The golden gem on its pommel glinted back. “Thatismy job.”
“Your job is stabbing, Sid.” Reeve began toward the village, eyeing the road for others but finding no one. Beside him, Earlylyte followed, shaking out his blond mane and chuffing.
“Yourjob is stabbing,” the sword said. “Myjob is channeling your arcana. And a little persuasion when need be.”
Reeve wasn’t sure that was true.Hisjob was much more complicated than stabbing, though stabbing was often a big part of it, usually the easiest part, and while he needed a sword to do it, he’d done so without a talking one for years before he found Sid.
“You have to admit, I have a point!”
Reeve groaned but couldn’t suppress his chuckle, a small crack forming on the anxious cast that had settled over his chest. There was a lone cricket chirping his arrival somewhere in the grasses but no one to greet. That was also all right: he knew he had reached his destination if not quite his destiny. Not yet.
He’d been stalwart to seek out that destiny the previous summer after many prayers to Valcord, climbing into the peaks of Ashrein Ridge to find the Denonfy Oracle and discovering he did indeed have a purpose he had yet to fulfill. But that purpose was…confusing.
The Denonfy Oracle was either brilliant or an idiot, everyone had their own stark opinion, but there was no doubt they were arcanely gifted by the gods in ways that were incomprehensible. Unfortunately, the prophecy they’d given to Reeve had also been incomprehensible.
That was by design, both because it made things interesting and the oracle found it amusing, but Reeve didn’t know that. What he did know was the Denonfy Oracle used very big words and overly complicated metaphors and probably a few too many parentheticals—though these would be set off by em dashes if someone were to write it all down. And write it down Reeve did because there was no way he would remember the prophecy—he couldn’t even recall it now.
When Reeve trudged back down the mountains in the heat of summer, he had passed right by Briarwyke unknowingly—which, to be fair, was how he did a number of things—then took the long way around the Gloomweald—because, also being fair, a haunted forest is unnerving even to a holy knight—and eventually returned to his home temple in Bendcrest on the southern border of Eiren.
There, Father Theodore helped him piece together what the prophecy actually meant. The oracle’s sesquipedalian words were broken down and made understandable, and with a map and a purpose, Reeve was set to once again leave the only home he had ever known.
But then chaos had broken out in Eirengaard, King Archibald was slain by a demon, and holy knights were called in from all over to help set things right. Reeve remained in Bendcrest to protect the temple and the people there in the wake of so many of his brothers and sisters being called to serve elsewhere, a calling which did inspire a bit of jealousy, though he swallowed that down.
Winter came, and with it harsh weather that made travel unsafe, but just as the oracle had said, by the time spring was bursting forth into Eiren, so would Reeve burst forth into his inevitability. There was perhaps an intended crassness in thatbursting, but the holy knight tried to push the oracle’s friendly laughter from his mind.
“Once we’re in town, keep an eye out for the temple,” said Reeve, the murkiness of falling night deepening. Usually there was a pull in Reeve’s chest, an arcane tingle that told him where his god could be found, but the temple in Briarwyke had been desecrated years ago, so he couldn’t follow his magical inclination.
“Don’t really have eyes, buddy,” replied the sword.
“Well, your arcane senses then.” Reeve still had yet to understand how The Obsidian Widow Maker actually saw and spoke and thought for that matter, though he wasn’t pressed to find out—it was just one of those things, the sword had tried to explain, one of those magical things that wasn’t really supposed to make a lot of sense and simply be accepted because it worked. It often meant Sid fell into random slumbers, but Reeve wondered if those were just times when it was most convenient for the sword to forget he had consciousness.
Candlelight flickered in the window of the next cottage along the way. An older couple sat on its porch at the road’s edge. Their low tones dropped off when Reeve approached. “Good evening,” he called, waving over Earlylyte’s back.
The man lifted his chin slightly, his scowl unnerving but also could have just been how his face was—Father Theodore’s face was like that, always pulled down grimly, making one wonder if one had done something wrong even though one could only remember striving to be good, but Reeve knew no kinder man than the Valcordian Priest who had helped raise him.
An older woman sat beside the man, her fluffy grey brows lifting and the corner of her mouth twitching up in response to Reeve’s greeting. That was friendly enough for both of them. When Reeve noted the two were holding hands, he reasoned that the grumpy-looking villager was probably not so grumpy. At least, he assumed having the hand of someone to hold would make a person a lot less grumpy no matter how their face naturally fell.
“You sure you want to head to the temple tonight?” The road narrowed ahead as more buildings came into view, and Sid lowered his voice. People didn’t usually take well to talking swords, even after it was explained they weren’t cursed anymore.
“Of course,” said Reeve, squinting into the newly fallen dark down the dirt crossroad. There looked to be only residences in one direction and a pen filled with goats along the other.
“But you don’t know what you’ll find,” Sid cautioned as they continued along the main thoroughfare. “If this is your destiny, surely you won’t be able to overcome it in a night’s time, and after a full day of journeying? Seems like asking for trouble. Strike out with the dawn, I say, as Valcord intended.”
Reeve tipped his head. Sid was right—the sword’s job was persuading, and he was good at it, likely due to his ability to see into its wielder’s heart. “As Valcord intended,” he repeated with a nod.
The road took them past more scattered buildings, some clearly empty with doors broken on their hinges and smokeless chimneys, but others gave off the warm glow of indoor candlelight. No one else loitered, and unease crept its way into Reeve’s belly, but it wasn’t that he was frightened—holy knights weren’t afraid of the dark or abandoned buildings or even the low creaking of unfastened shutters caught in the wind. Holy knights were, however, arcanely perceptive, and there was something else about Briarwyke, something caught up in the thorny bushes that snaked over the buildings and through the unlit lampposts and even beneath the earth itself, that told Reeve to be cautious.
And so cautious he was, especially when he came upon Briarwyke’s center, stopping in the shadow of an old mill-like building now in disuse. The circle was laid out wide before him, but he couldn’t imagine it busy, even in the light of day. The modern way was to arcanely leach water directly into buildings making wells obsolete, but something about the village’s well fallen into disrepair gave him a chill. He surveyed the manor across the circle, one light on high up on its third story, the biggest of the homes he’d seen. Even the light in that window felt dark, as if a shroud had laid itself thickly over Briarwyke. The light in Reeve’s chest, the one connecting him with Valcord that he couldn’t see but consistently felt, suddenly dimmed as well.
Then a different brightness lit up the northeastern corner of the circle. A slender figure stepped out of a building there, and as the door closed at her back, the gentler glow of the building’s torch illuminated her features. She was a young woman with a long fall of hair as black as the night sky, a stark contrast to the fairness of her skin and the powdery blue dress she wore.
Reeve held Earlylyte still at the edge of the southern road. There was no one else around, and he didn’t want to startle her in the fallen dark, but even if he had not been naturally inclined to the kind of thoughtfulness that made a man hide in the shadows when women were around, he still would have found it difficult to move because…well, she sure was pretty.
Reeve swallowed. He didn’t always have a hard time around pretty girls. In fact, sometimes he didn’t even notice, Gable or Flint having to point out, and in lewd detail, just how attractive certain women were. But every so often Reeve was struck by the look of someone—especially when they smiled the way this one did as she gazed up at the moons—and he was abruptly reminded that he had gone twenty-six years without successfully wooing a woman.
Holy knights didn’t have a lot of time for romance, that’s what he told himself anyway. There was no requirement that they be celibate, not by Valcord’s teachings. Some did choose to be, and they made a whole thing of it. Many chose not to be, and they too made a whole thing of it, especially Flint who acted as though sex and prayer went hand-in-hand. And then there were the few holy knights who were on the fence. That was where Reeve sat, and it was rather uncomfortable.
Though there was that one time with the succubus, but he wasn’t entirely sure if that counted.
