-GUIN-
The Boundless had seven gods, and I’d learned to hate every one of them.
Kaelthar’s Hour fell at midday, and Galahad called it The Watcher’s vigil. As I watched him, his eyes were open, his hands folded before him, and his spine was straight. He recited the litany in the same tone he used for Verath while the noon light pressed through the narrow window and turned the stone floor the color of old bone. I’d been kneeling since the hour before dawn. The Seven Hours of the Seven Gods didn’t pause for things like hunger, cold, or the particular exhaustion that comes from sleeping in fragments, always half-listening for footsteps.
My eyes closed before I knew what they were doing. I didn’t decide to close them; my body simply stopped asking permission.
My head dropped toward my chest, and I caught myself, jerked upright, hands tightening in my lap, but the damage was already done. Galahad stopped his intoning, and the room went very quiet. It was the kind of quiet that meant something had changed.
I didn’t look at him. I just pretended that it hadn’t happened, that I hadn’t fallen asleep for the split second that I had. Instead, I finished the litany, and I kept my voice level.
“The Watcher does not sleep. The Watcher does not turn. The Watcher holds the vigil that separates the faithful from the dark.”
The words came from memory because my mind had gone very still and cold, the way it did when I needed to assess a situation before reacting to it.
“Stop.”
I stopped.
Galahad was standing beside his plank bed with his arms loose at his sides and his gray eyes on me with an expression I’d learned to read. He wasn’t angry. No, this was something more controlled than anger. It was a door closing over something he needed contained.
“You closed your eyes.”
“I stumbled in the litany. I corrected—”
“—you closed your eyes, and you succumbed to sleep during Kaelthar’s Hour.” He said the accusation again as if repetition gave it more weight. “During the Watcher’s vigil. The Watcher commands:do not avert your gaze.The Book of Abominations is explicit. To close one’s eyes during Kaelthar’s Hour is to open a gap in vigilance. And through a gap—”
“—corruption enters.” I finished for him, hoping it would earn me some reprieve. But I could tell by his expression that it hadn’t.
Something moved across his face then, and his lips went tight as his eyes narrowed.
“This cannot go uncorrected.”
I held very still on my knees while he sat on the edge of his plank bed. He folded his hands in his lap as he looked at me and said nothing more, but I could see the thoughts playing out in his mind. He was planning something. When he spoke again, a few seconds later, his voice had settledinto the pastoral register. It was the same tone he used for doctrine when he read from the Book of Bindings, for the careful explanations he gave of why the things he did to me were necessary.
“This is not punishment,” he said. “Drenath teaches that the flesh must learn what the spirit already knows. A father corrects a child. A shepherd corrects a lamb.” He paused. “Lie across my lap.”
The calculation occurred to me in the space between two heartbeats. And it was a sickening calculation. The thing that made it sickening was how practiced I’d become at it, how I instantly reminded myself that fighting him was futile. Refusal simply meant he forced me. It was easier not to fight him, just to do as he said. Voluntary submission meant I retained a measure of control over how my punishment began, which meant I might retain a measure of control over how it ended. I hated that I knew this. What was more, I hated that I’d filed this particular realization under the title of:useful.
I stood and walked to where he sat. Then I lay across his lap with my arms folded, my face turned toward the wall, and my entire body constructed around a single central stillness the way you build a wall around a flame to keep the wind from taking it.
The first strike against me was open-palmed and hard. He smacked my ass through the thin linen of my tunic. It registered as heat before pain: a sharp, spreading warmth across my left cheek.
“One for Aethon.”
The second landed before I’d mapped the first.
“Two for Verath.”
He moved through the pantheon of the gods, and as he did so, his voice was steady. It was the tone of a man readingaloud from a text he’d committed to memory. Each word was unhurried and placed with care, his left hand resting on my lower back in between blows. It was warm, heavy, and still. Strangely, the stillness of it was almost worse than the strikes because it was the touch of a man who wasn’t yet doing what he intended to do and was waiting for the permission his theology was still constructing in his mind.
Another four gods called out and another four blows landed.
On the seventh strike, something changed. The blow landed lower on my ass. It was just a matter of inches, but I’d noticed the pattern and the deviation was obvious and intended. The impact was softer this time, and his hand didn’t lift immediately.
Instead, it rested there as if it hadn’t made up its mind on what it was going to do next. Soon, I felt his fingers spreading against the back of my thigh, pressing lightly, as if he were measuring something, as if he were taking stock of my warmth through the fabric.
He’d stopped counting gods. In fact, he’d stopped speaking entirely.
