merry grin returned. “He’s worried, angry—all the things boys get when they think they’re old enough to be included in adult affairs, but aren’t. Nothing worse.”
“Free to come and go as he wills?”
Another calculating glance. “Very definitely. The path that lies before Zvain must be freely chosen. There is no other way.”
There was more here than Pavek’s freshly awakened mind could decipher. He raked his hair and felt matted tangles and grease. Cleanliness was far from mandatory in the templarate, but Pavek had savored the tile-lined baths beneath the barracks. He was appalled that he’d grown so rank and wondered how the cleric could stand so close without gagging. Perhaps it was part of a healer’s training as it was, to a certain extent, part of a templar’s.
A templar’s lifelong training.
His hand began to tremble. Without warning, an abyss opened within his mind, separating what he was from what he’d been. Perhaps he hadn’t been so lucky, after all. He covered his right hand with his left and noticed the fresh crimson scar winding around his elbow like one of Dovanne’s serpents. Oelus had done a hero’s work: the left arm was notably leaner than his right, but pain-free and fully flexible. Strength would return quickly enough, a few days on the practice fields—
The abyss widened. Pavek shook his head helplessly.
“Something wrong?” Oelus asked, taking Pavek’s left hand between his own. He poked, prodded, twisted, and flexed until his patient yelped. “Pain? Expect a little stiffness. Your muscles had rotted, Pavek. Would’ve been easier to lop it off right here—” He pressed the edge of his palm into the muscle below Pavek’s shoulder. “But I figured to let you make the decision for yourself: fight for your arm and keep it; languish and lose it.”
Pavek considered the prospect of one-armed life and cringed. “I fought,” he assured himself. “What happens now, healer? I know what the Veil would have done, what about you? Your peers? Superiors?”
“You’re my problem, Pavek. Mine alone,” Oelus stated firmly. “You were my patient; now you’re my problem.”
“And your solution to that problem? Do I walk out of here or have I been buried forever?”
“Neither. Oh, you could walk out of here, and you might even find your way back to the sun before you starved, but your name, Regulator Pavek, is still written in red on the gatehouse walls. You should be honored: The reward is up to forty gold pieces and, from what I hear, many have died trying to collect it.”
He sucked his teeth, but was otherwise speechless.
“It’s no great secret that the templarate consumes itself. No secret and no loss. But to be so noisy about it!” Oelus chuckled and shook his head. “I wondered myself: How did a mere third-rank, civil bureau regulator gain so many enemies? And why were his enemies having such trouble reeling him in? You roused curiosity underground, Pavek, as surely as you roused your enemies above it. The weather-eye was out for you, but you slipped through every net until the boy stumbled on you, by chance. Or so I heard.”
“Zvain,” Pavek repeated the boy’s name with a sigh and experimented with a fist. “If you know everything about me, you know his name, and you know it wasn’t by chance.”
“A slight exaggeration,” Oelus admitted. “You raved a bit those first few days, and I know how to read a body’s tale. You’re basically too healthy for a slave or peasant, too much muscle for a nobleman—not enough for a gladiator. The wrong calluses and scars for any artisan. And you’ve got all your teeth. Add that up and it comes out yellow, even though you weren’t wearing yellow and you had a putrid wound. I read the walls and listen to the morning harangues. I figured the boy was coincidence.”
“A coincidence who just happened to know a short path toward the Veil?”
Oelus gave an open-handed smile. “To be sure, that’s what he was doing—but did he know it? I don’t think so, and neither do you. The boy’s his own mystery: not my problem or yours, agreed? If the Veil’s got a weather-eye on him, at his oh-so-innocent, oh-so-corruptible age, I don’t want to know any more about him, do you? Better he remain a coincidence, don’t you think? Or maybe you have an interest in him yourself?”
Time was—time when there was a medallion around his neck—that he would have slain the cleric on the spot for the insult. That time was past. “Someone’s taught