I found Emma, as Nath had promised, wandering lost in the woods. She didn’t look amused. Indeed, she’d drawn her fine sword and was in the process of swiping it at Wil-O’ Wisps.

The ghostly spirits, for their part, seemed to be enjoying the game. They swept in and out of Emma’s reach in turns, giggling like children. Sweat beaded on Emma’s face, and she looked very pale — they’d drawn some of her warmth out of her. These had little in common with the small, mostly harmless spirits I’d encountered at the House of Irn Bale. In the Wend, the wisps had grown large and glowed a sickly blue-green, bloated from the stagnant od.

Sighing, I stepped out of the shadows and drew on my aura. “That’s enough,” I said, my words carrying a slight echo of power. “Begone.”

The spirits scattered, vanishing into the forest. I stepped forward, taking a moment to make sure we had no more unwelcome company, then turned my attention on Emma. Winded, she took a moment to catch her breath before glaring at me. “I had it under control.”

I nodded. “No doubt, but we’re on a timetable. If you want to keep practicing swordplay on incorporeal spirits, though, be my guest.”

Scowling, she sheathed her blade and cast a furtive look into the night. “They are malicious things. I’ve been going in circles, and…” she swallowed. “Well, it wasn’t just them. I do not like this place. The air feels foul.” She returned her amber eyes to me. “Where were you?”

“Talking to your benefactor,” I admitted. “Nath wanted a private word.

Emma’s eyes widened at that. “Then… what now?”

“Now…” I sighed. “Now, we talk to your ancestor.”

***

Fresh snow had fallen over the field beyond Orcswell, veiling the signs of the furious battle that had raged there little more than a day before. I could no longer see the patches of burnt ground, the ichorous sludge the hellhounds had dissolved into, the evil rune with which the Scorchknight had scarred the frozen earth.

The tree, however, remained. Like a skeletal black appendage reaching up from clean white surrounds, its jagged, leafless limbs looked especially sharp under the moons, and starkly black.

I took a deep breath of the night air, only mildly tainted still with the stench of sulfur. I steeled myself — not for the tree and the nightmare trapped in it, but for the conversation I needed to have with Emma.

“I need to talk to you about what happens next,” I said to her, stopping a distance away from the tree. “I have a way to end this, but it might put you in even more danger.”

Emma pursed her lips in a slight frown, taking this in. Whatever else might be said about the impetuous young noble, she wasn’t slow. “How so?”

“It will involve more powers,” I said. “Once done… I might not be able to control what happens next. I’ll do everything I can, but you have to understand that I’m tossing a set of dice and seeing what numbers come up. I can’t make you any guarantees.”

I turned on her. Tall for her age and gender, she still had to look up to meet my eyes. We made an odd pair in that snowy field, me tall and garbed in a dull red cloak, frayed by many long miles and strange roads, pointed cowl shadowing my features. Her, clad all in black and velvet, the image of the shadowy aristocrat, almost vampiric under the moonlight.

“I’m here to back you,” I said to her. “Not to make your decisions for you. There are some things about me you should know, other… interests, pulling at me. Nath is just one of them, and I don’t think she has any more control over the outcome here than I do. I can give you knowledge, let you make the choice with open eyes, but I can’t promise you a happy ending.”

Emma chewed on those words a while. She bit her lip in thought, her gaze wandering toward the black tree. Finally, in a quiet voice that hid none of her uncertainty she asked, “can’t it just be your choice? You’ve known what to do until now.”

I realized something then, seeing the indecision on the girl’s face. She’d spent her entire life at the mercy of others, that life dictated by choices people both in the present and the past made. Now I gave her the chance to take some agency back, and it scared her.

I empathized. I’d chosen to give away much of my own agency because of that same fear, and…

I’d regretted it every day since.

“I rarely ever know what to do,” I admitted. “It’s up to you, milady. It’s your life.”

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then snapped her attention to me. Standing tall, chin up in aristocratic command she made her choice. “Tell me. All of it.”

And I did.

“I used to be a knight,” I said quietly, eyes drifting away in recollection. “A knight, and a damn good fighter. But I made some bad choices, trusted the wrong people, and ended up getting excommunicated by the Church, stripped of my titles by the Accord. I wanted to make amends, try to fix some of the damage I’d helped cause. I fought for the Accord during the war against the Recusants. For three years after Elfhome burned, I fought. When the war ended, I wandered, adrift, like a ghost. I took to drinking. I was aimless.”

I remembered those days of mead-haze and emotional fugue. I’d been like a living dead man, a wretch. I clenched a hand into a fist against my sternum, hating the memory, ashamed by it. Emma, for her part, only listened intently.

“One day, when I got close to… ending things, Nath’s brethren offered me a road through the new world, which had become so dark in my eyes. I became their blade in the night, their executioner. I’m still tied to what I was, though, and beings like Nath are drawn to that. Not just her, but ghosts, monsters… demons. It’s the light they put in us. It’s like a torch, guiding in moths.”

Emma’s brow furrowed. “Why are you telling me this? What does it have to do with what’s happening here?”

“I’m telling you because what we do next might draw a lot of attention on me, and you. Not all of it pleasant. I want to dispute Orley’s presence here, officially, which means getting immortals involved. I won’t put you in that situation without your consent, and to truly give that you need to know what I am, and that my role in this could… change.”

“Is there an alternative?” Emma asked.

I nodded. “I fight everything that tries to come after you, and hope it buys you time to escape, to hide. I’ll probably die, and you’ll probably still end up getting hunted down, but it might give you a chance.” I shrugged.

Emma’s mouth fell open. “You would do that? For me? Why?”

I inhaled deeply through my nose, feeling strangely calm. “Because the gods can be assholes. I might fight where they tell me to, but I do it my way. And if they’re willing to damn you for your family’s crimes, then they’re not worth following. I’d rather be an oathbreaker than serve that.”

Emma only shook her head, dumbfounded. “I don’t understand. You’ve only known me a handful of days.”

I shrugged, a smile tugging at the corner of my lips. “It’s a knight thing. I guess part of me just can’t let it go. There are a set of codes every knighted warrior in Urn learns. One of the first tenants is defend the innocent and the just, even at the cost of your own life. They teach you that certain tenants override the others. Honor before wrath, loyalty before valor, love before war.”

Emma’s eyes widened in recognition. “The Writ and the Mien.”

I nodded, impressed she recognized the words. “Most forget it, or disregard it, because it just isn’t practical all the time.” I closed my eyes. “I didn’t swear my oaths because it was practical.”

“Madness,” Emma stated, though by her expression she seemed more taken aback than scornful. “You would die on my behalf because of some code?”

“Because it’s right,” I said softly. “The code just gives me a bit of direction, is all.”

We stood there a long time in the cold and the snow, while Emma thought on what I’d said, and offered. She didn’t come to the decision she did lightly, of that I am certain.

“If you are willing to challenge Orley’s masters on my behalf…” Emma took a deep, shuddering breath, steeling her own nerves. “Then I won’t run. I won’t hide. I have nothing to hide. Let all the devils and gods of this world tell me who I am and what I will become, I will defy them.”

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She had a bit of aura in her words then, though I didn’t think by intent. Sometimes, high emotion and strange circumstance can cause the soul to stir as easily as any practiced will, any ritual. Her visage became more stark in the starlit night, her presence in the world more tangible. “I give you my leave to speak on my behalf.”

I nodded. “Good. Then let’s talk to your great-grandfather.”

Orley remained as I had left him. I could just barely make out his shape, black against black, fire-ruined armor half fused to the gnarled trunk of the Malison Oak. Perfectly still, he didn’t stir as I approached. I had Emma wait a ways back, just out of easy earshot, not wanting anything dramatic to happen just yet.

I studied the fallen lord for a moment, trying to decide what to do, what to say. I settled for bluntness.

“I’m not going to let you take the girl,” I said. I didn’t raise my voice, didn’t growl or snarl, just said the words simple, calm. Even still, the charred carcass did not stir.

I waited a beat and continued. “I don’t know how much any of this matters to you, what I’m saying. Probably, you don’t have any more of a choice in this than I did. Less, I imagine. Even still, hear me well, Rider of Orkael; I will not let you take her. She isn’t the woman who betrayed you. She wasn’t party to the crimes against your family. You stay on this path, it’s on you for dragging her down into the mud with the rest of them. You want her to become another Astraea?”

The tortured grinding of deformed metal broke the night’s quiet. Jon Orley’s iron-shelled head twisted very slightly in my direction.

“I knew you could hear me,” I said through my teeth. “And you remember that name, don’t you? Astraea Carreon. She’s the one who betrayed you, Jon, not the girl. You want her? Look in Draubard. Leave the living to their own.”

This binding will not hold me.

I tried not to shiver, but the words that scalded my thoughts — quiet, tired, and painfully sad — left a horrible sense of emptiness in their wake. It was the voice of one who’d been in agony so long he’d forgotten anything else. He made the words a statement of neutral fact, without a hint of threat or bravado.

“Probably not,” I admitted. “But I don’t need them to. Here’s what’s going to happen, Jon. You’re here to punish House Carreon, and I’m here to protect your great-granddaughter. Did you know that? That she’s your blood?”

If the man — if any of the man was still left in there — had a reaction, I couldn’t see it through the melted helm.

“You speak for the Iron Tribunal,” I continued, “and I serve the Choir. Both powers have taken an interest in the girl’s fate. This is bigger than just you and me, and certainly bigger than your vendetta.”

I didn’t actually know if the Choir cared a wit about Emma Carreon or her cursed house, but the statement wasn’t technically untrue. Nath cared, and the Onsolain needed her appeased. A small lie for a good cause.

I took a deep breath, forcing my thoughts to calm. “I’m officially challenging you for the right to decide Emma Carreon’s fate. As one Doomsman to another, I’m placing the girl under my personal protection until such a time as her fate has been decided by a higher authority.”

I felt aura well up in me. This time, I didn’t try to suppress the foreign will I felt in it, but let it surge up and out, passing through my lips. I knew my eyes shone bright, luminescent gold then, that gilded fire burned behind my teeth. “By pacts of old made between the Apostles of Zos and Onsolem, I invoke the Rite of Doom on behalf of the Choir Concilium, who govern this land in the name of the Second God’s Heir. It is the Choir who will judge House Carreon, for this is their domain. You have no right to our souls, Infernal One.”

Of all the things I might have expected in that moment, with my attention firmly fixed on the trapped Scorchknight, it was not to hear a weary sigh from directly behind me as the last metallic echo of my pronouncement faded on the wind.

“I really wish you hadn’t done that,” a familiar voice said.

I whirled around, and there, standing in the snow not ten feet away, I saw Renuart Kross. Clad in his dark gray cloak and battered armor, he almost melded with the ashen snow, a dun statue rising up from the ground. His dark eyes were on the tree, but he addressed me.

“They told me you wouldn’t make any bold moves, that you were too… broken. I see they misjudged. I had worried as much, when you told me all that in the chapel.”

Something cold and hard as an iron ball began to form in my chest. “Kross—”

“It really is a shame,” the knight-exorcist continued, looking genuinely remorseful. “I had hoped to resolve this situation without involving greater forces. It could have been done quietly, amicably, without fuss.”

I turned fully from the tree to face him, a terrible suspicion beginning to shout its warning in my thoughts. “Kross, what are you talking about? Why does the Priory care about Emma Carreon?”

Part of me knew he didn’t refer to the Priory of the Arda, the militant arm of the Urnic Church. Still, I hoped I was wrong, that my paranoia had reared its head and that he wasn’t actually—

The Priory had gotten involved to avoid inquisition and possible crusade, that was it. They wanted to deal with the situation quietly, so the presence of infernal powers didn’t start religiously motivated panic. That had to be it. Because, if he was anything but what he appeared, and I’d told him all of that, then…

He crushed all of my hopes with brutal, dispassionate bluntness. “I am afraid this farce has run its course. Understand, you did ask for this.”

Feeling that pit in my chest form a hollow place, draining all my emotions into it, I spoke with the same lack of passion he did. “What are you talking about?”

Emma had approached when Kross had made his sudden appearance, casting a confused look between us. “Ser Kross? How did you… what is going on?”

I heard metal grind, and knew Orley had stirred at Emma’s nearness. My attention remained on Kross, who finally directed his gaze on me. His lips twisted into a malformed smile.

“You wish to challenge the right of Orkael to pass judgment on the scion of House Carreon? You understand, Jon Orley is but an iron fist. You must have expected there to be an advocate, just as you no doubt sought your own in that rebel seraph.”

“You fought with us against him!” I took a step forward, unable to contain the bitter emotion that welled up in me, despite my attempt to quench it.

“I had to maintain this cover,” Kross said with lifted eyebrows, unaffected by my anger. “Though, I am certain Orley took satisfaction in wounding me. He hates us nearly as much as the ones who betrayed him. Then again, the armor was perhaps a bit much.” He glanced at the Scorchknight. “I understand it is quite painful.”

“Us?” Emma had no clue what was going on. “What is happening? Explain this, Ser Kross.”

“You’re carrying an angel around on your back!” I couldn’t accept it, couldn’t bring myself to fully admit I’d been so easily duped, so starstruck by the image of a True Knight.

“Alken, Alken…” Kross sighed and lowered his head, shaking it in disappointment. “I thought you knew this lore! As I said in the council, the followers of Zos are kinfolk to the Onsolain, no less holy than they.”

Baring my teeth, I brought my aura to bear and looked, using my paladin powers to see through illusion, cleave through falsity. And I saw…

The same thing I’d seen in the graveyard. Around Kross bloomed a soft light, cold and clean, forming the shape of a winged figure holding his neck in an embrace. It opened its silver-white eyes and met my gaze, and—

I realized my mistake. I'd seen the beauty, and stopped looking there. The being who rode Kross was beautiful, yes, as much as any immortal I’d ever laid eyes on save one. But it had a malice in its gaze, a metallic harshness even Nath did not possess. And Kross himself…

I’d been a fool. The spirit clinging to him masked his own aura. I’d never felt his own presence, not once. How else could he walk freely among the faithful, disguised as a holy warrior?

Kross watched my realization, then chuckled. “Very well. I suppose it is only fair, since you removed your mask for me.”

He bowed his head, and… changed. His gray cloak began to shift like liquid shadow, melting and reforming, coiling about his neck into a high scarf. The armor beneath rippled, softening into robes such a deep gray they were nearly black. The gauntlets became loose sleeves, the steel sabatons roughly made leather boots. The buckled sword belt frayed and wound into a simple rope tied about his waist.

A very different man stood before me a moment later. He looked older, though not by much, and not so tall. He hunched beneath a worn, charcoal gray robe, similar to what a mendicant priest might wear. The garment, layered and badly frayed, soot-stained, looked ancient, and obscured the figure beneath in deep shadow. Still, I could see the eyes beneath the heavy cowl.

They burned like twin embers.

Emma took a step back from the transformed knight. “What sorcery is this?”

“No sorcery,” the cowled monk said. His voice held none of Kross’s warm, paternal airs. Cold, without emotion, with a hint of a throaty growl in it. “Just a glamour. Honestly, I expected at several points your guardian would see through it. The power must be truly faded from you, Alder Knight.”

“Who exactly are you, sir?” Emma drew herself up, responding to uncertainty with haughty demand, an Urnic noble through and through. I failed to say anything, too busy putting together small details, little hints. The way his broken arm had healed so quickly in the middle of the fight with Jon Orley. His knowledge about esoteric lore, the scorn he’d directed toward Brenner’s clericon. He’d practically told us what he was, in the council chamber.

“You may call me Vicar.” The monk bowed his head to Emma, folding his hands into his wide sleeves.

I realized then that I recognized him. “You were in Strekke,” I said. “In Emery Planter’s keep. The monk advising his son.”

“Hm?” Vicar returned his attention to me. I could see very little of the face beneath the cowl — just the impression of a chin and wide mouth, and those two hot-coal eyes, red on black. “Ah. You must be referring to one of my brothers. Yes, Emery Planter was one of ours, or very nearly so. My brother told me about you, Headsman. Quite uncouth of the Choir, to send you to poach his soul before we could lay full claim to it. Still, his son has proved quite cooperative.”

“Who are you?” Emma insisted, exasperated. “What exactly is happening here?”

“He is a Crowfriar of Orkael,” I stated flatly. “A missionary of Hell.”

Emma blinked, then turned back to the creature who’d called itself Renuart Kross. “A missionary?”

“Among other things,” the devil monk said with a slight bow of his hooded head.

I drew my blade. I didn’t think about the action, didn’t care about anything other than that I’d told this man — no, not a man — everything. Nearly everything.

“Oh, it’s too late for that.” Vicar didn’t so much as flinch at the dagger. “Thanks to your little stunt, force of arms will play no part in what happens next. We settle this now by precedent of law, by the Rite of Doom, with Emma Carreon’s fate in the balance. You will speak for the Choir, and as Jon Orley’s handler, I will speak for the Tribunal.” In an amused tone he added, “you invoked this, Alken.”

“Fine then,” I spat. I sheathed the dagger, too angry to be embarrassed. “Let’s get this over with.”

The Devil nodded. “So be it, Headsman.”