Chapter 7
Belle found that she quite enjoyed the Friar's company. She hadn't expected to like him: in her experience, limited primarily to the Chromatic Orders, clerics were mostly concerned with helping the Church more than church-goers. But then, the Old Faith had never been very focused on judging people as good and worthy of the Stars' blessings. Instead, they preferred to focus on the small, every-day acts of goodwill and bravery that kept wickedness at bay. The only sin they would not tolerate – their one, cardinal sin – was cowardice.
A coward looked at the evils of the world, and decided to be selfish. A coward ran away, rather than defend the things important to him. It was easy for her to see why Friar Lodowick took umbrage with the Merry Men, and Marian in particular, but he still chose to help them, and that – she supposed – was the whole point. It struck her as refreshingly simple, compared to all the intricacies and restrictions of the Blue Order.
The chill wind bit into her bare arms the moment they cleared the forest, and Belle shivered.
"Is something bothering you, Belle?" Lodowick asked her, draping his coarse cowl over her shoulders. "You seem troubled."
"I was just thinking," she confessed, "about what we were discussing earlier. I hope you… I hope you can think well of me, Friar. I hope you don't think I'm a coward for choosing to flee the Ogres."
"Why would I ever think you were a coward?" he asked, sounding flabbergasted. She smiled at that and took his hand.
"No, it was nothing. Just… what you said to Marian. And I don't feel brave, really. I try to do the brave thing, and hope that bravery will follow, but sometimes I'm afraid the whole world can see right through me. I thought a Brown Friar would have preferred me to stand and fight, not sneak away in the night."
Friar Lodowick stopped walking and glared down at his cassock with more vehemence than she'd thought he could muster. "There is nothing brave about stupidity," he hissed. "Death is quick, death is easy. A blade slips between your ribs, and all your troubles fade. Living is hard, Belle. Living takes bravery. You can run away from war without running away from your responsibilities. I believe that. I do. There are more important things. There's family."
"You... you lost someone, didn't you? A wife? Or was there a child?"
"Yes, there was a child. A son. I… I lost him, as I did his mother."
"I'm so sorry," she replied, pulling him into a hug. It was stupid of her, thoughtless, so close to the city walls. No one could see her. But if they did… if they did, then she would tell them to sod off. She wasn't a sworn Sister yet, she could still offer comfort to a grieving man without penalty.
"Yes, well," whispered the Friar when she released him, obviously flustered. "No matter."
"We aren't as superficial as the dogmas on our sleeves," Belle surmised, pinching the hem of her own vestments with humor in her eyes. "We have layers. I think we'd better hurry, we don't want to be outside the gates after twilight." The sun was already reddening the western sky.
She took a few steps, but the Friar wasn't moving.
"Aren't you coming?" Belle grinned, and he made a bashful smile that suited him perfectly before resuming the slow shuffle of his feet toward the city.
As soon as they entered the town square, Belle wished they hadn't. The crowds were too thick to navigate, and the road to the castle had been completely cut off by a line of men in studded, black armor; intermixed with them stood the Crusaders – Blue Star guards brandishing steel morningstars that could crush bone – and several men clad in the crimson and gold of the City Watch.
"People of Nottingham!" a Blue Brother shouted over the crowd. "This man has been found guilty of the Ogre Heresy and crimes against the City. He must be purified before his taint corrupts us all! Firstly, he has been heard to claim that Ogres are not men, but natural beasts of the forest. We know this to be false; our Blue Star teaches us that the Dark One's demons have corrupted weak and cruel men, and that they may be slain by those with Faith and Trust!"
"All you need is Faith and Trust," the crowd murmured in assent, and their fear flavored the air around her.
"Secondly," the cleric continued, "this man was heard to profess that the actions of the Church are not divinely ordained by the Stars! He has stated, while drunk at the tavern, that a wanted criminal known as the Hood has more to do with the Blue Star's divine will than your Brotherhood. We know this to be false! I say to you now: the Hood is a wanted felon. The Blue Star does not condone theft. Any caught harboring this outlaw in defiance of the Stars will be punished just as severely as the man himself. It is a sin to be complicit with blasphemy!"
A herald, dressed in more practical clothes, took over for the High Spark. "You who pay your tithes and pray to the angels above have nothing to fear! We guard our flock here, in the heart of a land plagued by the father of all demons, and it falls to us to carry out the will of the angels on earth. To deny that will is to deny the sanctity of the Blue Star. What say you?"
"All you need is Faith and Trust," they murmured again, eyes cast-down into the mud. Belle trembled.
"And so this man is justly punished!" the herald shouted. Several Crusaders forced a middle-aged man, stripped of his shirt, to his knees. As the herald spoke, the guards began to scourge the man viciously.
"We stripe his back in remembrance of those who fall from Grace and forfeit their wings," the herald proclaimed as the beating grew bloody.
The crowd repeated their litany, many with tears on their cheeks.
"We salt the wound that he may remember this!"
The masses repeated their refrain again and again, and a pair of Sisters with gem-encrusted wings strapped to their backs produced a golden basin full of rock-salt. The priest took the first handful, whipping it into the sores on the man's back, and the crowd followed suit. The salt was meant to emulate Fairy Dust, Belle knew.
In the old days, tinkerers would sell Fairy Dust diluted with salt to increase from village to village, along with Magic Beans and other mythological things. Most had no more than a speck of real Magic in their entire stock, but the use of salt became symbolic none the less – a pinch thrown over the bride and bridegroom to sanctify a wedding, a bit tossed over the shoulder for good fortune. And here they were, many centuries later, rubbing salt into the wounds of a dying man.
It would have been her father's fate, had he survived the siege. He never made a secret of his belief that Ogres had nothing to do with demons, and Belle secretly agreed. Only humans and devils knew how to be cruel; Ogres were far too basic to contemplate such atrocities as what she witnessed that evening.
She could hear herself shouting, flinging herself against the crowd without progressing more than a few feet. It was hopeless; they'd packed the people in too thickly.
A pair of strong arms encircled her, and Lodowick must have dragged her away, because she began to regain lucidity in a secluded alley, far away from the scene.
"I'll change this," she cried against his neck. "When I'm a Sister, I'll work every day to put an end to this misery. It doesn't have to be this way."
The Friar only hushed her, held her, and let her weep.
