Chapter 5: The Bath

"She knows," Isabeau said.

The great hall had emptied.

Veyron still sat at the head of the black table.

His bare hand lay flat on the wood, where a minute ago it had been on her.

"She suspects," he said. "It isn't the same."

"Suspects what? That I lied? That I'm..."

She couldn't finish.

Her legs were still unsteady, and her thighs were slick under her skirt.

She had come in front of a Sister of the Temple.

"Why do you want me to beg?" she said instead.

It came out sharper than she meant.

"You could have taken me in the tent. You could have asked for anything. Why that?"

He looked at her for a long time.

Then he stood and held out his bare hand, palm up, with the black vein showing.

"Walk with me."

The lord of Corvane had built a bathing room under the Citadel, fed by a hot spring that came up through the rock.

It was a round pool of grey stone, steaming gently, lit by a ring of candles in wall niches.

The air smelled of minerals and wet stone.

Veyron stopped at the edge and looked into the water.

"There were two before you," he said.

Isabeau waited.

"Two Saintesses. The first came to my camp in the third year of the war."

"She was nineteen. She came on foot like you, in white, and she begged me to spare a village."

"Did you?"

"Yes." His jaw tightened. "She asked for nothing for herself. Not food, not a blanket, not a word. I offered her all three."

"She took none?"

"She said the Flame wanted nothing for itself, and neither did she."

He turned his head.

"On the fourth night she walked back toward her own lines, and the collar round her neck burst into fire."

Something cold crawled up Isabeau's spine.

"The Temple did it?"

"The Temple tells it as a martyrdom. The second Saintess came two winters later."

"She begged for a city, asked for nothing, and burned at the border."

The steam curled between them.

"I decided the next one would ask," he said. "Once. For anything. I wanted one of you to want something."

"Why?"

"Because every one of you walked into my tent already dead," said Veyron. "I wanted to see someone alive."

She looked at the water.

Everything she had been told about demons had been a story.

Everything she had been told about herself had been a story too.

"Then I'm asking," she said.

He didn't move.

She reached up and began to undo the ties of her dress, and she was not graceful, and her fingers shook.

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