Page 38 of The Salt King
Avelyn blinked slowly and felt tears soak his lashes.
“What happened then?” Jericho asked, to the needle again.
“Whitby sent Saint Hildegard. She went down into the mine and woke the King, and when the knights came back, he trapped them on the fen, at Caer Halen. They were cursed to ride forever, never knowing how long it had been.”
“Caer Halen means ‘the Salt Fortress,’ right?”
“Right,” Avelyn said, crushing the need to fold his arms. He was sitting here half naked. Even when he’d spent three days negotiating with an unwilling cement mixer on a building site in Sudan in fifty-degree heat, he had never taken his shirt off. This was the first time anyone had seen his tattoos since the tattooist.
“I never understood,” Jericho said, still sewing as calmly as if he were putting a button back on an old shirt, “how the Salt King is supposed to live at Caer Halen, but also in the mine here. Or—is it just two stories that were never really meant to match up?”
“It’s . . .” Avelyn tried to concentrate. Jericho needed to do the stitching.
Jericho touched his ankle to move him to a better angle for the light and this time, Avelyn had no control over it. He jolted back. The thread pulled taut, and Jericho had to make an awkward lurch after him to keep it from snapping.
“Did I—”
“No—no.”
For a long time, there was no sound but the fire. Avelyn wanted to speak, but he couldn’t. He had to put his hand over his mouth and stare at the floor, waiting for his throat to unlock and his breath to stop catching. He wanted to lock himself away and never come out.
“You’re doing brilliantly,” Jericho told him. He was just a monochrome blur now. “I’ll be finished soon. Or I can talk you through how to do this yourself, if that’s better? It isn’t difficult.”
“No, I’d stitch my elbow to it,” Avelyn said, trying hard to smile.
“Good, because that was a lie. I would very definitely be called before a jury if I gave you a suture needle.”
Come on. Sentences. “What? I’ve been very polite and hardly Jesuity at all. Haven’t I?”
Jericho lifted his eyebrow and leaned over to snag some kind of official form from his desk. It was a formal complaint about Avelyn. Aggressive and bullying. Submitted anonymously.
Anonymous, but somehow the handwriting could only belong to a person who said You do you! “Fabian . . . blessed me with his presence.”
“Oh, I see,” Jericho said, and relaxed.
“Sorry, you mean there exists somebody you don’t like?” Avelyn said, because this was revelatory information and never mind any other crises.
Jericho stiffened, caught out. “No. He’s perfectly lovely.”
“He surely is,” Avelyn said, on the scent now.
Jericho looked like he was having some internal moral clashes. “Did he, er . . .”
“Give me a detailed lecture about why there shouldn’t be any women allowed in the priesthood? Yes, he did.”
“Because the apostles—”
“Because the apostles were all men,” Avelyn joined in, aware that the only reason Jericho had brought this up was so that he could sit still and get used to the idea of the stitching before it began again. “You’ve heard it too. What did you say?”
“I said, ‘But wouldn’t first-century socioeconomic factors mean the broad majority of women weren’t free to give up everything to wander around after a carpenter,’ and he said, ‘It was the Lord’s choice,’ and then I made him sit next to Annunciata for a week,” Jericho said. “People . . . are allowed to have their opinions, though.” It was cracking around the edges.
Avelyn was starting to feel less terrible. “I’m going to start cornering him in corridors and asking him about abortion. As you say, he’s great. I’m sure he’ll say completely reasonable things.”
Jericho broke. “I will stab you with this.”
“Ah, you’re a normal person really,” Avelyn said, victorious. It was a brittle kind of cheer, but it was better than nothing.
“For God’s sake, you’re like a cat with a—no! Never mind,” Jericho cut himself off. Avelyn must have been emanating triumph. “Never mind. I’m not encouraging you. Shall I try this again?” he asked, about the stitching.
