The Forest Laird(109)
“What happened to you?” she asked as I reached her. “Did you know that man?”
“No. Scales from my eyes,” I answered, not caring whether she understood me or not.
“Aye? So where are you goin’ now? It’s plain to see you’re goin’ somewhere.”
I looked at her, and then beyond her to where one of our party held the reins of her horse and my own. “I’m going back to Will. You’ll be fine without me … Better off, in fact, for we both know how feckless I’d be in a fight.”
Her eyes had narrowed and she looked at me now with a completely different expression than the slightly scornful one that she habitually reserved for me. “And what will you do when you find Will? He’ll have no need of a priest under his feet, Jamie. D’ye not know that’s why he sent you away in the first place?”
“Aye, I do. And I’ll stay out of his way. But first I’ll give him the absolution I’ve been withholding.”
Her frown was quick. “Absolution for what?”
“For what he’s about to do. It needs to be done and he’s the one to do it, but it’s taken me until now to see that. Now I need to give him my support and my blessing.”
“D’ye think he needs those?”
“I don’t care, Mirren, and I didn’t say he needs anything. I need to give them to him, freely. I’ve been wrong. Stubborn and stupid and short-sighted.” I pointed with my thumb to the blood-drenched corpse on the grass behind me. “I see it now, my eyes washed clean by the blood of the sacrificial lamb there.”
“That sounds blasphemous,” she said more quietly.
“What’s happening in this land is blasphemous, and my Church has been perverted to make it possible. I’ve only now come to see that. So now I’m going to try to help change things.”
She nodded, a single dip of her head. “Aye, well, ye’d better hurry, or it’ll all be done when you get there. Away wi’ ye, and tell my man he’s in my mind and heart. Run now.”
2
Less than half an hour later, I walked out of the woods into full daylight again, leading my horse, and allowed my gaze to slide across the scene in front of me, marvelling at the rich brightness of it. The uneven surface of the rocky escarpment beneath my feet was sparsely carpeted with short, springy, startlingly green grass and striped in places by slanted, inch-high ridges of silvery-white, flaky stone. The sky was blindingly blue and cloudless. The sun had been climbing it now for nigh on two hours, yet in the valley below, the fog was still thick and solid. Directly ahead of me, seemingly just a short leap down from where I stood, a thick, flat blanket of greyish white stretched away from me. It had appeared solid mere moments earlier, but as I looked at it now I could see the topmost, budding twigs of the trees beneath it showing through, the mist that had concealed them eddying gently and dissipating in the tiny breeze. Across from me, half a mile to the south, a twin bluff loomed straight up from the fog-shrouded trees at its feet. Beyond that, stretching away like a string of green and silver beads, other hilltops sparkled in the strengthening sunlight.
“Fog doesn’t often stay this long,” a voice said beside me, and I turned and nodded to Will, who had been standing with three of his people, gazing down into the carpet of mist when I arrived. “But the wind’s coming up now, so it’ll all be gone soon.” He turned his head slightly to look me in the eye. “What brings you back here, and where’s Mirren?”
“She’s with Shoomy and the others. She’s fine. They’ve cleared away the scouts along the road, so you don’t need to worry about being taken from behind.”
“That’s good, but you didn’t answer my other question. What brings you back here?”
“Conviction, but not in the way you’re probably thinking. I’m here to tell you I’m sorry for the way I’ve been … stubborn and stiffnecked and arrogant.”
“Arrogant?” The expression on my cousin’s face was almost but not quite a smile, for there was uncertainty in his gaze, too. “Am I hearing aright? A priest, admitting to arrogance?”
I ignored the jibe and merely nodded. “An epiphany is what you’re seeing. I’ve had a change of heart in the past hour. I watched a man die and I saw the pity and the sickness of it all. And with that, I came to see that I have been wrong. Ever since he first told me about this, about what was in his mind and what he intended to ask you to do, I’ve been angry and afraid of my own Bishop’s motives and I’ve been questioning what I saw as his mutiny against the Church. But now I can see he’s right—has been right all along. This trickery that’s afoot is sinful, betraying the Church’s trust for the benefit of a mere man, no matter that he be a king.”