He stood behind a tree at the edge of the clearing for a full turn, staring at the priory. The building the headless knight with flowers inscribed on his armor called a chapel. Heden wasn’t sure what he’d meant by that. It was an obscure term.

He watched the priory. No one went in, no one came out, no movement within. It looked deserted. His horse stepped up and put its massive head over Heden’s shoulder, as though it were looking at the priory too. Wondering if they were going to approach, or just stand there. Then it made a horse noise, and Heden reached into his pack and gave the beast another apple. As the horse chewed, Heden reached up and absently scratched its ear.

It stood, a narrow stone building with a single large tower, on the far side of a large clearing, maybe 4 acres across. The trees marking the edge of the clearing were all very close to one another, in contrast to the rest of the wode. It was a dark building, and the dirt around it looked black.

Heden was watching the priory, and not watching it. He was thinking about the knight, or whoever or whatever it was, whose head he’d chopped off. He’d seen many strange things in his years as a professional, certainly much stranger than a man putting his own head back on, but something about this knight was personal. Directed at Heden. It unnerved him in a way dragons and celestials and floating cities had not.

The knight had been testing him. Had intended to test him from the beginning, and Heden had seeming passed. Why the test? No one else had gained the priory since the death, the probable murder, of the knight-commander. Renaldo said anyone who came in, just came out again. Turned around without realizing. That was a kind of magic Heden understood. The knight mystified him.

There was a dreamlike quality about the man he fought. But nothing could be more real than the man who found him on his ass and helped him up. The man he talked to. Heden had replayed that conversation a dozen times as he followed the path that led here. It revealed nothing.

He related to the man. Understood him. Was he meant to? Was the knight he fought the real thing, and the man he conversed with the invention? A fabrication designed to find out more about Heden? He went through a dozen possibilities and then shook his head. No point. If there was anything to be gleaned, he wasn’t smart enough to do it. He missed Elzpeth.

He reached up to his neck. He’d healed the wound on his arm and his shoulder, but left this one. He wanted to remember the encounter was real. He pulled his hand away. The blood was dried, the thin cut already healing, but some dried blood came off on his hand. Real enough.

The horse sniffed the air, and Heden noticed there were two troughs of water in front of the priory. Looked like there was water in them. He saw no well. Could be rainwater. Didn’t matter. The horse needed a drink either way.

Heden and the horse walked into the clearing.

The sky was bright blue, the day brilliant. Large white clouds drifted by. It was beauty Heden was not immune to. He missed scenes like this in the inn. He checked the ground. It looked as though it had been churned and then matted down. If by horses, there was no obvious sign. But he knew he was terrible at reading the ground.

As they approached, Heden saw there was a large stained glass window set on the north facing wall. It would be on his right if he entered so the sun would shine through it.  He led the horse to one of the troughs. It slurped up the clear water while Heden looked around again, taking in the whole clearing. He didn’t know what he had expected, but at least some horses. Knights rode horses, didn’t they? Maybe a pavilion.

The stone was granite, but black in many places. Most places. Heden’s boots sunk into the soft dirt all around. Rich soil, he thought.

He walked slowly around to the back of the priory, looking closely at the blackened stone. It looked as though the priory had burned, but whether recently or in the distant past, Heden couldn’t say. Wouldn’t rain wash away soot? Maybe not without soap or quicklime. The dirt within a few inches of the priory was also black.

Heden ran his hand over the granite and soot came off. He put his hand against the rough hewn rock. It was still warm. But no warmer, Heden thought, than it would have been just from absorbing the heat of the sun all day.

He looked up at the stained glass window, still intact. This was a puzzle. What kind of fire would leave this much soot and not melt the glass? Who would try and burn a granite building? Someone trying to kill the people inside.

He walked back around to the front and looked in. A foyer lead to a long, narrow nave and several small rooms branching off. At the end of the nave, past several prayer benches, was a small altar on a raised dais. Where were the knights?

Feeling like an interloper, he walked into the priory.

The stained glass window dominating the north wall was large. It seemed odd to Heden, then he realized. He’d never seen a church oriented in this way. The entrance west, the nave leading east to the dais. Usually the entrance was north or south, so the stained glass window would be above either those entering, or the priest at the altar. Why the difference here? Was it significant? No way for him to know.

He stood in the middle of the priory, even empty it felt intimate compared to the cavernous enclosure ofLlewellyn’s cathedral. He looked at the window. The glass artwork depicted a scene he recognized: Godwin the Vigilant, Saint of Cavall fighting Saint Pallad the Black, Saint of Nikros. He knew the story. Godwin lost. The glass depicted their final battle. It was, Heden thought, a strange moment to commemorate, but then he often felt that way about the stories of Saints.

He turned and continued up the nave, his boots loud on the flagstones. The altar was typical. Raised. A stone rectangle with pictures of knights in Cavall’s service carved into it. Behind it, nested into a cubby hole at the back wall, Heden saw a font about four feet high in a recessed hole.

Something about the font triggered Heden’s instincts. He walked around the altar and examined it.

He resisted the urge to try and move it or inspect it to see if it hid anything significant. Sometimes even writing hidden away from view was useful, but this was a priory and he reminded himself it held nothing secret. No dwarf would arrive and use a metal pole to make the altar slide away revealing a complex underground chamber.

He leaned against the altar and looked at the font. There was a little water in it. This meant someone had tended it recently. It looked exactly like a bathing pedestal for birds such as noblemen had in their castle grounds.

Then he saw it. The font was of a different stone from the altar, the flagstones, the wall. Everything else was granite. Hard to work, requiring master masons to ensure the building didn’t collapse under its own weight. But the font was limestone. It was, Heden realized, much older than the rest of the building. It was weathered, heavily so. Heden suspected the priory was built around it. He imagined the small stone pedestal, its bowl filled with water, alone in the forest with no building around it. Sunlight reflecting off its water. Something that could not happen now. This priory had started off as a simple shrine, a font hidden away miles in the forest. How old was this place?

He touched the font. Ran his hand around its edge and put his fingers in the water. He said a prayer to Lynwen. Not much of one. Thankfully no response, and continued his survey of the priory.

Along both walls, five on one side, four on the other, were several crests painted on wood about seven feet up each wall. Each was very simple, and all followed the same theme. Each had a white field with a solid green circle in the middle. Each was adorned very discreetly with one additional element, no two alike. This crest has crossed swords. This one stylized shields. Each had a different number of elements, no two the same. Two shields, seven crossed swords. A sprig of holly with six branches. Three horses rampant.

Heden noticed two things. Beneath each crest was a hook, as though to hang a shield, Heden guessed, and below that a wooden brace, as though to hold a spear or a lance. They were all but one empty.

The one held a large metal shield. A knight’s shield. With the green circle on a white field, the sign of the Green Order, Heden surmised, and in the middle of that green circle, one yellow star. The sun.

Kavalen.

Without thinking, he reached up and lifted the heavy shield off its hook. The shield had been heavily damaged and some attempt at repair had been made.

Heden turned it around. Not repair, just reshaping. From behind, he could see the shield had been pierced twice. By what, he couldn’t tell, and the metal then pounded back in shape. The leather straps were new. But the shield was now useless. The reshaping was for show. Its owner, he knew, was dead. And the shield hung as a memoriam.

“Replace that shield upon its hook,” a soft voice came from behind Heden, causing him to jump almost out of his skin. He turned, alarmed, and saw a figure framed in silhouette in the entryway.  “Or my lance will find your heart.”

On to Chapter Twenty-three!

Chapter 22