I Accidentally Caught a Falling Goddess - The Vortex Above the Bed

On the northern gallery of the Seventh Nave below him, a lone priest in white robes was pinned against a balustrade, a heretic broadsword poised two inches above his collar.

Corin didn’t stop to draw a line. He angled his descent, dropped through the mist like a falling anvil, and his left boot struck the heretic’s shoulder-plate with the weight of a falling portcullis. The grey-coat was driven six inches into the lead roofing sheets, his weapon flying wide into the courtyard below.

“Hold the stair, brother,” Corin said without looking back, and launched himself upward again before the stunned priest could wipe the rain from his spectacles.

The roof of the Saintess’s private bedchamber had ceased to exist.

A localized tornado—eighty paces wide and black as chimney soot—roared directly above the center of the room, its funnel anchored to the four heavy oak tie-beams that supported the ceiling. The air within forty yards of the tower was thick with flying slate tiles, shattered plaster, and shredded tapestries that spun through the vortex like dead leaves in a thresher.

Inside the bedchamber, standing on the shattered parquet floor, three Holy Blades and Arch-Priest Austin were fighting for their lives.

Austin was down on one knee, his white scholar’s robe shredded to ribbons, both hands pressed against the floorboards as he channeled the last dregs of his marrow into an expanding dome of white light. But the wind was too heavy. The suction from the vortex was dragging the furniture across the room, smashing heavy oak wardrobes against the walls and peeling the plaster down to the bare lath.

On the far balcony, arms raised toward the churning clouds, stood Archon Kormac.

He was forty years old, broad-shouldered, with a long, puckered scar running from his left temple down across his lip to his collarbone. He wore no armor—only a sleeveless tunic of dark grey leather inscribed with the jagged, necrotic glyphs of the Nether-Cults. His eyes burned with an unnatural, sickly yellow glare as he poured his life-force into the storm.

“Tear the roof!” Kormac’s voice ripped through the gale, carrying the ear-splitting resonance of a Grand Master. “Bring the bed into the sky! Let the crows feed on the empty vessel!”

The white dome over the bed shattered with a sound like breaking glass.

The two remaining Holy Blades were lifted clean off their feet, tumbling through the roaring funnel like rag dolls, their swords spinning away into the dark.

Upon the four-poster bed of carved walnut, Saintess Verene lay motionless.

Her long, flaxen hair was whipping wildly in the wind, her linen shift clinging to her frail frame as the suction of the black vortex lifted her mattress two feet off the floorboards. She was entirely limp, her head thrown back, her grey, translucent skin offering no resistance as her body was drawn upward toward the toothless maw of the funnel.

A young acolyte girl lunged forward to grab the edge of the sheet, but the wind caught her, hurling her thirty feet against the stone fireplace where she collapsed into the soot.

The bed frame splintered into twenty jagged beams, and Verene’s body was sucked twenty feet into the air, rising straight toward the rotating core of the storm.

“She’s mine!” Kormac roared, stepping out onto the empty air of the balcony as his dark aether lifted him toward the prize.

Then the clouds broke.

A single, vertical line of blinding, sun-golden fire dropped out of the sky, faster than the thunder of it.

Corin did not shout an incantation. He did not ask for divine assistance.

He came down through the center of the vortex, his left arm hooking around Saintess Verene’s narrow waist with the instinctive, iron-hard grip of an apprentice catching a falling bolt of dyed wool. He pulled her frail, cold torso tight against his left ribs, planted his heels in the empty air, and brought the Sun-Blade down in a single, two-handed vertical cleave.

The golden arc did not merely cut the wind.

It severed the spatial tension that held the tornado together. The three-hundred-foot funnel of black soot and shattered timber split cleanly down the middle with a sound like an iron boiler bursting under a hammer-blow.

The roar of the gale died in a single, choked gasp.

A rain of shattered slates, torn velvet, and splintered oak beams dropped straight down onto the floorboards with a deafening, clattering crash.

Corin landed on the shattered parquet floor, his boots crushing through the plaster debris, his left arm locked firmly around the sleeping girl’s waist.

Verene’s head rested against his shoulder, her flaxen hair spilling over his blue cadet tunic, her breath coming in slow, faint puffs that smelled faintly of dry lavender and cold rain. Through the thin linen of her shift, he could feel the frail, terrifying flutter of her heart—so light and rapid it felt like a trapped bird beating its wings against his ribs.

Across the ruined room, hovering three feet above the broken balcony rail, Archon Kormac stared at them.

The yellow glare in the heretic’s eyes flickered, replaced for a fraction of a second by pure, uncomprehending shock as his gaze traveled from the unconscious girl to the three-foot unadorned broadsword burning with golden fire in Corin’s right fist.

“A boy,” Kormac whispered, his scarred jaw tightening until the muscle stood out like a knot of rope. “The See puts the living vessel in the arms of a common apprentice.”

Corin shifted his boots in the plaster, brought the Sun-Blade up to an outside hanging guard, and looked the heretic warlord dead in the eye.

“Get off the balcony, heretic,” Corin said, his voice flat and steady as an anvil. “Before I take your head off.”

Plaster dust fell through the broken rafters like grey flour, settling into the damp fur of Corin’s collar.

The wind coming off the gorge was wet, sharp with the smell of scorched masonry and the tallowy grease of burned roof-pitch. Verene was limp against his ribs, her head hanging back over his left bicep, her flaxen hair tangled in the brass buttons of his navy cadet coat. Her skin had the cool, dry feel of unbaked dough, but where her cheek rested against his throat, her breath came in faint, shallow puffs that hitched every fourth beat.

“Put the girl on the floorboards, boy,” Archon Kormac said.

The heretic warlord was not standing on the masonry. He drifted four inches above the shattered balcony flagstones, the air around his scarred jaw shimmering with a greasy, yellow-tinted heat that distorted the rain falling behind his shoulders. His right hand dropped to his side, fingers curling inward with a dry, rhythmic clack of cracked fingernails.

A five-foot broadsword of dark, auric aether condensed out of his palm with a roar like an iron furnace door being kicked open.

It was not the pure, sun-pale gold of the relic blade in Corin’s fist. Kormac’s aether was the dark, oily yellow of stagnant butter, streaked with veins of dull rust-red that hummed with a low, bone-grinding vibration that made the lead flashing on the roof-edge curl and blister.

“You have a dead man’s sword in your grip,” Kormac rasped, the long scar across his mouth stretching tight as he smiled. “And you’re hauling a full-grown woman on your off-arm. Do you know what happens to a boy’s lumbar when he takes fifty tons of hydraulic impact on a split stance?”

Corin didn’t answer him. He shifted his left boot two inches back into the rubble, his heel locking against the edge of a broken floor joist.

He didn’t drop Verene.

His left forearm was locked tight beneath her armpits, her frail weight pressed against his side like a sack of dry fleece. He brought the Sun-Blade up across his breastplate, resting the unpolished iron fuller along his forward line, his thumb hooked over the square crossguard just as Bancraft’s fourth margin had diagrammed.

The steel does not fight the weight, the old master’s handwriting whispered through his blood. The steel balances the marrow. When the off-side carries mass, the blade becomes the counter-lever.

Kormac moved.

There was no preliminary shift of his hips. There was no wind-up.

The heretic warlord crossed the twenty paces of open room in the space of a single heartbeat, his boots barely touching the plaster before his dark gold broadsword came down in a thunderous diagonal cleave aimed directly through Corin’s left shoulder—where Verene’s neck rested against the blue wool.

Corin’s body moved before his brain could form a thought.

The ancient memory sleeping inside the Sun-Blade took his right wrist and twisted it three degrees outward, bringing the forte of the iron blade up at a steep, forty-five-degree wedge.

CLANG!

No ring of steel. Just a flat, concussive boom — an iron mortar bursting in a trench.

A shockwave of compressed air and golden sparks ripped through the ruined bedchamber, blowing the remaining lath and plaster off the walls, shattering every pane of glass in the western gallery forty yards away. The floorboards beneath Corin’s boots groaned, two oak joists snapping with dry cracks as the sheer downward mass of Kormac’s blow drove Corin three inches into the timber.

The pain that shot through Corin’s right shoulder was blinding, but his left arm didn’t slip. He kept Verene tucked tight against his ribs, using the recoil of the impact to spin on his right heel, deflecting Kormac’s dark blade off the flat of his fuller and sending the heretic’s point crashing into the hearthstones behind him.

The granite fireplace exploded into gravel.

Kormac didn’t pause. He ripped his blade out of the stone with a savage jerk, spun on the ball of his foot, and launched a blistering sequence of six rapid-fire thrusts aimed at Corin’s eyes, throat, and lower belly.

Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.

The two auric blades met in the air like twin lightning bolts trapped in a cellar.

Corin was moving faster than he had ever run on the shingle of Lake Angdos. He didn’t try to overpower Kormac’s blows; he used the short, brutal deflections of the Old March guard, meeting each thrust with the thickest part of his blade, his iron pommel snapping in tight circles that threw Kormac’s dark aether wide by half an inch every single time.

The wind from their blades cut the falling rain into white spray.

“You’re fast, dyer,” Kormac snarled, his yellow eyes bulging as he pressed his weight into a high bind, his scarred face inches from Corin’s nose. “A common apprentice with the reflexes of a grand-master! But your left arm is going numb, isn’t it? The girl’s dead weight is dragging your spine out of true!”

The heretic was right.

Corin’s left shoulder was screaming with a hot, tearing agony; holding Verene’s body while pivoting against thirty tons of kinetic force was shredding the muscle fibers along his shoulder blade. His breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps, the sweat stinging his eyes.

Kormac suddenly dropped his shoulder, broke the bind, and drove his left elbow straight toward Verene’s exposed temple.

The strike was vicious, dirty, and utterly lethal. If that blow landed, the fragile clay of the living vessel would crack like an unglazed eggshell.

Corin didn’t try to block with his sword.

He threw his own body forward, twisting his torso to take the full weight of Kormac’s iron-clad elbow directly into his own right collarbone.

The bone cracked with a dull, sickening snap.

Pain exploded behind Corin’s eyes like a flash of black powder, but he didn’t stumble. He clamped his teeth together until the blood ran from his gums, hooked his right foot behind Kormac’s lead ankle, and brought the pommel of the Sun-Blade around in a savage, rising hook that caught the warlord squarely under the chin.

Kormac’s head snapped back with a wet crunch of broken teeth.

The heretic flew backward through the broken balcony doors, his boots tearing through the lead flashing, tumbling ten yards across the outer stone terrace before he caught himself on one knee, spitting a mouthful of black blood and splintered bone into the rain.

Corin stood in the shattered doorway, breathing through his teeth, his right arm trembling as the golden fire on the Sun-Blade pulsed with a deep, furious heartbeat.

He looked down at Verene.

The girl had not stirred. Her head rested against his ruined shoulder, her skin still cool and pale, the faint smell of dried lavender rising from her hair amidst the stink of sulfur and blood.

“I have you,” Corin muttered into her hair, his voice thick with blood and rain. “I’m not letting go.”

He stepped out onto the rain-swept terrace, his boots crunching on the wet gravel, the Sun-Blade pointed straight at Kormac’s throat.

The rain over the High Spire had turned to sleet, rattling against the slate parapets like handfuls of river sand.

Archon Kormac hauled himself to his feet against the stone balustrade, his dark leather tunic shredded at the ribs, black arterial blood leaking through his fingers where Corin’s pommel had fractured his jaw. His yellow eyes were no longer arrogant; they were wide, bloodshot, and burning with the frantic, cornered madness of a wolf caught in an iron gin.

“Two hundred years,” Kormac rasped, his voice thick with spit and broken teeth. “The Covenant waited two hundred years for the thousand-year hex to ripen… for the Mother’s curse to strip the starlight from her flesh… And they send a boy with grease on his sleeves to hold the door.”

He dropped the broken hilt of his dark broadsword onto the terrace flags.

The iron clattered, rolled twice, and tumbled over the stone lip, falling three hundred feet into the courtyard below.

Kormac didn’t reach for another steel blade.

He brought both hands together in front of his sternum, his fingers interlacing in the forbidden, seven-pointed knot of the Nether-Tithe. He began to breathe—not in the rhythmic, hydraulic cadence of the martial schools, but in short, violent gasps that sucked the very air out of the terrace.

The atmospheric pressure around the high tower plummeted in an instant.

The sleet stopped falling. The raindrops froze in mid-air, suspended like thousands of tiny glass beads. Around Kormac’s chest, the fabric of space began to warp, bending the light from the burning cloister below into a dark, swirling funnel of absolute void.

“Origin Detonation,” Corin heard Arch-Priest Austin croak from the ruined doorway behind him, the old scholar dragging his broken legs across the parquet. “He’s collapsing his marrow-core… He’s going to level the entire western ridge… Run, Frankland! Take the vessel and jump for the lower roofs!”

Corin looked down at the courtyard three hundred feet below.

The imperial vanguard had breached the outer gates; two hundred cavalrymen under General Salmond were pouring through the smoke, their gilded lances flashing in the torchlight. If Kormac detonated his core, thirty thousand people in the lower square would be vaporized in one blind wave of necrotic fire.

There was nowhere to run.

Corin knelt on his right knee, lowering Saintess Verene gently onto a dry pile of fallen velvet drapery beneath the stone lintel. He touched her cold cheek with the back of his bloody knuckles, then stood up, turning his back on the girl.

His right collarbone was broken, the jagged edge of the bone grinding against his trapezius with every heartbeat, but inside his marrow, the fire had ceased to be violet.

It was white. It was gold. It was the cold, unyielding iron of a dyer’s boy who had stood over Master Sona’s vats until his hands were raw and his back was straight.

He took the hilt of the Sun-Blade in both hands, planting his boots wide on the slippery terrace flagstones.

A-E-L-I-S.

The five runes along the fuller flared with a light so brilliant it burned the shadows out of the stone cornices.

Across the terrace, Kormac let out a final, ear-splitting shriek that did not belong to a human throat. His chest split open, revealing a roaring, spherical singularity of black-and-crimson anti-matter that began to expand at the speed of sound.

“Die with the Dawn, dog!” the warlord screamed.

Corin didn’t shout.

He drew his breath deep into his pelvis, locked his diaphragm, and swung the Sun-Blade upward from his right hip in a clean, vertical crescent.

He did not strike Kormac.

He struck the empty air four feet in front of his own boots.

The consecrated iron edge severed the fabric of reality itself.

With a sound like a wet linen sail tearing in a hurricane, a three-fathom-tall vertical rift tore open in the middle of the terrace—a clean, black fissure that revealed the cold, starless void of the outer cosmos.

The suction from the spatial tear was instantaneous and absolute.

Kormac’s expanding necrotic detonation did not touch the stone parapet; it was dragged into the void like bathwater down an open drain. The roaring black fire, the expanding crimson pressure, the fragments of Kormac’s flesh and shattered armor—all of it was pulled into the spatial slit in the space of a single, breathless second.

The heretic warlord let out one last, choking gasp as his shoulders were dragged through the event horizon.

Then the Sun-Blade reached the apex of its arc.

Corin snapped his wrists forward, bringing the point down, and the spatial tear closed with a dry, hollow thump that sounded like a heavy oak bible being slammed shut on a wooden lectern.

The terrace went dead silent.

The sleet began to fall again, hissing softly as it struck the warm flagstones where Kormac had stood. There was no blood, no ash, no shattered bone; where the heretic warlord had been, there remained only a faint circle of white frost on the granite.

Corin stood alone on the terrace, his hands still clamped around the hilt of the broadsword, his chest heaving in great, shuddering sobs.

The golden fire on the steel flickered once, twice, and died away, leaving only the plain, unpolished iron resting across his knuckles.

From the courtyard below came the thunderous roar of two hundred imperial horsemen, the brass trumpets of the High Guard sounding the general muster, their white-and-gold banners fluttering through the smoke.

Footsteps pounded up the stone spiral stairs behind him.

Ser Campton Runcorn limped through the shattered doorway, leaning heavily on a broadsword he had scavenged from a fallen guard, his wounded thigh bound with a blood-soaked linen rag. Behind him came Judith, her head wrapped in a white bandage, her side-sword drawn, her face pale as lard.

“Corin!” Judith screamed, dropping her blade and lunging across the rubble to catch him as his knees gave way.

Campton stopped beside the velvet drapery where Saintess Verene lay sleeping. He knelt down, pressed his rough thumb against the girl’s throat, felt the steady, regular beat of her mortal pulse, and let out a long, ragged breath that sounded almost like a sob.

He looked up at Corin, who was slumping against Judith’s shoulder, his broken collarbone protruding beneath the torn blue wool of his tunic.

“He cut the void,” the old swordsman whispered, his hand trembling as he reached out to touch the cold hilt of the Sun-Blade. “The boy cut the void with unranked marrow…”

As Campton’s fingers closed around the grip, Corin let his hands open.

The weight of three hundred years of dead men’s memories left his skull in a single, dizzying rush.

His vision went grey, the sound of Judith’s frantic voice calling his name faded into a distant, muffled roar, and Corin collapsed forward onto the wet stones of the terrace, completely and utterly unconscious.

A mouthful of bitter vinegar and steeped wintergreen was the first thing that cleared the numbness from Corin’s tongue.

He was lying flat on a low pallet of stitched sackcloth, his cheek pressed into a coarse wool bolster that smelled of stale horse tallow and lye soap. Overhead, the ceiling was made of heavy, unmortared granite blocks, their joints weeping dark moisture that dripped with a slow, hollow cadence into an iron bucket near his feet. A single tallow dip guttered on an overturned water cask, throwing yellow, greasy light across the whitewashed stone.

His right collarbone was bound tight with five yards of unbleached linen, the cloth pinned across his shoulder with a square iron bodkin.

“Drink it and stop squirming,” Judith’s voice rasped from the shadows near the cask.

She was sitting on a three-legged stool with her sleeves rolled past her elbows, a clean linen bandage wrapped around her own forehead, covering the bruised knot where the heretic’s iron mace had caught her temple. Her plum-colored gown was smeared with lime dust and dark grease, but her hands were steady as she held an earthen mug to his lips.

Corin took two swallows. The broth was bitter enough to make his throat seize, but as the hot liquid hit his belly, the hollow, nauseating void in his ribcage receded slightly.

“Where are we?” he croaked, his voice sounding like two dry pine boards scraped together.

“Under the Fourth Nave,” she said, setting the mug down on the cask with a dull clatter. “The old cellars where the guardians store winter salt and oil-casks. Uncle carried you down through the service hoist before the imperial wardens could seal the upper galleries.”

Corin tried to sit up, but the moment his weight shifted onto his left elbow, the muscles in his neck spasmed, driving a sharp, iron-cold ache down through his spine. He fell back against the bolster, his breath hissing through his teeth.

“The broadsword,” he whispered.

“On the oak pegs where it belongs,” a voice rumbled from the arched doorway.

Ser Campton Runcorn stepped into the yellow circle of lamplight, his massive, square frame filling the doorway from jamb to lintel. The old master had stripped off his torn white arming coat; he wore only a grey wool shirt with the sleeves ripped away, revealing thick, hairy forearms corded with scarred tissue. His left thigh was wrapped in fresh bandages stiff with dried blood, but he walked without a staff, his heavy boots making no sound on the wet flagstones.

He stopped at the foot of the pallet, crossed his thick arms over his chest, and looked down at Corin with small, dark eyes that were completely free of sleep.

“The Saintess is in the deep crypt,” Campton said, his voice level and heavy as a slab of quarry slate. “The virgins washed the roof-dust from her hair and laid her on the down mattress. Her pulse is eighty beats to the minute, regular as a water-clock. She won’t wake until the seventh dawn, but the clay of her body is whole.”

Corin let out a long, ragged breath, his fingers relaxing against the sackcloth. “The heretic warlord… Kormac…”

“Swallowed by the dark,” Campton grunted. “The imperial inquisitors spent two hours sweeping the terrace with scanning crystals. They found half an iron boot-heel and three ounces of white ash. They think the Nether-Cult’s detonation backfired when General Salmond’s vanguard battered through the outer portcullis.”

The old master stepped closer, his heavy shadow falling across Corin’s face.

“That is the report General Salmond will sign before the High Council tomorrow morning,” Campton continued, his voice dropping into a harsh, grinding register that didn’t carry past the damp stone walls. “The official record will state that the Holy Blades held the fifth gallery, that the Heretic Archon was crushed by falling masonry, and that the Sun-Blade remained untouched upon its oak trestle throughout the assault.”

Judith frowned, looking up from her stool. “Uncle, Corin saved Verene’s life! He cleaved the gale in half! He took Kormac’s void-blast on his own chest!”

“And if the Council knows that,” Campton snapped, his small eyes flashing with sudden, dangerous fury, “the boy will not live to see the spring thaw.”

He pointed a thick, calloused finger directly at Corin’s nose.

“Listen to me, dyer’s boy. There are seventy-two noble houses in this empire with sons enrolled in the Department of Steel. Every one of them has spent three generations claiming that only pure imperial blood can resonate with the relics of the First Reign. If they find out an unranked apprentice from the lower dyeworks picked up the sovereign steel and carved a spatial rift with his bare knuckles, they will not give you a medal. They will take you to the dungeons beneath the Citadel, strap your wrists to an iron bench, and let their chirurgeons dissect the marrow out of your femur to see why your blood didn’t boil like theirs did.”

Corin stared up at the old swordsman, the cold stone ceiling dripping steadily into the bucket beside his ear. The memory of the golden fire—the ancient, weightless clarity that had filled his skull while he held the broadsword—was still humming in the deep recesses of his marrow like the echo of a brass bell.

“I don’t want a medal, Ser Campton,” Corin said quietly. “I want to walk back to the Alley of the Coopers before my mother starts checking the river-gutters for my corpse.”

Campton’s mouth twitched beneath his grey beard. He looked at the boy for three long seconds, then reached down, grabbed Corin by the uninjured left shoulder, and hauled him upright off the pallet with a single, effortless pull.

Corin’s boots hit the floorboards; his knees shook, but the bone held.

“Your uniform coat is ruined,” Campton said, tossing a dark brown wool carter’s cloak over Corin’s bandaged shoulder. “The collar was soaked in Judith’s blood and the right sleeve was shredded by Kormac’s shockwave. I had the cellar-keeper burn it in the furnace. Put this on. It smells of wet horse-blanket, but the city watch won’t look twice at a carter with his hood pulled low.”

Judith stood up, adjusting her plum-colored gown, her eyes dark with concern as she took Corin’s left arm to steady him. “I’m coming with him to the South Gate.”

“You’re going to your father’s townhouse in the High Quarter,” her uncle barked, shoving her toward the service stairs. “You’ll tell your mother you slipped on the icy steps outside the chapel and chipped your forehead on a boot-scraper. If I hear one word about the Fourth Nave from your mouth, Judith, I’ll tell the Inquisitor-General you’ve been sneaking wine to the stable-hands again.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she scowled, though she squeezed Corin’s wrist with rough, unmistakable warmth before stepping toward the steps. “Don’t die on the road, Frankland. We have blade-geometry at eight, and I’m not sitting next to Cassio Vane alone.”

“I’ll be there,” Corin said.

Twenty minutes later, Corin slipped out through the postern gate behind the cathedral stables.

The streets of Skan-Tor were black and slick with melting sleet, smelling of wet soot and burned tallow. The city had not yet recovered from the panic of the raid; mounted patrols of municipal horsemen with unlit torches trotted along the main avenues, their iron horseshoes ringing hollow against the wet granite, but the narrow lanes of the lower quarter were completely deserted.

Corin kept his head down, the rough wool hood pulled over his ears, his left hand clamped over his fractured collarbone beneath the carter’s cloak to keep the joint from grinding as he walked. Every step through the slush sent a dull, throbbing ache through his pelvis, but beneath the pain, something strange was happening in his veins.

The warlock’s black hex was completely gone.

His blood moved with a thick, heavy warmth that felt like hot olive oil, pulsing through his arteries steady and warm, keeping the freezing mist from chilling his skin.

He reached the Alley of the Coopers just as the night bells struck three.

The ground-floor window of the Frankland tenement was dark, but a thin sliver of yellow light showed beneath the door of his mother’s scullery.

Corin lifted the iron latch with the thumb of his left hand, eased the oak door open an inch at a time, and stepped over the threshold into the kitchen.

Suzanne Frankland was sitting at the pine table with her darning basket on her lap, an unlit tallow candle in her fingers, her eyes closed, her head resting against the rough whitewashed brick of the chimney-breast. She had not gone to bed. On the iron stove, a pot of turnip broth was sitting cold in its grease.

In the dark corner by the ladder leading to the garret, a figure stood motionless in the shadows.

Elspeth Phillips was leaning against the wall, wrapped in her grey wool shawl, her right hand resting casually on the horn hilt of her Thanecroft skinning knife. Her grey eyes gleamed in the faint moonlight coming through the transom.

She looked at Corin’s carter’s cloak, at the white linen bandages showing at his collar, and at the slight, awkward tilt of his right shoulder. She didn’t speak. She simply took her hand off the knife, pointed a thumb toward the loft ladder, and gave a single, slow nod.

Corin nodded back, stepped around his mother’s chair without making the floorboards creak, and began the slow, agonizing climb up the wooden rungs into the dark garret above.