Chapter 11: The Last Paladin vol 2

The mud was still wet.

Hallah woke to the taste of copper and the pressure of Lucan's hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake with a desperation that bordered on violence. She was lying on her back in the mudflat, the sky above her grey with dawn, and the corpse of the Titanoboa was still smoking feet away. The stench of cooked meat and reptilian blood hung thick in the morning air, mixing with the metallic tang of her own blood that coated her tongue. Her armor was sodden, heavy with mud and fluids she didn't want to identify, clinging to her limbs like a shroud.

"Get up," Lucan said. His voice was raw, wrecked, scraped hollow by hours of panic. "Hallah, get up, you have to—"

"I'm awake," she croaked. Her gut screamed when she tried to move, the bandages Lucan had tied—strips of his own shirt—stiff with blood and crusted against her skin. Every breath sent glass shards through her abdomen. The poison was still in her, a cold thread winding through her veins, making her fingers numb and her vision blur at the edges. Her heartbeat felt wrong—too slow, too heavy, each pulse pushing ice through her arteries instead of warmth.

"The Cleric," she mumbled. "We need a—"

"No." Lucan's hands were on her face, turning her head to make her look at him. His eyes were wide, desperate, ringed with purple shadows and the red of unshed tears. His fingers trembled against her cheeks. "No Cleric. No time. You have a cure poison spell, Hallah. You memorized it. Last week. In the Academy library. 'Cure Toxins.' It's in your head right now. Use it."

She blinked at him, sluggish. The poison was making her stupid, making the world soft and distant, wrapping her thoughts in wool. Even his face seemed to drift at the edges, like smoke. "I don't... I can't..."

"Yes, you can." He shook her, gentle but firm, his grip iron-strong despite his own shaking. "Goddamn it, use it. Cast the spell. Now."

She reached for her mana reservoir and found it nearly dry—a shallow pool at the bottom of a deep well, the dregs of her power thick and stagnant. But the spell was there, waiting in the slot she'd prepared yesterday morning, before the hunt, when she'd thought she might need it for Lucan.

Not for herself. For him.

"Sancte... purificare... egomoi..." she whispered.

The casting was weak, barely a whisper of divine light, pale as winter dawn, but it was enough. The holy energy washed through her body like cool water, finding the poison threads and burning them away. She felt the cold retreat from her extremities, felt her vision clear from the grey haze, felt the nausea loosen its grip on her throat. The magic tasted of copper and incense.

She gasped, curling onto her side, and vomited black bile into the mud. It steamed where it hit the cold earth, acrid and wrong.

"Good," Lucan said, holding her hair back with one hand, his other steadying her shoulder. "That's good. Get it out."

"Fuck you," she wheezed, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her lips felt cracked, her throat burned. "That's... that's not... how you help..."

"It's exactly how I help." He sat back on his heels, and she saw that his hands were shaking violently now, that his face was grey with mana depletion and terror, his skin clammy and pale beneath the dirt. "You were going to die. You were going to die because you forgot you could save yourself."

"I didn't forget," she lied.

"You never think of yourself," he said quietly, his voice dropping to something broken. "Not once. Not ever. It's always me, or the job, or the kingdom. Never you."

"Works better... that way," she mumbled, pushing herself up to sitting. Her gut wound was still there—deep, aching, sealed by the spent jade pendant but far from healed, throbbing in time with her pulse. She'd need a Cleric eventually. But the poison was gone, leaving only the hollow emptiness of exhaustion.

"Can you walk?" Lucan asked.

"Can you?" she shot back, but she let him help her up, let him take her weight as they staggered away from the smoking corpse and the mudflats that had nearly become her grave. Each step sent jolts of pain up her spine, but she bit down on her tongue and kept moving.

The Guild debrief was mercifully short.

Rufus took one look at them—Hallah pale and bloody, her armor scuffed and rent, Lucan barely able to stand from mana depletion, his eyes hollow and his clothes stiff with mud—and waved off the formal report. "Tomorrow," the ratkin said, his whiskers twitching with agitation, his nose wrinkling at the smell of blood. "Job's done. Titanoboa dead. Payment processed. A-rank confirmed, conditional lifted. Now get out of my sight before you bleed on my floor."

They made it to the Academy infirmary, where a healer clucked over Hallah's gut wound and Lucan's hands—burned from channeling through Gold Rush, the skin pink and blistered—and pronounced them both idiots who needed bed rest. The healer's magic smelled of lavender and soap, too clean for the dirt still under Hallah's nails.

Hallah slept for fourteen hours, dreamless and dark, her body knitting itself back together with desperate hunger.

When she woke, it was to find Lucan sitting in the chair beside her bed, reading a spellbook, acting like he hadn't been hovering. The afternoon light slanted through the window, gilding his profile, highlighting the dark circles still under his eyes. A half-empty water glass sat on the table beside him, untouched.

"Job 2," she said, sitting up too fast and wincing as her wound pulled.

"Absolutely not," Lucan said, not looking up from the page.

"Posted?"

"Yes. An armored undead knight in a ruined fort. A-rank. But we're not taking it until you can walk without bleeding."

"I can walk without bleeding."

"Prove it."

She did. She got up, walked to the window, and walked back, though she had to grip the bedpost at the end and pretend she was admiring the view of the courtyard below. Her legs felt like water, her balance uncertain. Lucan watched her with those calculating eyes, and she knew he saw through the act. But he didn't call her on it.

"Tomorrow," he said. "We leave tomorrow. Not today."

"Tomorrow," she agreed, because arguing would take energy she didn't have, and because he was right, and because she hated it.

The ruined fort stood ten miles outside Valeris, a black silhouette against the grey sky, its towers broken like rotted teeth. It had been a border keep once, back in the Silence, before the Rebirth made such defenses obsolete. Now it was just stone and memory, crumbling walls wrapped in ivy that had grown too thick and too hungry, the leaves dark and waxy. The wind smelled of coming rain and old decay.

Hallah walked with Gold Rush at her hip, her gut wound aching with every step but holding together, the skin pulling tight and hot. Lucan walked beside her, close enough to catch her if she fell, far enough to pretend he wasn't hovering, his eyes scanning the treeline.

"You're limping," Lucan said.

"I'm walking. There's a difference."

"You're also favoring your left side. If we encounter hostiles, you'll be off-balance. Your center of gravity—"

"My center of gravity is fine," she interrupted. "Stop mothering me."

"I'm not mothering. I'm calculating."

"You're mothering with math."

He made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been despair.

The fort's gates were rusted iron, hanging open like a mouth, the hinges screeching in the wind. Inside, the courtyard was overgrown with weeds that brushed against their knees, and the well in the center was dry and choked with leaves, the stone lip cracked and moss-covered. But the keep itself—the central tower—still stood, its stones dark with age, and from within it came the sound of metal on stone, rhythmic and patient.

"One knight," Lucan whispered, listening, his head tilted. "Just one. Like the posting said."

They entered the keep.

The interior was dark, lit only by arrow slits high in the walls that cast bars of grey light across the stone floor. Dust motes danced in the thin light, swirling in their wake. The air was cold, smelling of rust and old incense, of stone that had forgotten the sun. And in the center of the hall, kneeling in prayer before a broken altar, was a figure in full plate armor.

The armor was ancient, pitted with age and verdigris, but the holy symbol etched on the breastplate—the Sixfold star—still glowed with a faint, internal light, pale and steady. The figure was dead. Had been dead for ten thousand years. But it was still praying, still kneeling, still faithful, its helmeted head bowed, its gauntleted hands clasped.

"The Last Paladin," Hallah breathed.

The figure turned its head. The helmet was closed, visor down, but the voice that came from within was warm and sad and very, very old, echoing slightly in the hollow helm.

"At last," it said. "I have been waiting. Come, child. Let us spar."

The ghost rose without a sound, its movements fluid and unearthly. Its blade—an ancient longsword, pitted but still sharp, the edge catching the dim light—came free of its scabbard with a whisper of steel that seemed to hang in the air.

Hallah drew Gold Rush. The orichalcum core hummed against her palm, warm and alive and eager, vibrating with a frequency that matched her heartbeat.

"Not the boy," the ghost said, gesturing at Lucan with its free hand. "You. Just you. He may watch. He may cheer. But this is between Paladins."

"I'm not—" Hallah started.

"You are," the ghost said simply. "Now fight."

It came at her without warning, blade flashing in a high arc that would have split her skull if she hadn't gotten her shield up. The impact rang through her arms, jarring her wound, sending sparks of pain through her gut, and she snarled, lunging forward with Gold Rush, her muscles screaming.

Her lunge found nothing. The ghost had taken one half-step sideways — no wasted motion, no flourish — and its longsword came down again, not at her head this time but at the seam where shield met shoulder. She got the shield up late. The edge bit the rim and screamed down the metal, close enough to her face that she felt the wind of it pass her cheek.

It struck again. And again. Not an assault — a rhythm. One, two. One-two. Each blow placed exactly where her guard was thinnest, each one showing her where her own body wanted to leave itself open. Her arms took the impacts and her wound took them worse, every jolt tearing a breath out of her she couldn't spare.

She stopped retreating and drove forward instead, Gold Rush low, then high — a feint she had practiced until it lived in her wrists. The ghost read it like print. Its blade turned hers aside with a flick, and the flat of its sword slapped her ribs. Not a cut. A correction, sharp as a switch.

She snarled and came in harder, a horizontal arc at its waist, all her weight behind it. The ghost stepped inside the swing, inside the arc's reach, close enough that she could see the pitting on its breastplate — and its pommel struck her forearm. Numbing. Precise. Her grip loosened for half a heartbeat.

Its point was at her throat before the heartbeat finished.

It held there. One breath. Two. Then it withdrew, unhurried, and reset its stance as if nothing had happened at all.

She reset hers slower, shaking out her arm, furious at the shaking. The next exchange she kept her strokes short and her shield tight to her wounded side, refusing to reach, refusing to give it the openings it kept cataloguing. That bought her three clean parries and one touch — Gold Rush's edge kissed its gauntlet and struck a single spark off the ancient steel, the first time she had touched it at all.

The ghost's answer was to stop holding back its speed.

That was the shape of the next twenty minutes. The hall became nothing but steel and dust and the bars of grey light from the arrow slits, cut and cut again by moving blades. It was faster than anything she had ever fought — faster than Captain Dawnshield, faster than the Titanoboa — and it did not tire, and it did not breathe, ten thousand years of practice moving with a fluid grace that made her own ferocity look like flailing. Every time she counted its footwork, she was late. Every time she measured an angle, the angle was gone. Her breath came hard and ragged; its helm never moved faster than it chose to.

The flat of its blade found her wrist. Her thigh. Her ribs again, always the ribs, always the lesson. Not to kill. To teach — to show her every opening she left, every guard she dropped, every moment she was thinking instead of feeling.

Then its disengage carried it two steps toward the wall where Lucan stood, its blade drifting, just slightly, off her line and toward his.

Hallah crossed the distance without deciding to. Gold Rush was up and driving before the thought existed — the fastest she had moved in the whole spar, faster than pain, faster than her wound's complaint.

"Stop thinking," the ghost said, parrying her strike and stepping inside her guard, forcing her back. "Faith is not a calculation. It is a trust."

"I don't have faith," Hallah grunted, shoving it back, her boots scraping on stone. "I have a sword."

"Then use the sword with faith." The ghost disengaged, stepping back, its armor making no sound. "Channel not into the blade, but into yourself. The body is the vessel. The will is the weapon."

"I don't know how."

"You do." The ghost's voice softened, gentling. "You do it every time you protect him."

It gestured at Lucan, standing by the wall, watching with white-knuckled hands, his face pale and set.

"Your faith is not in Valerius," the ghost said. "Not in the Six. Not in the Holy Mother. Your faith is in him. That is why your light burns when he is threatened. That is why you stood in the mud and let the snake tear you open. You have absolute faith in that boy. Use it."

Hallah stared at him.

Then she looked at Lucan, really looked at him—the way he was watching her, the way his hands were clenched, the way he was ready to leap in if she fell. The way he trusted her to win. The way he believed in her, absolutely, completely, without reservation.

She had faith in him.

She had faith that he would be there. That he would strike true. That he was worth dying for. That he was worth living for.

"Again," she whispered.

The ghost attacked.

This time, when she raised Gold Rush, she didn't just grip the sword. She reached for that feeling—the warmth in her chest when she looked at him, the certainty that he was good, that he would stay, that he mattered more than anything. She reached for it like a reservoir, like a pool of light, and she poured it into her body, filling herself with it.

Her divine aura ignited.

Not the wild, desperate flare of the mudflat. Something controlled. Something focused. The light ran down her arms and into Gold Rush, and the orichalcum core drank it, stored it, gathered it like a battery, the blade glowing white-hot.

"Good," the ghost said, pressing her. "Now release."

She swung.

The Radiant Slash left her blade in a crescent of concentrated holy fire, a blade of light that extended three feet beyond Gold Rush's edge. It caught the ghost's parry and burned through it, knocking the ancient Paladin back five feet, skidding across the stone, leaving tracks in the dust.

The ghost laughed—a warm, delighted sound, genuine and young.

"Perfect," it said. "You see? Faith in the mortal. Faith in the immediate. That is the oldest way, and the truest."

It lowered its sword.

"I have a gift for you," it said. "An enchantment. Your blade stores faith now. Over time, it gathers. In the moment of need, release it. No chant. No spell. Just will, and trust, and love."

Hallah lowered Gold Rush, breathing hard, her chest heaving. The light faded from her arms, but the warmth remained, settled deep in her bones.

"One thing more, while I can still give it," the ghost said. "There is a book. The Tome of the Paladin. It was mine, once — every spell I ever carried, bound between two covers. A Paladin's whole art in one place. The King's house keeps it now, waiting for a Paladin to claim it." Its voice gentled. "Your spells live scattered in your memory, child, and this morning a scattered memory nearly killed you. Gather them. When the time comes, ask for what is yours."

"Why?" she asked. "Why teach me?"

The ghost walked closer. It reached up with gauntleted hands and lifted its visor.

The face inside was young. A boy's face, no older than twelve, with kind eyes and a sad smile. A thin scar ran across his lower lip—old, healed, but visible. And in his eyes, she saw recognition. Not of the Paladin. Of something older. Something from another life.

"You're..." she whispered.

"The bathroom," the boy said softly. "Room 117. The Mush Inn. You put us in the tub—me and the girls. You told us not to come out until it was quiet. You died with your blood on the floor outside." He touched his split lip, the scar there. "I never said thank you. I lived to be eighty. I died in my bed, and I wished every day that I'd thanked you. So the Weaver wove me here, to the deep past, to wait. To help you in your next life. To finally say..." He bowed his head. "Thank you, Bear. You saved me. Now let me save you."

He straightened. "It's Hallah now, isn't it? Not Bear. Not anymore."

"No," she said softly. "It's Hallah now."

"Hallah, then." He smiled. "The Hollow King's cage grows thin as winter ice. The bars rust. The seal weakens. Be ready, Paladin. Be ready, and have faith."

He stepped back, and his form began to fade, dissolving into light and dust and memory, the armor emptying like a shed skin.

"Wait," Hallah said. "What's your name?"

But he was gone, leaving only the echo of his voice, and the weight of Gold Rush in her hand, thrumming with stored faith, and the warmth in her chest that was Lucan, always Lucan, only Lucan.

She turned to him, and he was staring at her with wide, wondering eyes.

"You knew him," Lucan said. "Before."

"Yeah," Hallah said. "I saved him. In another life."

She walked to him, her gut wound aching, her body tired, her heart full. She took his hand, and together they walked out of the ruined fort, into the light, ready for whatever came next.

They were halfway down the hill, the fort shrinking behind them, when Lucan finally spoke.

"He called you Bear."

Hallah didn't stop walking. "Yeah."

"Who's Bear, Hallah?"

The road was empty. The sky was doing nothing interesting. There was nowhere to put her eyes except the truth, so she put them on the road in front of her boots and gave it to him the only way she knew how — all at once, like pulling a blade out of a wound.

"Me. Before." She swallowed. "I wasn't born Hallah Sovringard, Lucan. I was a man first, in another world. No magic. No classes. Nothing like this. Bear Norcofski. Thirty-eight years old, and not a good man, whatever that ghost thinks. One night at an inn in a place called Anchorage, men came to kill me, and there were three kids in the room who had nothing to do with any of it. I put them in the bathtub and went out the door so the men would follow me. They did. I bled out in the parking lot."

She kept her eyes on the road. "I woke up here. Before I was born. Remembering all of it."

Lucan walked beside her in silence for a long stretch of road. She could hear him thinking — could practically watch the pieces of her rearranging themselves in that careful head of his. The swearing. The fighting. The way she had always known things a smith's daughter had no business knowing.

"How long were you going to not tell me?" he asked at last. Not angry. Worse — careful.

"Forever, if I could've managed it." The honesty hurt coming out. "I'm not him anymore. I'm Hallah. I'm me. I just... started as him."

"I know," Lucan said.

She stopped walking. "You know?"

"You're still the person who stood in the mud and let a snake tear her open rather than step aside." He adjusted his glasses, and his voice stayed level — but his free hand found hers again and held on like the road was tilting. "The rest is just where you came from. Everybody comes from somewhere."

Something in her chest that had been clenched for twelve years — for fifty years — loosened by one notch.

"Don't make it a thing," she said roughly.

"Wouldn't dream of it," he said, and they walked on.

Because the seal was weakening.

But her faith was strong.