From Stian’s naming of the dance rounds, I had estimated the change of season would come some two hours past midnight. I would know, he’d said. But then, he had not thought I would be wallowing in a stupor, clutching a pierced hand and working not to empty my guts onto the lighthouse floor.
Gildas had returned to his bench. He cleaned his knife and coiled the rope he had used to hold Jullian. “Come, sit up, Valen,” he said when he’d finished these tasks. “We’ll share a pitcher of mead. Very good mead, I would imagine, as it was laid down in the early days of the lighthouse.”
Behind him, Jullian was twisting his face like a mischievous aingerou, and one of his hands kept making sharp jerking movements. Something about the pitcher in his hand. About Gildas. Distract him…
Gildas narrowed his eyes and glanced over his shoulder. Jullian stepped around us, and I heard him set pitcher and cups on the table behind me. I uncurled, pushed up with my arms, and vomited into Gildas’s lap. That he then kicked me in the face with his slimed boot didn’t matter. Nothing could hurt me.
“Disgusting filth,” snapped Gildas. “Find a rag and clean this up, boy. My boots, too.”
Jullian trotted off and soon returned with a ragged towel. Once the mess was dealt with, Gildas ordered Jullian to pour the mead. “Remember what I told you, boy. Whatever I eat or drink, your protector eats or drinks, as well.”
“Aye, I remember.” So much for my muddled hope that Jullian had poisoned the damnable monk.
Gildas watched as Jullian poured, then prodded me with his boot. “Get up and get something in your stomach, Valen, or I’ll have to drag you to your cell. You remember Gillarine’s little prison? You’ve chains and silkbindings waiting.”
Gildas and I drained our cups in perfect unison. And in perfect unison, we gasped. The bone-cracking spasms came hard and fast; the light splintered.
“J-Jullian,” I croaked, aghast, “what have you done?”
Gildas paled and clutched his belly. Shudders racked his limbs. “The wretched little beast…poisoned us both.”
Not poison. The doulon. I wanted to weep and laugh all together. So bright a mind, but the boy didn’t understand. This would hurt Gildas for a while. But me…two massive doses in the space of an hour…The colored ceiling plummeted toward me, and I threw my arms over my head. My skin felt as if it were peeling away from my bones. Gildas screamed and collapsed on the floor.
“I’m sorry, Brother Valen. So sorry. I know it’s awful.” Jullian kicked Gildas’s knife away and shoved stools and table out of the monk’s reach. With the coiled rope that had bound his own neck, he tied the weeping, writhing Gildas’s hands behind him. Then, grabbing me under my arms, he dragged me, quat by quat, toward the stair. “I had to pour from the same pitcher—give it to you both—else he’d never drink it.”
Trumpets blared inside my skull and would not stop, no matter how I tried to crush them, and always the pain grew, squeezing harsh bleats from my ragged throat. In all my life I had never hurt so wickedly—and my body seized and begged for more. “Kill me. Please, god…”
Images flashed before my eyes and fractured before I could identify them. The world was crumbling, and even Gildas’s groans could not put it to rights.
“Come on, Brother Valen. We’ve got to get you up the stair. I know what to do. I found out about nivat in a book. As you asked me to.”
He forced me to crawl…nudging, shoving, yelling unintelligible words…into the night…into the cold that sent spears of ice into my lungs and my heart that hammered to bursting. Through the snow that seared my raw flesh. More steps. More stone. Endless misery. Endless agony…
At last he propped me against a ring of stone, grasped my head, and forced me to look at his face. He was so ragged…weeping…but he did not falter. “This is Saint Gillare’s font, Brother. It’s a part of the Well—your sianou. Nivat is like spirits for the Danae. When they have too much of it, they go into their sianous and it puts them right. You’ve got to go into the font. Back to the Well.”
Snow drifted through the strips of stone above his head. I could not comprehend what he asked of me. “Sorry. Sorry. I can’t…”
“You must let go of your body, Brother. Then it will be all right again.”
He threw water in my face—bitterly cold and tasting of starlight—and my body understood. He shoved. I crawled. Once my aching belly rested on the font’s marble rim, he tipped me forward, and I rolled into the burbling water. With a sigh, I yielded my boundaries and plummeted, and with water, stone, and the deep-buried fires of the Well, I purged spirit and flesh of my old sin.
“Just implant the lesson in your head, Gildas. Relief comes only when I say. Food and water come only when Jullian says.”
Pain-ravaged, slimed with vomit and worse, the man who had once been my friend slumped against the stone wall of the abbey prison cell. The manacle that held his ankle to the wall gleamed bright in the light of Jullian’s lamp. The mark on his cheek, where I had struck him to resolve his first doulon and teach him of perverse pleasure, was already swelling and would make a lovely bruise.
Jullian swore that no more than half an hour had passed from the moment I rolled into the font a madman until I climbed out again, refreshed and clearheaded. I would have believed it if he’d said days or weeks, for I’d had no sense of time at all. Yet I had carried with me the urgent understanding that I must return to physical form as soon as possible. Even so, we had gone to Gildas’s relief only after we had buried Brother Victor in the herb garden.
Our prisoner croaked a laugh. “One doulon does not enslave me, Valen. I’ll walk free and never look back.” He spoke bravely now I had refused to soil my hands with his blood.
“Very true. So let me show you magic, friend Gildas. A talented physician taught me how to enhance the effect of medicines fivefold.” I crouched beside him, placed my fingers on his brow, and triggered the spell. “The doulon is but a potion after all, which means—assuming a normal cycle of eight-and-twenty days, shortened by the extra-potent paste you prepared—you have perhaps two days until you feel the hunger ready to devour you. Perhaps only one. By that time, either the world will have fallen into the chaos you desire and no one will ever come to succor you, or Osriel of Evanore will be King of Navronne, and I will bring you to his justice for the murder of Brother Horach, Brother Victor, Thane Stearc of Erasku, Gerard of Elanus, and Clyste Stian-daughter. He will not be merciful.”
Gildas lunged toward my ankles as I headed for the door. “Wait, Valen, I can tell you secrets—”
I slammed the prison cell door and locked it. “Never step within his arm’s reach, Jullian,” I said, as Gildas yelled after us. “Never open the door, but just shove a water flask through the slot. He will beg and wheedle and play on your conscience, but this is no sin to confine him.”
“He didn’t listen to Brother Victor,” said the boy as we climbed the three short flights of steps back to the alley and the lighthouse door, trailed by Gildas’s hoarse curses and a last despairing wail. “I’ll vow he didn’t listen to Gerard or Horach either. This is justice, not sin. Not at all what he did to Thane Stearc.”
“Exactly so. Now, I must go. You’re all right with being alone, lad?” I hated abandoning him. “You’ll not go out again?” Victor and Jullian had stepped out to retrieve what was left of the abbey service books and stores when Gildas took them.
The boy shook his head and hung the magical lamp on its hook just inside the door. “Brother Victor showed me how to lock and unlock the door wards without magic. I’ll be sorry he’s not here to teach me more, but I’m not afraid and not alone. Iero and his angels are with me. Teneamus, Brother Valen.”