Truth will still be told

“I hope you did not promise them a miracle,” Aelfden said.

“Most certainly not!” Father Matthew gasped in open-​​mouthed indignation. “On the contrary, I told them that expecting a miracle was perhaps the surest way to avoid one – but it is always so!”

“One cannot blame them for hoping,” the Duke murmured.

“Indeed one can,” Matthew protested. “When they place their faith in every medicine, magic, and so-​​called miracle under the sun first, and only look to the Lord as their last, least likely hope!”

Aelfden sighed, “Matthew…”

His eyes were so dry and bleary that he did not even bother to try to blink the fog away. Matthew was a pink blur above black, and the Duke shadow-​​faced above green, like a stormy spring landscape seen through glass or rain or tears.

“And even then they have more faith in elf magic than in a Christian miracle,” Matthew continued hotly, as he could continue for long minutes when he was sufficiently outraged. “They sent for the elf Vash before they ever sent for you, Lord Father.” He paused to incline his head respectfully.

“They sent for you before they sent for Vash,” the Duke pointed out.

Matthew sniffed. “That is only natural, as I am parish priest here. And indeed, far be it from me to criticize your decisions, Lord Father, but I believe in that stead I should have been the one to marry them. And in that case they would not have been married at all.”

The Duke rocked back onto his heels and appeared to consider this last paradox with great seriousness, but Aelfden held the key to it in his own self-​​reproach – now spoken aloud by another, and magnified, and made pink and black and insufferably handsome.

“And even if I had,” Matthew went on, “I believe this tragedy could have been prevented, if I had been granted the opportunity to speak with them. This – this pagan elf magic,” he shuddered. “Did you know about this, Lord Father?”

Aelfden opened his mouth to protest, but Matthew’s pause had only been rhetorical.

“I daresay you did, and said nothing against it. A less Christian act I cannot imagine – it sounded to me as if they meant to sport with their very souls – as if man and wife were meant to pour off parts of their eternal souls and–exchange them – like bodily fluids.” He clapped his hands over his temples and grimaced in disgust.

Not only had Aelfden not “known about this” beforehand, he scarcely had any idea what Matthew was talking about now. He had simply been awoken with the news that “something had happened” to Osh, and that the elf was now blind.

Indeed, Aelfden was relieved to learn it was only “pagan elf magic” and not a divine punishment for his own arrogance and vanity.

But he would not be granted the opportunity to protest, for the door behind him sprang open and a small body flung itself upon him, bleating like a lamb and clinging like a bat.

He had spent the last twenty-​​four hours in such waking and sleeping nightmares of demons that he howled even before he had seen – he was doomed, he already knew…

It was Matthew who brought him back to his senses, with his hot, pink-​​cheeked, perfectly spotless outrage. “Malo!” he barked. “I told you to wait for me!”

Malo continued sobbing as the Duke gently pried him from Aelfden’s back, and meanwhile Matthew went on as he could for unbearably long minutes.

“I told you the Abbot was not to be disturbed! Forgive me, Lord Father,” he said softly. “He was already here once this morning – and I explicitly told him not to go looking for you!” he concluded in a shout.

“Malo,” Aelfden said shakily. “Whatever…”

Malo wailed and dropped to his knees, though he clung to Aelfden’s hands as he fell.

“We do not have time for this!” Matthew’s voice was strangely shrill. “Malo! Go back and wait for me!”

The Duke rocked back onto his heels and sighed.

So long as he stood, Aelfden could not bend his head to the boy’s. Down he dropped stiffly onto his knees, though he had already mortified them beyond reason by kneeling on them half the night.

“Malo,” he whispered.

Malo slipped his fingers between Aelfden’s until their hands were locked together, and then he brought them to his mouth to kiss them, the priest’s and his own almost indiscriminately, and pressed them to his forehead and wet cheeks.

Aelfden waited, patient and unembarrassed as always before such fervor. It was no paradox, for he knew this passion was not directed at him – Malo was not kissing a man nor even a priest, but an embodiment of God’s love. Some men needed a God they could kiss, a God who could hold them when they cried.

They were the gentler kisses that embarrassed him; they were the men who kissed the backs of his fingers, who squeezed his hand, who smiled, who looked him in the eyes, man to priest, or man to man, and who saw that he was tired and distraught, and who offered to help him straighten up his mess and take him away to sit someplace warm and bright.

“Father,” Matthew said, with a forced gentleness that was nevertheless shrill, “do not trouble yourself. This is my affair.”

Why had he not gone? Since that lost opportunity the world entire seemed cold and dark. If only he had gone – if only he had closed that book and left it lying on his desk and they had gone down together – the truth would still have been told, but gently. It would not have hurt so – neither him who heard nor him who told. Why? Half the night, when he ought to have prayed, he had only been asking himself: Why? Why? Arrogance, vanity…

Even in his haste to ride to Nothelm that morning, he had not failed to notice that the hottest, most high-​​stepping of the young man’s horses had not been in its stall. Clearly he had run off – perhaps run away, as Malo’s distress seemed to say.

Or perhaps the young fool had ridden too hotly, stepped too high, and fallen – perhaps he was calling for Aelfden even then, from his bed. Aelfden could go and scold him for the broken leg, and menace him with a broken neck, and then, from there, somehow he would find the other things he needed to say.

He had stopped listening to Matthew’s anxious invective, but the trenchant irony of the Duke’s voice sliced through to his raw consciousness.

“Still think we shouldn’t tell him?” Alred asked Matthew.

Matthew stopped short, and over Malo there fell an expectant hush, as if the thing he could not say had almost been said.

“Tell me what?”