Vigora’s ears were extra alert. Draka tried to reassure himself it was the forest. The narrow path to the Abbey, to Father Hagen’s camp had been cleared since the last time he took her this way. She was expecting to be on a hunt, he tried to reason. Anything but what he knew was the truth. He was upset and she could sense it. With her nose lower than usual and her trot barely faster than a careful clopping walk, she was feeling his emotions as strongly as he was, like she always has. That only made it worse.
The river did nothing to cool the heat of his blood with Aurie in his arms. His heart was beating so hard in his chest with her arms around him, with her legs clenched, her thighs tight around there, nothing but his eyes on hers. Those pale blue eyes were haunting him with each passing branch that was near bare from the frosts that had sped autumn to an early end. How many women had tried to place themselves in his arms like that, how many had wrapped their arms around him, and never had he found himself falling into their gazes, lost in the myriad of their desires as he was in that moment? For a single second, he didn’t feel the icy flow around him. Only her embrace.
Lord, help me. He hung his head. He shouldn’t have thrown her. What else could he have done? If he hadn’t, if a single moment longer passed between them, all his desires would have taken over and he would have pulled her to him, would have finally tasted those lips and felt her against him. Felt his ache for her soothed. And felt his sin take control.
Father Hagen’s camp had moved. The wide gates to the Abbey ruins, worn and tattered by disrepair, were crisscrossed by barbed wire wrapped to rods in the trenches that began on either side of the road leading to it. Monastic Knights were in the trenches that were forming a few meters from the walls, digging and swinging pickaxes while their Clerics stood over them, pointing and directing their swings or setting the foundations of siege scaffolding. They had cleared most of the trees from around the Abbey already, most of which had been lain in stacks that were being used to form the spikes placed along the edges of the finished bits of the trenches or as the braces of its deep walls. Engineers were framing what would be catapults. Trebuchet and battering ram wheels were being assembled not far from there.
Draka led Vigora to the tethers where other horses were being kept. There was a pen with some cattle and another with lambs that the monks were taking by ones and twos toward a tent nearby. Draka didn’t have to look to know why. They had coated the lower half of the Abbey wall in lambs’ blood and were keeping it wet while the trenches were being dug.
“Your majesty,” Enya didn’t sound very respectful when she said it.
Draka didn’t look while he was giving Vigora an apple he had taken from the kitchen before he left. He tapped Vigora’s nose and pointed to the water barrel so she knew where it was.
“I was hoping I’d have a chance to speak with you unofficially before the feast.” He tightened his jaw, still refusing to turn to her. “I’m not sure how to say this, so I’m just going to say it…WHAT IN BLOODY MATTHEW’S ABICUS ARE YOU DOING?”
Draka turned wide, glaring eyes on her.
“Look, I get it. She’s tiny and pretty—which seems to be the preference around here—but are you OUT OF YOUR MIND? Now, of all times, you came this close,” she held up a finger over her thumb, nearly touching, “and we’re nowhere near prepared. This isn’t Strasbourg. I already know we’re up against at least a full devil-led legion in there. Until I get at least a handful of Paladins, we’re nothing more than shish kabobs digging holes, and you nearly kicked it off thinking with your prick instead of the cross. And…and…she’s a Paladin, on top of all that!”
Draka crossed his arms.
Enya returned the gesture, meeting his glare while towering over him. “You’re still married, Seven-pointer. Keep it in your breeches and your hands to yourself. She’s got it hard enough already. I don’t need her heart shattered and her soul broken apart while still trying to get her used to having the most invasive conscience in the universe within her head. She was barely a Christian when she was awakened. God is putting her through the gauntlet without you adding to the mix with your temptations and harsh rejections. Stay away from her at the feast. I don’t care how you do it.”
Draka let his gaze and arms fall, nodding solemnly.
“Alice is going to do everything in her power to put her by your side,” Enya sighed, anticipating defeat at the same time, her own gaze turning to the trenches. “We’re on the losing side. If God intends this to fall into our hands, we’re going to pay dearly to do so, of that I’m sure. I’ll have to be on the front this time.” She turned back to him, “Valmond will be more difficult to outsmart than Alice. He’s kindhearted, but he’s clever as a snake when it comes to the court. He’ll have her beside you exactly when she needs to be and when you least expect it, likely to solidify that she’s yours and vice versa, especially when the dances begin. He wants her to keep her power projected in the court against any who would take her place and he knows what will happen if he can’t keep her there when the real court comes next week. I’m asking you as a friend to leave or dance with the princess or anything that will keep you two separate.”
Again, he nodded. He wanted to move on. He came here to get away from this, not delve into it, not have it spat into his face.
“If you kiss her…” the sight of Enya’s eyes glistening made Draka hesitate with her, “I want to believe that God will forgive you two for what you’ve been through together, what He’s put you both through, but He’s not the only one watching. You piss her off and we’ll be overrun. I can…” she looked over her shoulder again, this time to the jagged ruins of the high Abbey walls, letting a silence linger. Finally, she finished with, “I don’t think she’s the only one watching. Something else is waiting for—I don’t know what. I’m not even sure if it’s you and Aurie—but whatever it is, it isn’t friendly and it isn’t…” She shook her head instead of finishing the sentence.
Draka motioned for her to finish when she turned back. Her olive skin had gone pale. She was terrified. That, knowing what gifts she had, made Draka far more worried than he had been.
Enya straightened with a deep breath. Her voice deepened with conviction, “It doesn’t give a shit about the lambs’ blood. We’re not why it hasn’t attacked. It’s waiting on something else. The Strasbourg and Alcer cohorts will be here tomorrow. Most of them are being garrisoned in the village and in the castle. The rest will be here. I’m not taking any chances. We’re at war, it just hasn’t started yet, and I’m willing to bet that your old flame arriving on Monday is going to be first blood. Unless you make your other enemy agitated by kissing another woman. You get me, Blooded Ascended Paladin King?”
Draka nodded emphatically.
“Good,” Enya spun on her heels and stormed away, back to the Clerics who were working on the scaffolding where pipes for Dragon’s Tails were being offloaded from a wagon there.
“She’s a good commander,” Father Hagen seemed to appear out of nowhere beside him.
Draka nodded with a frown. A stack of parchment on a board with an inkwell fixed to it, balancing a short quill, was handed to him. He grinned halfheartedly as a thank you.
Father Hagen led him toward his small camp that had been moved to behind where the monks were fetching the lambs. He said as they walked, stepping over muddy puddles and misshapen dips in the ground from uprooted trees, “I’ve done research into the Abbey foundations and Brother Henry has found some interesting information about your wife in the last few days that I wish to discuss with you.”
Wonderful, Draka wanted to jump into the rapids and let them carry him into the sea.
Once in the small camp, Father Hagen sat him in the most comfortable of his chairs and handed him a cup of steaming coffee before Brother Henry unfolded a small table in front of him. Draka waved him off from putting any sugar in it. Instead, he wrote on the parchment, what did you find about Sophia? His hand shook when he wrote her name.
Father Hagen leaned back on his stool for Brother Henry to lift a thick tome onto his lap that was bulging with extra pages folded into it. He shuffled through them, mumbling to himself, until he found something that made his bare ears perk and the wool robe have to be adjusted with his earnestness.
“There are a few things,” Brother Henry set the tome on the table so that it didn’t impede on Draka’s cup or parchment. “First, that she and…you know…have not been on good terms since Christ. It possibly happened around the sixth or seventh centuries A.D., which would explain the sudden shift in beliefs surrounding her being far more, shall we say, empathetic.”
“It is a fringe source, and a solitary one, but it was influential and substantial,” Father Hagen had crossed his legs as he held the saucer in one hand and the cup in his other to sip it. “A complete turnaround on how her story is portrayed.”
“Extremely influential throughout western Europe, actually,” Brother Hagen slid a folded paper from the tome and handed it to Draka. “One of the influences to the story of King Arthur, inspired by Charlemagne and inspiration for the character of that story known as Morgan la Fey. It’s a bit of a reach, but it is an influence. Femininity became very much engrained with her as a symbol of strength in opposition to conservative traditions within the Church as liberalism in the later centuries leading to the Great Fires took hold. Pagans and Celestes were among her followers.”
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Draka skimmed over the excerpt he handed to him. Bits about the feminine strength given by Lilith’s defiance of Adam’s want for dominance over her. More about her need for similar dominance. Her need for vengeance was also apparent, but it was written with endearment and justification, in the same font and style of many texts he had read from the libraries in the Holy Lands of twentieth and twenty-first century texts that survived there.
“Most of that is common knowledge,” Father Hagen shrugged. He wagged a finger. “Tell him about the names.”
“Right!” Brother Hagen shifted toward the end of the tome, mumbling as he went, “Sophia is of a new sort of significance. Sophia…Sophia…Ah, here!” He ran a finger through his notes. “Sophia is in the Gnostic texts. In very few references she’s interchangeable with Lilith, but instead a mirror reflection of what Lilith once was or the opposite…or, well…”
Father Hagen uncrossed his legs with a chuckling sigh, “He’s a great researcher, terrible lecturer. Sophia is the Gnostic divine representative of femininity, a goddess of wisdom. I never delve far into the Gnostic mythos, but I will say that she is comparatively been seen as Christ’s divine sister in some belief systems and is his female counterpart. But then, her darker counterpart—twin, if you will—or the Fallen Sophia, the lesser because she is the shadow of forbidden wisdom and is often used as the warning to followers against pursuing such things, is interchangeable with Lilith in every aspect.
“If we are to assume that Sophia and Lilith are one and the same, then that means they are not twins, two sides to the same coin, but merely two moods, two phases in the very long life of a single being, with a dark and tumultuous past. Your Sophia, I imagine, was a very nurturing and lovely woman, or you wouldn’t have sworn such an oath upon her death, regardless of the circumstances. The Lilith we know now is merely the return to her former wrathful and vengeful ways.”
Draka wrote, ‘Among my people, she was as our women are: strong, domineering, and fiercely loving. All traits that seem on par with what I’ve heard of Lilith in all forms, regardless of sources or empathy. This Sophia being of Christ’s sister among the Gnostics is concerning. What are your thoughts on that, Father?’
“Heresy,” Father Hagen shrugged. “But, we can’t overlook the significance of that belief having taken root among her former followers. There are no known worshipers of her left, not even catalogued among the Celestes, since there was a purge marked in the early days of the Paladinate you are likely not aware of because they were neglected from the scriptures.”
‘Why would anything be neglected from scripture?’
Father Hagen hardened. “Some things encourage heresy rather than prevent it. Paladins who read the Third Testament are only a small percentage of those who have access to those books. Also, because our sources for it were not considered very reliable. Like many of the gospels removed from the canon of the New Testament by the Nicaean Council, including the Gnostic ones like the Gospel of Thomas, other sources of the events were in direct contradiction. What we can glean from the information we have is that there was, in fact, a very large following within the Celestes factions who were devout followers of Sophia until the First Paladin took Tehran and helped establish the Saracen Farussiyya.”
“There was a coup,” Brother Henry sounded excited.
“Coup, rebellion, whatever you want to call it,” Father Hagen shook his head, “It failed, but I imagine it resulted in Lilith’s divorce from the Enemy. But, there is reason we didn’t rid ourselves of the records of these contrived sources—they explain why the pagans and Celestes in Southeastern and Central Asia, Africa, and all but Northern Europe, folded to the Paladinate and the Farussiyya in only two hundred years. Your wife tried to usurp the usurper.”
‘Why didn’t we ally with her, then? Try to convert them to our cause? She’s human, is she not? Who I knew would have been reasonable.’
Father Hagen raised a brow, “I will say this as delicately as I can. She swore to kill the Children of Adam and their mothers, to seduce men from their wives, and defy God in all ways that would cause men to fall into sexual immorality as vengeance for her first divorce, unless she saw her name written in that which came from the earth, flatly refusing to return to Eden against Jehovah’s command. Does that sound like someone who could be converted?”
Draka grinned beneath a hard glare after writing, ‘People are people and do many things out of anger they regret later.’
“Leave us,” Father Hagen said to Brother Henry. Once he was gone, he leaned toward Draka with a finger jammed into the table, “Your wife is not going to convert, Dietrich. She is the embodiment of evil in humanity. Before Cain, before Jezebel, before Sodom and Gomorrah, she is all that can be considered truly evil within us. Vengeance, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, jealousy, all of it. She defied God in every way she could. If you think that you will convert her, then we might as well catapult you over those walls and let whatever is there tear you apart and elect someone else to take your place, for we have put our faith and hopes in the wrong man and all this has been for nothing. These men and women, and countless more across the world, will have died for nothing.”
Draka’s glare narrowed. He wrote, quickened by his rage, ‘Do not lecture me, priest. We convert, we do not kill. I taught an entire Order that lesson, I am not above reminding the Church a second time. If there is a chance to save a soul, I would rather die trying than to live knowing that I should have. Her followers were people who could have filled our ranks and been returned to the light.’
“And I will remind the King what happened the last time the Paladinate decided to teach the Church a lesson, for which we are still paying the price for,” Father Hagen looked like a snarling wolf. “Do not threaten me with the destruction of Christendom. You are in this position because we put you here with the authority of God in hopes of repairing the damages of both mistakes in judgment. To put it plainly, we’re not converting the Celestes because they don’t convert. They infiltrate and exterminate. It is not a risk I recommend you take. You need to understand that and live with it. The only way to defeat them is to destroy who they worship and we have yet to learn how to kill a Fallen Angel, let alone if it’s even possible.”
‘They do convert, it just takes time and actual effort, without dehumanization.’
“I’m not going to argue with you about what could have been done before the new kingdoms were carved out of the Paladinate Holds,” Father Hagen waved him off. “What I am going to do is ask with a sincerity that which must be answered just as sincerely. Do you intend to divorce Sophia? Or do you intend now to go into that Abbey, allow the breach into Hell open enough for you to rush in and die trying to seize her from the Enemy, who is her captor—likely keeping her as a slave—like a fool, thinking that you can fulfill your oath without killing her? Now is the time to say so.”
Father Hagen regarded him for a moment, waiting for Draka’s reply, but Draka was hesitantly holding his quill poised to write. The thought was only just occurring to him.
“All has been revealed to you,” Father Hagen huffed. “Interesting timing, don’t you think, to have it happen only after you finally find a woman who loves you as much as you love her.”
Draka’s eyes rose from the parchment to meet him.
“Your first oath is to bring her to God’s judgment. And there is only one way for a human to meet God’s judgment. Now, am I to send to Cardinal Thomas that he is to sign the dissolution or not? Because I want to know who I’ve been defying my Church for, who I’ve been supporting every whim, who I’ve stood by even when the Cardinal who fed my diocese and funded my outreach, helped clothe my orphanage and provide supplies to my priory, isn’t going to turn his back on all that he’s spent the past two decades fighting for because he forgot that his oath was specific in it’s simplicity. You swore to God—whether you knew it or not—that you would return Lilith to Him for judgment for all that she has done. And this divorce will be the first true and rightful step towards allowing you to complete that oath. She must die and you cannot let that happen while being her husband. Your answer, Paladin.”
Draka drew in a breath. His hand was shaking, balanced on the tip of the quill that was pooling ink into the parchment. He let his eyelids fall shut.
‘Dissolve it.’
“Cardinal Thomas is with Queen Isabella,” Father Hagen nodded. “He will dissolve it when Commander Enya says they’re ready. I suggest you pray for humility and wisdom for the coming days. God wanted you to learn from your mistakes in Strasbourg. I wonder if those were the only mistakes you needed to learn from. Whatever conflicts are in your heart…”
Draka narrowed his gaze and let out a long breath.
Far too many for this, he thought as he crinkled his brow at the words he had written, words he thought never needed to be written.
“…You’ve taken long enough. Stop burying them. It’s time to face them and end them with the conviction of one who intends to fulfill their divine purpose. We need you in the coming days. Your people need you. And Aurie is lost without you by her side nearly as much as you are without her.”
That made Draka raise his eyes, blinking in confusion.
Father Hagen grinned knowingly, “I know of your dreams together, Draka. She told me what was revealed to her in them. That is her second gift. Divine Understanding. And I wholeheartedly believe God sent her to use it on you first because you have been lost for a very long time or God wouldn’t have forced you to take so long to heal your wounds after Strasbourg. He’s waiting on you to turn back to His Will.”
Draka sank, his lips beginning to tremble as he struggled to hold his face from dropping away from Father Hagen’s hard gaze.
“I’m no fool, I know why Maudeline had to press your sword back in its sheath when she told you who your wife was. God will heal your body as soon as you allow Him to heal your broken soul.”
