“I know that maybe we should be further investigating the manor, but today we are going to stay here and fix this instead,” she said as she hesitantly showed Reeve the additional destruction she and her sister had wrought in the knight’s holy sanctuary.
“Oh, it’s like a puzzle!” Endlessly enthusiastic, he lifted up two of the shards and held them side by side. They clearly did not match. “I wonder what it’ll look like when it’s done.”
Together, Reeve and Celeste removed the additional stone and plush seating that had been added to the altar, and then they started in on the original relief. They sat on the ground and laid out the pieces, rearranging them until an image began to form, unsurprisingly that of a rising sun over a field of many clover. The task was arduous—clover really all looked quite similar when it came right down to it—but it was pleasant, and as morning rolled into midday and after a break for tea and salted meat, they were coming much closer to being finished.
The afternoon light was blotted out by heavy clouds, and rolling thunder evolved into heart-startling bursts as rain pelted the roof. But the two were safe inside, buckets still placed to catch water dribbling in through the broken windows, and the company of one another to reassure against the flashes of lightning.
“Tomorrow night is the sweetbriar festival,” she said to Reeve as she tried to find the next right bit of white stone from a dwindling pile of similarly-right-looking white bits of stone. “I have a feeling Syphon will use the distraction to do something terrible. We need to find that last sieve before Syphon does.” She swallowed, the heaviness of her next words almost too much. “We need to make sure it’s locked away for good.”
“We haven’t found anything in the manor, but we never searched Ima’riel’s. It must be there, right?”
“She says she doesn’t even know what sieves are, but I suppose that doesn’t mean one isn’t hidden there without her knowing it.” She didn’t want to suggest deceit to him, but it seemed the only option. “It will be safer to search if no one else is around, and the greenhouses will be empty tomorrow night when everyone’s in the village circle celebrating.”
He nodded, a silent agreement that they would go then despite the questionable morality of the decision. She intended to say no more about it then, letting the quiet be filled with the sound of heavy rain.
They worked for a while longer, piecing together more of the mural in comfortable silence. Sitting on the floor beside one another, Celeste could feel the warmth off his body, her skin painfully aware that Reeve wasn’t touching her, but with so little effort, he could.
When she glanced at him from the corner of her eye, he was intently studying two shards, his tongue poking between his teeth. She could feel that tongue again, briefly passing over her lips with a skill she was fairly certain he didn’t even know he had. She would have given just about anything to coax out that skill, though she wondered if any kind of coaxing would be theologically permissible.
“Valcord is one of the more reasonable gods, yes?” Celeste asked, pretending to be much more interested in the shard she held than it deserved.
“I think he’s very reasonable.”
“Well, you would, wouldn’t you?” She chewed her lip, and there was another crack of thunder that made her gasp and straighten. “I mean specifically with his…you called it a code, I think? One that the Holy Knights of Valcord follow?”
Reeve grinned as he made a choice from the pile and perfectly fit one of the smallest chips of stone into its rightful place. “Yes, we’re meant to be virtuous.”
Celeste tried to hum, but it came out as more of a groan. It was a troubling word,virtuous, for her purposes anyway. “And what does that mean?”
“To be honorable, loyal, kind, to treat each new day as an opportunity and not a burden, to be helpful and honest, you know, those sorts of things.”
“That’s it?” she asked, looking at him fully, noting he had not mentioned chastity. He had drunkenly said that holy knights were allowed to marry, but gods could be strange, and maybe that still didn’t mean what she thought it did. “There aren’t any harsher rules? Things you’re not supposed to…indulge in?”
He shook his head, finding that another piece didn’t fit, then put it aside. “Almost anything is all right in moderation so long as it doesn’t hurt someone else.” Then suspicion creased his features. “Are you asking because you’re interested in joining the priestesshood?”
“Not exactly,” she admitted, attempting to hide her smile and failing as lightning brightened the chamber.
Reeve chuckled. “Then why are you concerned with what Valcord thinks?”
“Well, I guess I’m not,” she said, watching his playful grin falter, “butyouare, and I do care an awful lot about what you think.”
Reeve’s smile continued to fall as he sat back, replaced with a softness she wanted, not for the first time, to rub against. But since she wasn’t a cat, and he was looking extra thoughtful, and also because Valcord might somehow consort with the god of storms and strike her down if she dared sully one of his followers, she held back.
“There is one rule for holy knights that could be considered harsh if you chose to believe it so.” Eyes squinted, Reeve was using that voice that suggested he was attempting to be diplomatic. He wanted so badly to be good that even though he sounded hesitant and strained, it made Celeste’s insides go right to mush, as warm and fluffy as Halfrida’s mashed potatoes. “Knights are supposed to be loyal to their cause above all else, and our cause is often linked directly to one another. We’re taught that we must defend each other because we swear fealty not just to Valcord but to the heart of our faith. What we do is dangerous and we would—” His words caught abruptly and then he cleared his throat through it. “Death would come for many more of us if we did not have one another.”
Of course, he was part of a holy order after all, and they made oaths for life. He was drunk when he’d told her, but the death of his brother Rory clearly still weighed heavily on him. And he had already mentioned once that Gable would have broken his oath and killed her. If any of his fellow knights came to Briarwyke, surely he would be beholden—and gladly beholden—to them over everything else.
Celeste shifted from sitting on one of her hips to the other and flipped a piece of mural over in her hands. It was a fragment she’d picked up many times and hadn’t found the right place for yet, not enough of the rest of the picture for it to make sense, but she was drawn to its sharp edges and strange shape. She held it tightly and ran thumbs over the relief work as the sound of rain pelted the roof. She almost allowed the rain to drown out what she wanted to ask, but it had always been too easy to not ask the hardest things.
“I know that your oaths mean everything to you, and it’s not fair for me to make this request, but…” Celeste took a deep breath and worried the shard in her fingers, turning it over and over. “When we finish restoring the temple and Syphon is gone, I’m not going to be able to…to engage in any kind of battle with you. So will you please just let me leave instead?”
“What?” Reeve’s face fell into stark anger. “No.”
As if she’d already been pierced by his uncursed sword, Celeste felt impaled to the spot, though she wanted to flee. How could he still want to vanquish her? To kill her? After everything?
“No,” he repeated, watching her ever-moving fingers on the fragment. “Celeste, I can’t let—please, don’t say you want to leave Briarwyke, that you want to leave…leave the temple.”
As she again turned over the shard, it slipped from her fingers, but she managed to catch it before it hit the floor. “But I don’t want you to kill me.”
