behind your family and friends?”
Reeve’s face twisted, struggling more than with the heft of the wyvern bones. “Well, no, I wasn’t ordered, this was my choice. I sought out the Denonfy Oracle to discover my purpose, and they said, well…they said a lot of things about a broken house and murky starlight and, um,”—he mumbled through the next word—“manhood, but it was all very confusing. Father Theodore helped me understand when I returned though. He discovered that no one had heard from Briarwyke’s temple in well over a decade, and so we decided that this was what the oracle must have meant, that I was to come here, vanquish a great evil, fulfill my duty to Valcord, and find my purpose.”
“Huh.” She kept staring at him, the strife on his face lost, replaced with a pleased determination. “So, it’s just that simple? You went to the oracle looking for your purpose, and they told you?”
He nodded, no hint of mockery.
Celeste sometimes wondered who she might have been if things were different. But as for purpose, that had always been what someone else told her to do. Now that there was no one to give her orders and expound on all the ways she was screwing up, she supposed she too was purpose-less.
“Well, I’m not evil, not because I’m an orphan or because some oracle said so.” She huffed and stood, tucking the half-dead gift from the wyvern behind her ear. “Now, would you like to move more bones or should we go inside the temple I helped desecrate and set a few more fires?”
CHAPTER 14
OF OFFENSIVE HANDS AND THEIR SEVERING
Reeve had said something wrong, but it was harder to tell with Celeste than with others. Gable and Flint were always quick to correct him when his words came out offensively, and the acolytes and priests were not terribly good at controlling their facial expressions, though they were a bit politer.
Celeste, however, was only quietly taken aback, like she didn’t want to offend with her own offense. She didn’t shout at him again nor did she treat him like he was a complete idiot, which he would usually argue that he wasn’t, notcompletely, thank you very much, but in this case, perhaps he had been.
And perhaps shouting would have been appropriate. Because he had done at least a little wounding despite not meaning to—he saw it on her face and in the subtle change to her voice’s tone. He’d not wanted to be hurtful. He was eventually going tohave tohurt her, of course, but not with words, and notnow.
He would find a way to make it up to her, though, and kept the task in the back of his mind as they continued to restore the temple over the following days. There were many heavy things to pick up and put down elsewhere, but Reeve was an expert at that, and in tandem, the gardening and rebuilding were easy except for the persistence of the thick thorns that spread over everything.
The greying tendrils of the Kvesarian sweetbriars were slightly pliant, which warned that they were not entirely dead as Ima’riel had suggested, but the thorns themselves had a familiar rigidity and were massive. This gave him an idea, and while Reeve’s ideas were usually questionable, he reasoned he was having a lucky streak and followed through.
Using his whittling knife, he collected some of the longest thorns and found they were easier to work with than fish bones, hardening nicely once severed and taking on the shapes he carved, forgiving of mistakes. When Celeste asked after what he was doing, he told her nothing—it didn’t count as a lie if the intention, in the end, was meant to be a benevolent surprise. At least, that’s what Gable would say, and he couldn’t always be wrong—even a villain did an accidental good deed once in an eclipse.
Valcord’s temple was looking much better after a week of labor, and Celeste too was looking better—not that she had not looked good to begin with, but Reeve noted that she smiled more and walked about with her face tipped up, shoulders no longer hunched and her limp healed. If the fear and despair had been an act, she’d completely dropped it, and he was glad. Shesaidshe wasn’t evil after all, and he had almost replied,I know, before realizing he supposedly already knew the exact opposite.
Knowingwas funny like that.
She had asked him a little more about his life in Bendcrest, and he told her of the men and women he called his brothers and sisters and the man called Father Theodore who actually had no children. He was surprised when she urged him on for more details about learning to wield a sword and ride a horse alongside the others as if she enjoyed him prattling on. If she truly did, she’d be the first.
She was much less keen to answer questions about her own sister and the temple they grew up in, so he tried only once every day before letting it be. Valcordian temples were known for taking in orphans, but Osurehm was the god of honor, not new beginnings, so why she and her sister had ended up at a temple known for martial pursuits was a mystery.
But he did get little details here and there, especially when she was distracted kneading dough. When the evening came and there could be no more outdoor work done, they took to working in the kitchen. She’d been repeating the instructions for fluffy loaves for the third time, his first two coming out crumbly, and he slipped in a question about her friends since he had run out of stories about Flint’s mischievousness and Gable’s brilliance.
“Friends?”
