"Paladin's Grace"

[fiefoe]

T. Kingfisher


It had never occurred to Stephen or any of the others that a god could die. Such things happened in mythology, not in real life.
Demon hunting was ugly work, mostly involving possessed livestock, and while the Dreaming God’s chosen were skilled at exorcism, a two thousand-pound bull inhabited by a furious demon was not something anyone wanted to tackle alone.
* Stephen opened his pack and pulled out his needles and a thick ball of yarn. Knitting socks was not a particularly glamorous hobby, but it filled the same mental need as the sword—careful work that held his attention and hopefully did not allow his mind to wander too far afield. Plus at the end, you got socks out of it, and no one appreciated good socks like a soldier.
“If they see the cloak, they know that the battle tide might take me without warning. And if it happens, they will know to get out of the way.”... It is all darkness and fumbling and rage. It is a black tide lapping over my head, where once the god poured golden fire over my nerves and turned me into the holiest of killers.
It had been over a year since the tide had risen for any of them. If the paladins were not precisely healing, at least the scars had grown thick. Sometimes Stephen thought they might yet live through this, as broken and battered as they were.
Was no one suitably worried about the severed head situation? <> The way people are treating this, you’d think decapitation was just a natural event that happens sometimes, as if people’s heads tumble off like leaves in autumn.
Now there is a prayer that I can get behind, thought Stephen, as he walked away. Oh gods, if any of you are listening, please grant that we don’t make things worse.

way. You can get your own. This one’s taken.” And, very quietly, “Extremely sorry, ma’am.”
And once they’ve left, this young lady will want to put a knife in my good bits and frankly, I should probably let her.
* The only saving grace of the situation was that, despite the fact that he had a moaning woman in his arms, Stephen had not been less aroused in recent memory. The angle of her leg around his waist meant that she had missed the aforementioned good bits and was grinding against his swordbelt, which had caused the padding he wore under his chainmail to ride up. A narrow band of skin over his hip was now caught between the leather swordbelt and the mail links, with her full weight upon it. It was not a good sensation.
He felt the Motherhood men’s eyes traveling over him. The young woman was moving enthusiastically against him, but she was, well, frankly she was very bad at it. She was pumping her legs like a child on a rope swing. He clamped his teeth on a groan as the chain links embedded themselves deeper into his skin. <> I am going to have a truly unique bruise when this is over…assuming the metal doesn’t just tear the skin right off…
“Well, they do it a few times a year, and that takes down the tall grass, so it has some of the same effect. You get it sometimes in sheep meadows, too, if they haven’t got very many sheep.” <> This was more than Stephen had ever contemplated the growth habits of plants in graveyards. “All right,” he said. “So you were picking flowers in the graveyard?”
Istvhan would clap him on the shoulder and tell him that it had been too many years since he had a woman. Istvhan had a somewhat earthy approach to life. And there was nothing remotely seductive in the woman’s manner.

but it wasn’t like she could even remember what color his eyes had been—
Blue.
“Bloody, bloody hell!”
He smelled clean and warm, with notes of leather and metal and, for whatever reason, gingerbread. You didn’t expect men to smell like gingerbread.

I don’t think perfume that smells like burnt meat is going to catch on any time soon…hmm, well, okay, maybe you could do it with a cold-fat technique, the way you do with the florals that you can’t heat… Annnnnd now I’m thinking about how to make perfume out of human flesh. Yep, that’s completely normal behavior. Nothing odd going on here.
Marguerite claimed that it was all a matter of attitude. “Get the attitude right, and everything else follows,” she always said. <> Marguerite had plenty of attitude. She was, in fact, a spy for Anuket City, the neighboring city-state.
There was quite a kerfluffle at the time among the temples, because nobody knew you could kill a god—or that they’d stay dead, anyway. Not just mythological dead. The Hanged Mother killed herself, but she didn’t cease to exist.”

“Worked out well enough, since the Rat doesn’t call fighting men of His own, and now they don’t have to hire out. And I’m not sure what other god would have taken them.”
“Hard for them, though,” said Grace. She thought of the paladin in his grey cloak, the amused lilt to his deep voice. It was impossible to imagine him running berserk and killing anyone. “Having to live on some other god’s charity.”
Marguerite shrugged. “Even gods have poor relations, I suppose.

_I think he was being very careful not to hurt me because when he pushed me against the wall, I didn’t get so much as a scratch and that’s hard to do when you’re pinning someone against brick and pretending to screw their brains out. And when he laughed, it sounded like he was surprised, as if he hadn’t laughed often. And I’d like to hear him laugh again. <> None of this sounded like anything she could say out loud, not even to Marguerite.
“I have never been wistful in my life.” Grace had no idea what being wistful entailed, but she was pretty sure that you had to be younger and thinner and possibly have consumption.

* Istvhan nodded. “The sacred order of this and that and that thing over there. Usually wolves. Or bears. Sometimes blood.”
“Blood?” said Stephen.
“Look, you can only have so many Sacred Order of the Wolfs in one region or it gets embarrassing. So then you have to be the Sacred Order of the Blood Moon, which still sounds impressive and you can keep all the wolf paraphernalia around and don’t have to get new sword hilts and standards and whatnot.”
“Istvhan, you ever kill someone with an ice swan?” he whispered. <> “I clubbed someone unconscious with a frozen goose once. That’s similar?”

He wished that he could break out his knitting, but for some reason, people didn’t take you seriously as a warrior when you were knitting. He’d never figured out why. Making socks required four or five double-ended bone needles, and while they weren’t very large, you could probably jam one into someone’s eye if you really wanted to. Not that he would. He’d have to pull the needle out of the sock to do it, and then he’d be left with the grimly fiddly work of rethreading the stitches. Also, washing blood out of wool was possible, but a pain.
Still, if he had to suddenly pull out his sword and fend off an attack, there was a chance he’d drop the yarn, and since he’d been feeling masochistic and was using two colors for this current set of socks, there was absolutely no chance the yarn wouldn’t get tangled and then he’d be trying to murder people while chasing the yarn around. And god forbid the tide rose and he went berserk. You never got the knitting untangled after that; you usually just had to throw it away completely.

“Well,” said the bishop, as Stephen fell immediately into the honor guard position, two steps back and to her left. “I tell you to go talk to a girl and you foil an assassination attempt. I’m a little frightened to think what might happen if I told you to go get laid.”
Stephen muttered something between clenched teeth.
“Would the city survive, do you think?”
“Gnnnrrrghhh.”
“That’s ‘gnnnrrrghhh, Your Holiness,’ to you.”

An attack like that was rare, particularly these days, but when one hit, it often wiped her out completely, sometimes for a whole day afterward. It was so bloody unfair, being so exhausted by something she didn’t want in the first place. As if her memory had decided to horsewhip her, and then turned around and charged her body for the privilege.
Rescue was bad. People who wanted you to be vulnerable and grateful tended to get very angry when you stopped being vulnerable and didn’t act grateful enough. Grace had been rescued twice in her life and both times, she’d have been better off keeping her head down and staying put.
* “It’s that or they get impacted,” she said grimly. Oh gods. A normal person would have just said “Yes” and left it there. What is wrong with me? “And then he’s miserable and scooting on the floor and there’s a stink like you wouldn’t believe.” Aaaand I’m still talking about my pet’s butt to a man I barely know. Well done, me. <> “Perfume making is clearly a very glamorous occupation,” said Stephen.
Nine-year-old Grace’s highest ambition had been apprenticeship in the kennels of a great house. She was good with animals but somewhat alarmed by horses. Caring for hounds seemed like the best possible life, and if you were lucky, you were treated as well as the hounds were, which in some houses was very well indeed.
Her new master could only work for a few hours a day, so she had a great deal of free time compared to the other apprentices she knew. His arthritis was so bad that he could only beat her occasionally, and it hurt him much more than her when he did.
A whole world opened up to her, a world of scents, a world where she was actually competent. A world where she could inhale and break a perfume apart into a dozen ingredients in her head. She could do it walking down the street. It made her feel like the possessor of secret knowledge, as if she moved in a hidden world that few other people could sense and fewer could make sense of.
They slaughtered villages indiscriminately. They were mostly cleared out by that point, but occasionally you’d get little groups still springing up. Some people just want the apocalypse in their lifetime.”
It’s easier for us. We just get pointed at the enemy and then the battle tide comes on us.” He sighed. “In our heyday, we could tear apart every cultist in a room and not lay a fingertip on their prisoners.” <> Precision berserkers. No wonder the army called them out. “That seems useful.”

The saint put the madness on you and took it off again, and afterward you had people left who weren’t part of the fight and didn’t need to see the carnage that had overtaken their farm or their village. It was easiest simply to use the paladin’s voice, tell them not to look, and help them away from the scene.
_And that is the only reason they used us, instead of hiring…oh, clockwork monsters from Anuket City, or golems, say. Assuming they could find a golem maker, in this day and age. Soulless machines kill as efficiently as we did, but they cannot comfort the survivors afterward. Or make reports. Stephen had a fairly cynical idea about which was ultimately more important to a commander.

“If he was already poisoned. That means it wouldn’t have mattered what you said.” <> He blinked at her, but the truth slowly worked into his mind, like water soaking through wood. “No. No, it wouldn’t have mattered, would it? Nothing I did could have saved him.”
A rush of fellow feeling rose in Stephen’s chest. There was something about poverty that was a little like war. Either you had been there or you hadn’t, and it wasn’t really possible to explain it to anyone who hadn’t.
“It is a hard thing to describe,” he said at last. “In the moment, it was like being gutted. As if someone had reached into my body and torn out handfuls of flesh and the rest of me had collapsed around the holes.”

Grace told herself that human skin didn’t show fingerprints and there was no way that she could know what they’d been doing.
_Which was nothing. Which was a hug. People hug. Friends hug. He and I are friends.
Aren’t we?
Granted, she hadn’t known Stephen that long, but if you couldn’t bond over multiple corpses, what could you bond over?

It was in the formal style of Archenhold, all stone and arches and tall pillars. Grace was rather fond of how clean the lines were here compared to the style of Anuket City, which never saw a facade it didn’t want to ornament or a stone that couldn’t be carved into ten animals and an allegorical representation of Prosperity.

“Sworn to her service,” rumbled Stephen. “By an oath.”
“You are?” said DuValier, which was good because otherwise Grace would have said it, and that would have rather spoiled the effect. “I thought you were sworn to the Temple of the Rat.”
“I swear a lot.”

“Fine,” said Marguerite. “So these unhealthy catfish are eating the severed hands. There, you see? Perfect crime.”
There was a lengthy pause while everyone considered this.
“What were we talking about again?”
“Please let me come with you to get the moss,” said Stephen. “So you don’t wind up as a pile of severed hands inside a diseased catfish.”

* She didn’t know why she was telling him this. She was still angry at him, and she still sure as hell didn’t want his pity. Maybe it was just her fate to have earnest, awkward conversations with this man. <> _Normal people flirt. I think. Apparently we just exchange terrible life stories.
“I’ll give you that. Still. If we limited loving to just the sane, undamaged people, the next generation would have about three people in it and presumably humanity would die out shortly afterward.”

“I wasn’t a screaming berserker as a teenager.”
“You’re not one now either,” said Istvhan. “I mean, you don’t scream. You make this sort of growling noise when you go. Now, Galen, he wails like the unquiet dead, but—”
“Istvhan.”
“Look, if you can’t laugh about the homicidal fits that make you a menace to society, what’s even the point?”

* “The bishop,” said Istvhan, almost apologetically, “is a marvelous woman. And of course she could not have a liaison with anyone in the hierarchy, for obvious reasons, but as we stand outside the hierarchy…”
“Saint’s teeth,” said Stephen. “You’re nailing Beartongue?”
“Well, it might be more accurate to say she’s nailing me,” admitted Istvhan. “She’s a decade older than I am and between you, me, and the gods, I’m having a hard time keeping up. I’m honestly thinking about taking one of these assignments to the far north, just so I can get some rest.”

Jorge had never held it against him, but of course he wouldn’t. Paladins turned forgiveness into a competitive sport, given the chance.

Jorge laughed and slung his arm around Stephen’s shoulders. “You seem cheerful.”
“Everyone is saying that,” said Stephen. “I don’t know why. I’m up to my ass in failed murder plots and the Motherhood would probably like me thrown in prison on suspicion of something or other.”
“Pfff, they want everyone thrown into prison. Don’t get a swelled head over it.”
“Also I tripped over a severed head yesterday.”
“Oh, it was your head!”

Marguerite, who had a grasp on human nature like some people had a grasp on a knife hilt said, “Where’s your watchdog today?”
“He’s a paladin,” said Marguerite. “They only have a couple of emotions and the primary one is guilt. You’ll see.”
* He was going to have to face up to the fact that he’d made a mess of things and go and apologize. Which was itself fraught because he knew his apology might not help and that meant that he was apologizing for himself, not for her. It wasn’t her job to absolve him of the fact that he’d been an ass. If all he wanted was absolution, he should probably be asking Istvhan to take his confession again.
Stephen did not know if he had ever seen such relief in another person’s face, and his mind flashed back to Grace saying, “Relief feels like happiness, if you don’t know the difference.”
He closed his arms around her and felt a jolt through him. Not lust, but a sensation like a tumbler in a lock or a bone jarred back into the socket. This was right. This was where he was supposed to be, at this exact moment. All his certainty that he had been doing the right thing by stepping away from her was burned instantly away.
On the battlefield, when the golden fire took you, you knew that of all the places in heaven and earth, this was the singular place where you were meant to stand. Since the god had died, he had not felt that certainty. It was one of many things that he had assumed was lost, that he would never feel again. <> With Grace’s head tucked under his chin and his arms around her, he realized that this, at least, was a certainty that humans could give each other.
He looked around. This was technically breaking and entering, even if he wasn’t going to take anything. What on earth would he say if Grace’s neighbors caught him? “Don’t mind me, ma’am, I’m a paladin. Just checking your dovecote for rogue perfume weasels, now that your neighbor’s been arrested on suspicion of poisoning a visiting head of state.”

It took Stephen rather longer, and she heard the chink of chain and a good deal of quiet muttering. It made her laugh.
“It’s not usual that the gentleman’s clothes are more complex than the lady’s,” she said.
“The gentleman isn’t usually carrying an anvil’s worth of metal around on his back.”

“Well.” The gnole waved his paws. “A golem is being big, yeah? Very big. Not easy. These…” he gestured to the clay heads “…easy. Small. Small kiln, small head.”
“And if one gets damaged, you can just pull the head out and put it in another body,” said Stephen slowly. “A whole army. Just add corpses.”
“Thanks,” said Mallory. “I didn’t need to sleep at night or anything.” He looked over at the gnole. “Efficient was the word. You were right.” The gnole looked professionally pleased.

* “Really, I’d appreciate it if you at least checked with me before you go haring off and taking all your fellow paladins with you. Although apparently that’s technically Istvhan’s fault, so no dessert for him, either.”... “Damn straight.” She turned to Grace. “As for you, Miss Angelica, I have no control over your dessert situation. However, I fear that in order to exonerate Paladin Stephen of the charge of kidnapping, I was forced to claim that you were the mastermind of the jailbreak.”
That was what tripped us up. We kept thinking it had to be something to do with the Archon or the Motherhood. But it really had nothing to do with us at all. A failed attempt needed to be made on the Prince’s life so that the successful attempt could be blamed on the same people. It was all about controlling the eventual investigation so as to exonerate the Prince’s brother. ‘The Prince has been assassinated by unknown people’ is a far different investigation than ‘Assassins targeted the Prince and succeeded on the second attempt.’” <> “And then we foiled the first attempt on accident,” said Stephen.

“Although I’m not sure how a woman who is six years dead signs a building over to me.”
The last page was not a document. It was a note, folded in half. She opened it.
_I’m sorry to run like this. You’ve probably got questions, but there’s a few too many people sniffing after me. I did my best to sort everything out before I left. I’m sorry I couldn’t say goodbye in person. Pet Tab for me.

“Also, my back has gone out,” he admitted.
Grace’s hands flew to her mouth. “Oh my god! Are you all right?”
“I can’t move,” he admitted. “I would have laid down on the floor, but that would have rather derailed your confrontation. And I don’t think I can get back up again.”

She knew what was coming next. Well, what was one more awkward conversation, really? The gods know, our entire relationship seems to be based on them. “What happens now?” she asked.