permission.” No need to tell him she didn’t always wait for permission.
“I give you permission.” It sounded more like a command.
What did he want of her? She turned and let her words fly without planning. “What should I say? I am not to speak of your eyes or your home and family or the war or God. I cannot speak of my travels, because I have none.”
Now he was the one who kept his eyes on the fire, refusing to face her. The singers started a round, and completed the three parts. Still, he did not answer. For a man who wanted to talk, it seemed to come no more easily to him than to her. “Tell me of your life at the Priory,” he said, finally.
She smiled, happy to talk of home. “I tend the garden, do the wash, clean.” No scowls this time. A determined smile carved his face. Should she tell him about her writing?
A cold, wet nose nudged her ankle. She picked up Innocent, burying her nose in his fur, smelling the unfamiliar earth he had explored. “And I feed the dog.” He washed her face with a scratchy tongue. “Find any turnips, boy?”
Sir Garren scratched behind the shaggy black ear and Innocent busied his tongue with the broad palm instead of Dominica’s face. Laughing, she turned back to The Savior, or whoever he was. “Did you have a dog as a child?”
“I don’t remember.”
At first she thought that he didn’t want to speak of his childhood. Then, the puzzlement in his voice hit her ear.
He could not remember. This was a man who had not been a child for a long, long time.
She watched in wonder as he patiently let Innocent’s pink tongue clean every one of his fingers. “How came you to know Lord William?” she asked, finally.
“He took me as his squire when I was seventeen.”
“Seventeen? A knight’s training begins as a child.”
“I had much to learn. My training was…interrupted.” The words came through lips narrowed by a harsh life.
“Interrupted by what?”
“I had just left the monastery.”
A shudder chilled her spine. Had he broken his vows? Was he an outcast monk? “Were you defrocked?”
“I was just completing my novice year. I had not taken my vows.” A haunted look lurked about his eyes. “All I could offer was a rusty sword arm, not even a sword.”
He gave me a new life, he said of the Earl of Readington, with the fierce loyalty men normally reserve for God. Even she knew how generous the Earl had been to take on a penniless, ill-trained squire. “Why did you leave the monastery?”
He was silent while the crackling fire shot a shower of sparks into the twilight sky, blue as if it had been ground from azurite. The first star blinked. “This was after the Death,” he said, finally.
She crossed herself. He had not answered, but she understood. Many strange events had come upon the land seized by that terror almost ten years ago. God had nearly destroyed the world. She still did not understand how the comforting God who spoke to her could let such a plague loose upon his people. “God punished us so harshly. We must strive to do his will each day so tomorrow will not bring such a punishment again.”
He shook his head. “We must strive to enjoy today because God may snatch us away before tomorrow comes.”
“But if He does, there’s a reason. There is always a reason for God’s plan.”
“Can you explain it?”
She searched his eyes, wondering whether God had sent him to test her faith. There must be words she could say to convince him of the rightness of God’s plan. “Sola fide.”
“What?”
He did not understand her Latin. She must have mispronounced the words. “By faith alone.”
Light from the fire flickered over his face. Shadows from his strong brows concealed his eyes. “You really believe that, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?”
The Miller brothers, one with a low voice and one higher, filled the silence with their harmonies. Faith is a trap for fools, he had said, this man who saved people but walked away from God.
“I believe,” he whispered, staring at the fire, “that we owe each other more than we owe God.”
She realized she had not breathed, waiting for his answer.
Day One: Faire weather. Walked until vespers. Pleasant land.
Lip out, Dominica watched the morning sun spill pink over the horizon. One sheet of paper lay atop a rock. Her letters, small and tight, filled the precious page edge to edge, as she’d been taught.
But were they the right words?
Just one day away from the Priory, she was farther away from home than she had ever been. She could not even name the place they had slept. Everything was fresh and unseen and untried and she was exhausted with the newness of it all.
The cheeping sparrows hopped close enough to touch. She must enjoy this time. These days. Write them down so she could remember later. When she would never be able even to speak of them without permission.
She wanted to write about how funny Innocent had looked chasing the rabbit and the way the young married couple walked holding hands and that she was worried about how tired Sister had seemed last night.
She wanted to write about him.
She dipped the quill into the ink and tapped out the excess.
Smooth straight path. Slept under stars.
Stars. How inadequate. Thousands and thousands of tiny candle flames lit by God. She could hardly bear to shut her eyes for the wonder of sleeping under such a ceiling.
She added a word. Many.
She frowned at her stingy parchment, a rescraped and reused scrap no one wanted any more, not good enough to copy God’s words. She had room for only a word or two to help her remember later.
What word would she choose for him?
The Savior was too blasphemous. Garren too personal.
The Man, she wrote.
She stared in horror, then struck through the words, blunting the point of her quill, hiding them with an ugly black blot, wishing she could blot them out of her mind.
He must be more than a man. For if he were only a man, she might be only reacting to him as a woman.
Alone in the shelter of the small grove before the day’s journey began, Garren thought about his plan. He did not know whether it was a good one.
He took the tarnished, dented silver reliquary from around his neck. Unwrapping the scrap of leather tied around it, he pulled apart the slender, silver tube. Inside,
