Flesh and Spirit Read Online Free Page B

holy father.”
    â€œValen. Nothing else, then?”
    â€œNay, holy father.” No title to mark me as nobility or clergy. No town or profession to mark me as a rooted man even if my father was unimportant. No association with any of the three provinces of Navronne—Ardra, Morian, or Evanore—or with their contentious princes. And certainly no colineal surname to proclaim my family pureblood, and thus my future beyond even an abbot’s right to determine. Especially not that. “Just Valen.”
    â€œValen Militius, perhaps?”
    Another dangerous topic. The young attendant monk’s dark brows lifted slightly. Attentive. At the worktable, Brother Robierre’s head was bent over his mortar and pestle, plants and vials, but his hands grew still.
    Though I tried to dip my own head farther, being propped on my side made it difficult. “Not a professional soldier, holy father, far from it, nor even a worthy freeman-at-arms. But I once carried a pike for King Eodward, Iero cherish his soul, and stood behind him as he drove the Hansker barbarians back across the sea. He called us his men of light, and so we all felt more than what we were born.” All true. And now the test would come…
    â€œAnd what of noble Eodward’s sons?” He touched the clean linen that wrapped my shoulder and made a blessing sign upon it. My flesh warmed beneath the bandage. “Which of the three princes owns your fealty? Or do you hope for this ghostly Pretender of current rumor?”
    â€œNone of them, holy father. Though the sign of three speaks of heaven, these three sons are so far from worthy of their kingly father that an ignorant lout such as I am cannot choose. And though I reverence any issue of good King Eodward, I fear that naught but tavern gossip has delivered him a fourth son.”
    Unless I could discover with which prince this man’s favor rested, I dared not say more. Perryn of Ardra, whom I had chosen as being the most intelligent and least openly brutal of the half brothers, was surely dead by now, or in chains, babbling his plans and the names of his noble supporters to his brother Bayard’s torturers. In either case, my oath to him was moot. He had shown himself mean and so stubbornly inept that my loyalty had been ruined much earlier. He certainly was not worth dying for.
    I glanced up. The gray eyes held steady, the long, slender bones of the abbot’s face unmoved. “So your wounds were not earned in battle, then?”
    Well, the battle had been over months before we’d charged Prince Bayard’s line at Wroling—in the spring when Bayard of Morian had allied with Sila Diaglou and her Harrowers. But such quibbling wouldn’t carry weight with this abbot. Not with a wound in my back, and the admission requiring me to declare not only that I had run away, but which side I had deserted. I needed a better story.
    â€œNay, holy father, rather my wounds stem from a private dispute with another man regarding property that belonged to me. Though right was with me in the matter, I believed I was going to die and so confessed my sins to a village practor. He sent me on the road with my wounds untended as penance, saying the One God would put me in the way of death or life as was his will.”
    I held still and listened carefully, fighting the urge to add more words to this collection of nonsense, such as what village I’d come from or why I had suffered the strikes of arrows rather than knife or club. It seemed a very long time until the abbot spoke again.
    â€œWas this, by chance, the disputed property, Valen?”
    The dark-browed monk stepped forward, pulled a book out of his black gown, and passed it to the abbot. The abbot laid it on the bed in front of my face, a squarish book some three fingers thick, its brown leather binding tooled in gold with gryphons and dragons, long-limbed angels, roundels, vine leaves, and every flourish of the