Brother Cadfael 20: Brother Cadfael's Penance

one was burning down to its ending.
    And on the bed, rigidly erect at the first grate of key in lock, and eyes levelled like javelins upon the doorway, was Olivier de Bretagne.
    "No greeting for me?" said Philip. The candle guttered for the first time in the counter-draught he had let in with him. He observed it, and meticulously closed the door at his back. "And after so long? I have neglected you."
    "Oh, you are welcome," said Olivier, coldly gracious. The tones of the two voices, a little complicated by an immediate and yet distant echo, matched and clashed. The echo made an unnerving third in the room, listener and commentator. "I regret I have no refreshment to offer you, my lord, but no doubt you have dined already."
    "And you?" said Philip, and briefly smiled. "I see the empty trays returning. It has been a reassurance to me that you have not lost your appetite. It would be a disappointment if ever you weakened in your will to keep all your powers intact, against the day when you kill me. No, say nothing, there is no need, I acknowledge your right, but I am not ready yet. Be still, let me look at you."
    He looked, with grave attention, for some time, and all the while the levelled eyes, wide, round, golden-irised and fierce as a hawk's, stared back unwaveringly into his. Olivier was thin, but with the restless leanness of energy confined, not with any bodily deprivation, and bright with the intolerable brightness of frustration, anger and hatred. It was, it had been from the first, a mutual loss, their rage and anguish equal, either of them bereaved and embittered. Even in this they were matched, a perfect pairing. And Olivier was neat, decently clothed, his bed well furnished, his dignity discreetly preserved by the stone vessel and leather bucket for his physical needs, and the candle that gave him light or darkness at will.
    For he had even the means of relighting it to hand beside his pallet, flint and steel and tinder in a wooden box. Fire is a dangerous gift, but why not? It cannot set light to stone, and no sane man cased in stone is going to set light to his own bed, or what else within will burn, and himself with it. And Olivier was almost excessively sane, so much so that he could see only by his own narrow, stainless standards, and never so far as the hopes and despairs and lame and sorry contrivances by which more vulnerable people cope with a harsh world.
    Confinement, resentment and enforced patience had only burnished and perfected his beauty, the eager bones accentuated, the suave flesh polished into ivory. The black, glossy hair clasped his temples and hollow cheeks like hands loving but alien, blue-black, live with tension. Daily he had plunged into the water brought to him, like a swimmer into the sea, urgent to be immaculate whenever his enemy viewed him, never to decline, never to submit, never to plead. That above all.
    There in the east, Philip thought, studying him, from that Syrian mother, he must have brought this quality in him that will not rust or rot or anyway submit to desecration. Or was it, after all, from that Welsh monk I have left outside this meeting? What a mating that must have been, to bring forth such a son.
    "Am I so changed?" Olivier challenged the fixed stare. When he moved, his chains chimed lightly. His hands were untrammelled, but thin steel bands encircled his ankles, and tethered him by a generous length of chain to a ring in the stone wall beside his pallet. Knowing his ingenuity and his mettle, Philip was taking no chances. Even if helpers could penetrate here, they would have much ado to hammer him loose from his prison. There was no will to mar or defile him, but an absolute will to keep him immured from the world, a solitary possession on which no price could ever be set.
    "Not changed," said Philip, and moved nearer, within arm's length of his captive. Fine hands Olivier had, elegant and large and sinewy; once they had established a first well-judged grip on a throat it would not be easy to break free. Perhaps the temptation and the provocation would have been even more irresistible if those hands had been chained. A fine chain round a throat would have choked out life even more efficiently.
    But Olivier did not move. Philip had tempted him thus more than once since the irredeemable breakage of Faringdon; and failed to rouse him. His own death, of course, would probably have followed. But whether that in itself was what restrained him there was no