Dreaming God’s people?”
He flinched. She hadn’t expected that. But still, absent that regrettable beard, the man was downright beautiful. And if you see a beautiful paladin, odds are good it’s one of the Dreaming God’s. But clearly that touched a nerve.
“I’m sorry,” she said, with her most contrite smile. “I just put my foot in it, didn’t I?”
“I served in the Dreaming God’s Temple until my eighteenth year,” he said. “But the god did not see fit to take me into service.”
Ouch. From what Marguerite knew of paladins, which admittedly wasn’t a great deal, this was akin to being jilted at the altar, only by your god instead of your bride. She wondered how long ago that had been. Without the beard, she reassessed his age. Mid-thirties at most. There was the slightest suggestion of lines at the corners of his eyes, but that was all.
If the god didn’t take him, it certainly wasn’t because of his looks. But I don’t think I’ll say that out loud.
“That temple’s loss is clearly my gain,” she said, instead. “Glad to have you with us. Both of you.” She nodded to Wren, who now had a fashionable haircut and appeared to resent it.
They both saluted. Marguerite winced. “Oh yes,” said Beartongue, as the pair went to their horses, “they’re saluting types.”
“I really should have guessed.”
“You are their commander.”
“I don’t want to be their commander. I just want to be the one in charge.”
Beartongue laughed at that. “I have been saying that for years now. Let me know if it works out any better for you.”
Marguerite shook her head, eyes still following Shane. “Damn, he cleaned up nice.”
Beartongue leaned over and murmured, for her ears only, “It would be a gross violation of power to force an underling to modify their appearance for my amusement. So believe me when I say that I have wanted an ethical excuse to make him shave that miserable beard for years.”
“You don’t have a barber, you have a miracle-worker,” said Marguerite, at roughly the same volume.
“Your Holiness,” Shane called.
The Bishop looked up inquiringly. Marguerite watched the paladin stride toward them, then drop gracefully to one knee before her.
“I request your blessing, Your Holiness.”
“Rat’s tail,” said Beartongue. “You know you don’t need to get on your knees for that.”
An almost imperceptible smile crossed the man’s lips. Marguerite suspected that she was the only one at the correct angle to see it.
“Very well,” muttered the Bishop, holding out her hand. “May the Rat walk with you and clear the way before you, and may your problems contain the seeds of their own solutions. And for the love of
all that’s holy, don’t die.” （Marguerite suspected that last bit was not actually part of the formal blessing, but then again, the Rat was very practical, so she couldn’t swear to it.） Shane rose as gracefully as he had knelt. She filed that away in the back of her mind. She did not know a great deal about the Saint of Steel, but she knew that His paladins were not generally knighted. Nevertheless, something about the way Shane moved, the practiced ease of his deference, made her think of the knights that she knew.
Well, if he was in the Dreaming God’s temple, he may well have been. They do tend to knight their people, if only because it makes life easier for someone to have secular authority when a demon shows up.
He went over to where the other paladin was standing next to a horse, and knelt again, offering her his laced hands as a stirrup. She climbed onto the animal with the set expression of a woman climbing a very tall ladder to a very great height. Shane stood up and said something to her that Marguerite didn’t catch, but which made Wren laugh.
Were they lovers? They seemed absolutely comfortable with each other’s bodies, but it was impossible to tell if that was from the intimacy of battle or the bedchamber.
“Oh, I should warn you,” said Beartongue, as she turned to leave. “One last thing.”
Marguerite braced herself. There was a glint in the other woman’s eye. It wasn’t quite malice, but it was definitely mischief. “Yes?”
“Shane can do the voice really well.”
“The voice? What voice?”
The glint became a gleam. “I suspect you’ll find out.” And then she was gone in a swirl of vestments, while Marguerite stared after her, wondering what on earth she was talking about.
The first leg of their journey was deeply uneventful. They took the road by slow stages for the riders who were not accustomed to time on horseback. Marguerite felt her nerves slowly settle. The Red Sail’s attempts to murder her had mostly occurred in places where they were already established. While it would be simple enough for someone to lie in wait with a crossbow, it would require them to know which road she was taking or to stake out every possible road. Marguerite was quite certain that she simply wasn’t worth that kind of effort. She was a loose end, not an active target.
Being a loose end is quite unsettling enough, thank you very much.
Wren was cheerful and chatty and Beartongue had been right—she really didn’t complain. Even when she was slapping about in the saddle with her teeth gritted and lines of pain around her eyes, she didn’t ask for stops. Marguerite found herself calling for an early halt out of pure sympathy.
Truth was, she was grateful for the frequent stops herself. While she often worked with the mounted nobility, riding out for a few hours of flirtation was rather different than day after day on horseback. She was not exactly sore, but she was certainly very stiff.
Though not as stiff as some people I could name. Her eyes drifted to the tall blonde man beside
her.
Shane was courteous, answered her questions politely, and volunteered nothing. Marguerite’s attempts to draw him into conversation failed utterly. He was from a town southeast of the Dowager’s capital. Had he grown up there? No. Had he been back? No. Did he miss it? No. Was the landscape similar? Yes, but the trees were different. Whenever she left a silence and waited for him to fill it, he allowed the silence to grow.
He didn’t laugh at her jokes. （She didn’t take it personally because he didn’t laugh at anyone else’s jokes either, and their groom, Foster, made quite a good one about a chicken.） He watched everything and said nothing unless spoken to.
She didn’t think that he was unintelligent. It seemed more like he was paying very close attention to the world and filing it all away somewhere behind those ice-colored eyes and simply had nothing to say.
For many people, this might have made him unreadable, but Marguerite had made her life’s work out of reading people, and the day that she couldn’t read a silence was the day that she retired and took up goat farming. The key was usually the eyelids. People say the eyes are the windows to the soul, but windows don’t actually have expressions. But you can sure tell a lot by how someone closes the blinds. The little twitchy muscles in the lower lid, the fine lines at the outer edge, the startled blink—those were the tells that she watched for.
Sadly, it was extremely difficult to watch someone’s eyelids when you were both on horseback, on different horses, facing the same direction.