Tonight dusk fills the vale not as gloved hands over the cliffs, but thick black ichor that wells within a wound ripe for infection. Sister Cadence can feel its menace without looking from the window, but knows that it makes no difference in this room. Here, four close walls remain the charge of one candle. A night and a day she has passed here, watching. And again, Valeun’s bell calls to evensong.

She will not go.

The stillness of her patient has afforded her time, more than she has had in twenty-five years, to study his face. It is not as she knows it. The skin is grey, lips bulging black, cheek split wide open in a gash where it met the chapel steps. She has smoothed his hair across the pillow; an unkempt tangle as ever, and yet changed. He is so much older now, of course: that fiery crimson gave way years ago to less vivid reds streaked through with coal. But there is a brittleness in it too, as if some other, colder fire has run each strand and doused its flame. Is he truly alive? She watches the slow rise and fall of his chest, but does not trust it. He is peaceful. And in that peace she hears a whisper. Those wings are broken.

His breaths are shallow.

He will not fly.

To drown the whisper in the rustle of her habit, Cadence rises, but the whisper rises with her. It is ending.

She schools her thoughts, steadies her own breaths and looks once more. He breathes. He lives, and that is all. Even his eyelids are still, and now she girds herself against fears of what they will contain when they open. If they do.

Lost in the whispers, she is deaf to the door when it creaks. Or perhaps it has creaked that note too many years. The footfall gives her a start and she turns sharply to the threshold, where the acolyte’s honest eyes lift from brown vestments; a contrast to her white. ‘Kendrick.’

The acolyte offers a wan smile.

Cadence sighs, ‘He shows no more sign of waking than when last you came.’ Her gaze floats back to the body. ‘I may require more water for his hurts.’

Kendrick goes, returning with a bowl half-filled and fresh cleaning cloths. The sister sets the bowl beside the candle and again applies herself to the washing of the wounds; thinking all the while how strange it is to touch this man. She never desired it: all her life she has feared him. Now it is for his very life she is afraid, and the touch is strange only because it is not. No blazing current surges through her hand on contact with his skin; no thrum of unearthly power. The man is flesh.

Arms in his sleeves, Kendrick remains but does not sit. After a time in which the only sound is the trickling of water, Cadence asks, ‘Where is the Reverend Sister?’ - aware that it is the same question she has been asking of Kendrick each time he comes.

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‘I don’t know.’ He watches her lift the hands to wash their palms. They are deeply bruised and torn by struggle. Relaxed, the thorny fingers no longer resemble the predator’s talons, but instead the frail digits of a man whose first autumn winds are upon him. Even through that crust of hardened skin, great calloused knuckles and yellow nails, they have never looked so fragile. Kendrick looks away from them and takes a deep breath. ‘She has not spoken with me since we found him.’

Cadence shakes her head. ‘Nor me.’

‘Also she has barred the crypt,’ he tells her, ‘but still made no attempt to attend to the disorder in the chapel. I do not think she would set foot there. Not yet.’

‘This isn’t like her.’

‘No. It isn’t.’

She finishes the cleansing of her patient, then straightens on her chair to look at Kendrick. ‘Does she know?’ she asks him, hoping that the question doesn’t sound as much as it felt like a gasp of air. ‘Do you think she knows what happened?’

Kendrick is younger than Cadence, but his firmness carries the register of an equal. He holds his gaze to hers, weighing the wisdom of speaking the words he knows none in Valeun are ready to hear. For twenty years she has been a friend, almost a true sister, to him. It is for that reason, if no other, that he must be truthful.

‘Let us not pretend we do not all know what happened.’ At this she blanches and averts her face, betraying the innocence that still lives, sheltered, within the habit of a senior cloistress. She knows she does it, but it does not make her feel younger. Only more afraid. ‘The one who did this—’

‘Don’t say his name,’ she cuts him off, ‘please.’

‘Did we ever know it?’ he poses, watching her draw unsteady breaths. ‘Did we ever know anything about him? We cannot hide from the chance that he did, or has remembered.’

His own eyes move to hover over the patient: the heathen druid who had yet helped them build a nobler realm of Naemia; a realm ruled by the tenets of a long-forgotten, profoundly sacred truth and where they thought, they had believed ‒ they had dared to hope ‒ truth would reign always.

‘Our Raven has met his match, sister,’ says Kendrick. ‘You saw what was done inside the crypt. How long might such as that have been happening here while we were ignorant?’

Clasping her hands in her lap, she glares at him as though he were threatening to take her world away from her. ‘This cannot be happening.’

The acolyte takes a step forward and draws her eyes back; his voice is firm. ‘It is happening. And it is greater than us, Cadence. Greater than our faith, and Naemia. It will blow us into the dark on the ash and embers.’

You are forsaken. Cadence understands the whispers now.

‘Are you frightened, Kendrick?’

Once more, he looks to the bed in its sphere of candlelight. There lies the one who does not rest – the Raven – for all his might, a sleeping child.

‘Yes, I am.’