It’s fine.
No, it’s not fine, but I’ll deal with it anyway. He wants to do good more than anyone I’ve ever met, and I have to let him. Trying to keep him with me instead of off fighting demons would be like asking a working dog to be a lap dog instead.
The thought made a yawning chasm open up in her guts. She had been avoiding it for weeks now, but it seemed that she couldn’t ignore it any longer.
Doing the right thing for someone else’s good. How very noble of me. Almost paladinly. Shit.
“All right,” Shane said. “Where are we going?”
“I haven’t—wait, we?”
He looked down at her, clearly baffled. “Yes, of course. Did you think I wouldn’t come with you?”
“I thought…” Marguerite swallowed. The knot in her stomach seemed to have changed and become a lump in her throat. “I didn’t think you’d want to come with me.”
He made an impatient gesture. “Where you go, I go.”
“Are you sure?”
“If the Sail is still going to try to kill you, you’ll need a bodyguard.”
“But…” Marguerite pinched the bridge of her nose. She hadn’t seen this coming.
Pile it on all the other things I didn’t see coming, I suppose. Samuel would give me such a lecture. But it was too good to be true, it was what she wanted, and things that were too good to be true were suspicious.
“Shane, you have other duties. I know that. And I really don’t want to come between you and your god.”
His eyes were the blue of a very hot flame. “You both came back for me. But you came back first.”
“Yes, but…Shane, He’s a god. Won’t He want you to go…I don’t know…chop up bulls that are speaking in tongues?”
“There’s no reason I can’t do that while we’re on the move, is there?”
Marguerite had to stop and think about that one. Was there a reason? Granted, slaying demons wasn’t quiet or subtle, but any sensible operative would be running in the other direction. Demons weren’t profitable for anybody. Frankly, if we’re tracking down demons, the Sail will be trying to get as far away from us as possible. And nobody can predict where they’ll show up, and if we’re moving from temple to temple, the Sail sure can’t buy off anyone there.
“Good god,” she said. “That might actually work.”
Shane stared intently into her face for a moment, and then, to her surprise, began to laugh.
“What? What’s so funny?”
“Sorry,” he said, immediately getting himself under control. “I’m sorry.”
“You’ll be really sorry if you don’t tell me why you were laughing.”
His lips were twitching and he couldn’t quite meet her eyes. “It’s just that you looked like someone had just hit you with a board. And I thought, oh hey, that must be how I look nearly all the time…”
Marguerite dug her elbow into his ribs. “Very funny. And how are you going to explain to the temple here that you have to go roam about the countryside with no forwarding address?”
“I thought I’d just tell them.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Seriously?”
Shane rubbed the back of his neck. “I realize I’m not as good at this as you are, but I was an avatar of the god for a minute or two, and they’re all still a little worried about that. But that won’t last forever. Every time I go over to the Dreaming God’s temple, I get the feeling that a lot of the priests would like me to go away. Not die, you understand. Just go be someone else’s problem. Does that make sense?”
“That makes a lot of sense, actually. We might make an operative of you yet.”
He made a hasty warding gesture and Marguerite laughed. The lump in her throat had gone, and left her feeling strangely light. Maybe she didn’t have to be noble and self-sacrificing after all. “I did
promise to do something about their intelligence network. But are you sure? Really sure? I know you don’t always approve of everything I do.”
He looked uncomfortable, and she suspected that he was thinking of Maltrevor. “Who am I to approve or disapprove?”
“You’re the man I love, for one thing. And you’re the only man I’ve ever known who makes me feel safe.”
He wrapped his arms around her, but not before she caught sight of the smile spreading across his face.
“We’ll work something out,” he said. “I’m told you’re a master negotiator.”
She leaned against him, feeling safe, blessedly safe, like she felt nowhere else. Thinking of how he looked, reading by rushlight, with spectacles perched on the tip of his nose, and how he felt in her arms, wrists bound by a fragile length of thread.
“If you’re sure,” she said. “But swear to me that you’ll tell me if something’s wrong. You won’t just suffer in martyred silence. Because I love you, and I want this to work.”
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “I love you, and I want it to work, too.” And he said it in the voice, so she believed him.
EPILOGUE
BISHOP BEARTONGUE LEANED on the upper railing of the warehouse, watching the work going on below. A machine the size of a small room was being slowly assembled on the floor of the warehouse, by a dozen harried-looking apprentices and two acolytes of the Forge God. Ashes Magnus sat on a chair in the center of the chaos, directing the streams of activity and occasionally shouting things like, “No, other way ’round!” and “If you hook that up there, your eyebrows won’t grow back in a hurry, my lad!”
“So you’re building it,” said Rigney, her assistant, coming to stand beside her. “I wasn’t actually sure that you would.”
“Neither was I,” Beartongue admitted.
“And will it work?”
“The Forge God’s people say it should. We won’t know until it’s built. And even then, we won’t know if it’s cost-efficient.” She waved her hand at the machine. “We’re having to bring in barrels of sea water for this one, which pretty much kills the budget, but if it does work the way Magnus thinks, we’ll put a much larger one in Delta. If it works.”
Rigney knew her far too well to be put off by that. “You think it will, though.”
Beartongue blew air out in a long sigh. “I do. That will make the most problems, so of course that’s what will happen.”
Rigney folded his arms and gazed down at the controlled chaos below. “It will disrupt a great many things if it does work.”
“I know.” Beartongue gave a short, humorless laugh. “Do you know that the damned thing makes ice too? Ashes didn’t care about that bit. Said it was just a byproduct and wasn’t that interesting.”
Rigney’s eyebrows shot up. Ice was expensive and had to be stored in sawdust underground through the summer months. In a city like Archon’s Glory, where the water table was never very far below the surface, that made it a rare luxury item. “The Rat have mercy,” he muttered.
Beartongue could see him doing figures in his head. “I know, right?” She rubbed her face. “Yes. It will change a ridiculous number of things, I expect. Probably even a few that no one’s thought of yet.