Calix’s eyes narrow as Magan changes his demand, the proclamation now public. Behind him he can hear shouts and the shuffling of feet, of people coming to speak or listen or make their own vows - and inside him the urgent drumbeat that never ceases when danger is near, as the look in Magan’s eye seems to promise. He could walk away. The call to do so and save himself is stronger than ever, and it might very well be his last chance. But go where? Not to Aleth. Not to anywhere in Brittany, with the shame of defeat and slavery emblazoned like a brand. So where does that leave him? Taking the offer and spitting on a God who had blessed him with the very gifts he’d just used to help the woman at his side? Heading to Canterbury with a pagan warlord who would sooner salt the earth with the blood of his kin? “Your price has changed and my answer with it. I will make an oath to you and you alone, Magan Aethling, and see you to Canterbury.” It isn’t enough, and he knows that. But what more can he offer? Not what Magan asks, not fully. He thinks of St. Stephen, silenced by stoning; of St. Cyprian, bound and beheaded; of St. Sebastian, tied to a post and riddled with arrows before being bludgeoned and discarded like refuse. He thinks of martyrs, and he thinks of stillness, and he thinks of Fabian, felled on the battlefield with his weapon weakly torn from him and his skull caved in two. No. If I am to die, he resolves, it will be with a sword. It will be with that sweord. The last hands to wield it can’t have been those that lost it to the ones who had put him in chains. It won’t. Forgive me, Lord, for I cannot forget. He looks at Magan, and the answer that had seemed so simple no longer is. Within him Genesis’ snake lifts its head with heavy-lidded eyes and rattles its tail. Had Calix not said already he cared nothing for the island Magan seems to hold so dear? He had no quarrel with Augustine, but did he either have an obligation to help? A Christian obligation, perhaps. But where had those Christians been when he was rowing half-dead from Brittany? When he had rotted starving in a cage and hoped for death? Forgive me, Lord, for I will not forgive . “What you seek there will not be beaten by might alone,” he finally tells the blond man who can’t possibly be much older than he is but speaks with experience far beyond Calix’s years. “Any promise I made to your god would be empty, and any to mine not one you’d believe. I was born under a Christian cross, I make no secret of it, and if you give me that sweord, I will swear upon it to tell you of what I know so that when you arrive, you do so wiser than your enemy.” Traitor . He doesn’t know if the word is actually whispered, or if it’s merely the serpent’s kiss in his ear; only that it’s both true and can’t be, because he can’t swear to a pagan and he can’t put this blade behind him and this is the only answer he has. Still the quote from 1 Corinthians comes almost unbidden, in the echoed murmurs from a blessed childhood he can still see but no longer feel. “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.” He tries not to think about what it says of him that in the end it was not the slavers who had sold him, but a cost of pain, and of vengeance, and of cold, bitter steel.
