"Yes," Aros said.
He could have said more. He could have told her about the palace in Sbelto, the smoke in the corridors, the king in his nightshirt, who had asked him at the very end who had sent him. He could have told her it hadn't fixed anything. But forty people were watching his face, and she was the only one whose opinion he cared about, and one word was all he could manage in front of the rest.
Gemma looked at him. Then she looked away, and he felt it like a door closing.
Talon raised a hand. That was all it took. The crowd broke apart and drifted back to the tables and the maps, still murmuring, still stealing glances over their shoulders. Broko herded the stragglers toward the door with a hand on their backs. Diana stayed by the column with her map case, pretending to sort papers, until Talon looked at her too, and then she left as well.
"Leave us," Talon said to the last of them.
When Gemma turned to follow, Aros caught her sleeve. "She stays."
Talon's pale eyes went from one to the other. "You don't trust me?"
"I don't trust anyone."
"No," Talon said. "You never did." He gestured at the bench nearest the altar. "Sit, then. Both of you. The saints can wait."
They sat. Rain had started again outside, and it came through the crack in the dome in a thin grey thread that fell straight down into a bucket someone had set beneath it. Every few seconds it made a small hollow sound. Talon stood with his back to the broken altar and his hands folded in front of him, and the silver chains on his wrists caught the candlelight.
Aros looked at the chains. He remembered them thinner. Ten years ago there had been only a few loops of cheap tin on a young priest who had walked out of the Sanctum the week the king died, who carried water to the wounded and quoted scripture at them until someone told him to stop. Now there were dozens of links, and most of them were tarnished nearly black. A handful near the clasps were new and bright.
He didn't ask about them.
"You heard what I told them," Talon said. "Some of it was even true."
"The part where I made the Priesthood afraid?"
"That part most of all." Talon smiled with half his mouth. "You know what they say about you in the villages now? That you're asleep somewhere in the hills, like the old kings in the stories, and you'll wake up when Dromo needs you. I'd like to believe it. When I was a boy, my mother told me stories about you. The rebel commander nobody could catch."
"Your mother told you fairy tales."
"My mother told me that one man with a sword could make the Priesthood afraid. That's not a fairy tale. That's the most important thing anyone has ever told me." He paused. "And then, when it mattered most, you disappeared."
There was no accusation in it. That was worse.
"I'm raising something new," Talon went on, more quietly. "Not like the old rebellion. That was all teeth and no mind. Burn a temple, they build a higher one. Kill a king, and the next man calls himself chosen by the Light." He glanced at Aros. "You taught me that. Not with words. With what happened after."
"So what do you want with me?"
"I want you to remind them it's possible." Talon turned his hands up. "That's all. Stand where they can see you. Let them say your name. People don't fight for ideas, Aros. They fight for proof."
"No."
"You haven't heard the rest."
"I don't need to." Aros nodded at Gemma without looking at her. "We came for walls. Broko said you had walls."
"I do." Talon's gaze shifted to Gemma, and something in his face changed. It sharpened and softened at the same time, like a man looking at an icon he hasn't decided whether to pray to. "And you, child. Broko says the fire bowed to you in Calad. Is it true?"
Gemma didn't answer.
"I'm not asking to use it," Talon said. "I only want to see it. Once."
"She's not a sideshow," Aros said.
"I didn't say she was."
"You didn't have to."
Gemma stood up.
Aros started to reach for her and stopped, because she wasn't looking at either of them. She had walked to the wall behind the altar, the old stone where the carved sun of the Priesthood had been chiseled away, and she laid her palm flat against it, as he'd seen her do at the city gate. She closed her eyes. Her lips moved, very slightly, as if she were counting.
When she turned around, there was a ring of light floating above her open hand. It was small and pale and perfectly steady, and in the grey church it was the brightest thing in the room.
Talon didn't move. He didn't speak. Aros had seen men look at gold like that, and at food after a long siege, and once, a long time ago, at a woman walking through a field. Talon looked at the ring the way those men had looked, and his hands came together in front of his chest, and the chains clinked softly against each other.
"Thank you," he said. His voice was rough.
Gemma closed her fingers. The light went out.
"I want to go to Bondrea," she said. "There's something there I need to find. Diana has a map. You have people who know the roads. That's what I want."
Talon blinked, as if waking up. It took him a moment to find his commander's voice again, and when he did, it was a little too smooth.
"Bondrea," he said. "Two days through the marsh, and the Priesthood has patrols on every road in. It's not a place I'd send anyone lightly." He looked at Aros. "But I'll send you. Broko, Diana, and one more I have in mind. Food, maps, a guide on the other side. And when you come back..."
"We'll talk," Aros said.
"When you come back," Talon repeated, gently, "you stand with us. Your word, Kingslayer."
Aros looked at Gemma. She was looking back at him, steady and stubborn, her hand still curled where the light had been. She nodded, once.
He let out a breath. "You have it."
They gave them a corner of the old vestry for the night, two blankets, and a bowl of something that had once been a stew. Gemma ate all of hers and half of his. He let her.
The rain kept on. It found every crack in the church and came through in threads and drips, and the knights had set out pots and cups and helmets to catch it, so the whole building was full of small uneven notes, as if someone were tuning an instrument in the dark.
Gemma sat on the bench by the door with her knees pulled up, drying her hair with a rag. She didn't look at him. She'd been not looking at him since the afternoon.
"Ask," Aros said finally.
"I did ask. You said yes."
"Then ask the rest."
She wrung out the rag and folded it in her lap. "Was he a bad king?"
"Yes."
"Then why do you look like that every time someone says it?"
He took a while to answer. Outside, water ran off the broken dome and splashed into the street below.
"Because I thought it would be the end of something," he said. "I thought if the king was gone, the rest would fall down after him. Like pulling the pin out of a wagon wheel." He turned his hands over and looked at them. "It didn't fall. Someone else picked it up and kept driving."
"Jacobo."
"Jacobo."
Gemma was quiet for a moment. "You should have told me."
"Probably."
"Is there more you should have told me?"
He thought of a house by an orchard, and smoke, and a little girl calling for her father. He thought of how long it had taken him to stop seeing her face on every child he passed in the street, and how he had never fully stopped.
"Yes," he said. "Not tonight."
She looked at him then, for the first time since the square, and whatever she saw in his face made her stop pushing. She lay down on the bench with the blanket over her, her back to the room, and after a while her breathing slowed.
Aros didn't sleep. He never did, the first night in a new place.
Sometime after midnight he got up to walk the halls, the way he used to walk the camp lines in the war. Most of the knights were asleep on pallets in the nave. A sentry dozed by the main doors with his musket across his knees. Aros let him doze.
There was a light in the small chapel behind the altar.
He stopped in the doorway. Talon was kneeling on the bare stone in front of an empty niche where a statue of some saint had once stood. He wasn't reading. He wasn't moving his lips. His hands were open on his knees, palms up, the chains pooled around his wrists, and his head was tilted slightly, the way Gemma's tilted when she was listening to something no one else could hear.
He stayed like that for a long time. Nothing happened. No light, no voice, no sign. Just the rain, and a man on his knees waiting for an answer.
Aros went back to the vestry without making a sound.
He had just lain down again when the main doors opened.
Cold air came through the church, and with it the smell of wet earth and horses. The sentry jerked awake and fumbled for his musket. Then he saw who it was and lowered it again, quickly, as if he'd been caught pointing it at a bear.
The woman who walked in was taller than any man in the room. Her cloak was the color of ash and soaked black at the hem, and a long sword in a plain scabbard was strapped across her back. She pushed back her hood. Her hair was dark and cropped short, and there was a scar through one eyebrow that made her look permanently unconvinced.
Broko sat up on his pallet, saw her, and lay back down with a quiet groan. Across the nave, Diana had propped herself on one elbow. The two of them exchanged a quick look. They both knew a story, and neither wanted to be the one to tell it.
Talon came out of the chapel. If he was surprised, he didn't show it.
"Candriela."
"I heard," the woman said. Her voice was low and flat. "In the village, before I'd even reached the gate. They're saying the Kingslayer walked into Skariz with a girl the fire bows to." She looked past Talon, into the dark of the vestry, and Aros had the uncomfortable feeling that she could see him perfectly well. "Is it true?"
"It's true."
"Where are they going?"
"Bondrea."
Something moved in her face at that. It was quick, and then it was gone.
"Then I'm going with them," she said.
"I was going to ask you to."
"You don't need to ask." She unbuckled the sword from her back and set it against a pillar, and took off her wet cloak, and sat down on the floor right there in the middle of the nave, as if she meant to sleep where she was. "Wake me when they leave."
Talon looked at her for a moment, then went back to his chapel. The sentry went back to dozing. The church filled up again with the sound of rain.
Aros lay with his eyes half shut and watched the woman in the nave, and the woman in the nave didn't sleep either.
An hour later, when the candles had burned down to stubs, she got up without a sound and crossed the church. Aros kept his breathing slow. Through his lashes he saw her crouch beside the bench where Gemma was sleeping, close enough to touch her, though she didn't.
Gemma stirred. She must have felt someone there. She rolled over and opened her eyes and didn't move.
"Don't be afraid," Candriela whispered. "I'm going to ask you one thing, and then I'll leave you alone."
Gemma didn't answer. Aros's hand was already under the blanket, resting on the cork handle of the gutting knife.
"When you listen," Candriela said, "do you ever hear a woman? Crying?"
The rain filled the silence. Gemma's eyes went past Candriela to the door of the vestry, to Aros, and back.
Then, very slowly, she nodded.
Candriela let out a breath that shook on the way out. She closed her eyes, and for a moment the hard flat face went soft, like a fist opening.
"Then she's alive," she whispered.