Brother Cadfael 16: The Heretic's Apprentice

almost grown reconciled. My word against his! A risk... but almost I came to terms with it. Even now - do you see it? - all this is my word against yours, if you so choose!" He said it without emphasis, almost indifferently. But he had remembered her again, a danger like the other. His unquiet prowling drove him back to the table. He ran the hand that was not clutching the key along the rack of his knives, in a kind of absent caress for a profession he had enjoyed and at which he had excelled.
    "In the end it was pure chance. Can you believe that? Chance that I had the knife... It was no lie, I came out here to work that afternoon. I had been using a knife - this knife..."
    Time and silence hung for a long while as he took it from the rack and drew it slowly out of its leather sheath, running long fingers down the thin, sharp blade.
    "I had the sheath strapped to my belt. I forgot and left it there when I locked up to go home. And I thought I would go on through the town and go to Vespers at Holy Cross, seeing it was the day of Saint Winifred's translation..."
    He turned to look at her, darkly and intently, she sitting there slender and still on the chest beside the lamp, her grave eyes fixed unwaveringly on him. Just once he saw her glance down briefly at the knife in his hand. He turned the blade thoughtfully to catch the light. Now how easily he could end her, take the prize for which he had killed, and set out towards the west, as many and many a wanted man had done from here before him. Wales was not far, fugitives crossed that border both ways at need. But more is needed than mere opportunity. Time was passing, and it seemed this deadlock must last forever, in a kind of self-created purgatory.
    "... I came late, they were all within, I heard the chanting. And then he came out from the little door that leads to the priest's room! If he had not, I should have gone into the church, and there would have been no death. Do you believe that?"
    Once again he had remembered her fully, as the niece of whom he had been humanly fond. And this time he wanted a reply; there was hunger in the very vibration of his voice.
    "Yes," she said, "I do believe it."
    "But he came. And seeing he turned towards the town, to go home, I changed my mind. It happens in a moment, in a breath, and everything is changed. I fell in beside him and went with him. There was no one to see, they were all in the church. And I remembered the knife - this knife! It was very simple... nothing unseemly... He was just newly confessed and shriven, as near content as ever I knew him. At the head of the path down to the riverside I slid it into him, and drew him away in my arm down through the bushes, down to the boat under the bridge. It was still almost full daylight then. I hid him there until dark. So there was no one left to betray me."
    "Except yourself," she said, "and now me."
    "And you will not," said Jevan. "You cannot... any more than I can kill you..."
    This time the silence was longer and even more strained, and the close, stifling air within the room dulled Fortunata's senses. It was as if they had shut themselves forever into a closed world where no one else could come, to shatter the tension between them and set them free to move again, to act, to go forward or back. Jevan began once more to pace the floor, turning and twisting at every few steps as though intense pain convulsed him. It went on for a long time, before he suddenly halted, and lowering with a long sigh the hands that still gripped the knife and the key, went on as though only a second had passed since he last spoke:
    "... and yet in the end one of us will have to give way. There is no one else to deliver us."
    He had barely uttered it when a fist banged briskly at the door, and Hugh Beringar's voice called loudly and cheerfully: "Are you within there, Master Jevan? I saw your light through the shutters. I brought your kin some good news a while ago, but you weren't there to hear it. Open the door and hear it now!"
    For one shocked moment Jevan froze where he stood. She felt him stiffen into ice, but his rigor lasted no longer than the flicker of an eyelid, before he heaved himself out of it with a contortion of effort like a man plucking up the weight of the world, and summoned up from somewhere the most matter-of-fact of voices to call back an answer. "One moment only! I'm just finishing here." He was at the door and turning the key as silently and softly as a cat moves. She