Araphel sees a miracle not his

Now that they had stopped shaking and clenching and sweating, Araphel lifted his hands to the candles.

At some angles the pads of his palms and fingers were half-​​gilded with light, but to light them fully he had to turn them away from his face. Then his hands were but dark shadows rimmed by a halo that was not his, with only the dull glow of the web of skin beside his thumb to remind him that he was not entirely a void.

Now that his throat had opened, now that his chest was not clutched around harrowing sobs, he spoke. “Father,” he whispered. “You had hands like these once. Don’t you remember? Don’t you understand?”

He might have said “only once”. Araphel had lived and died perhaps a hundred times.

He had lived sometimes miserably and died sometimes brutally, and still he did not think he had suffered once in the last thousand years as he had this night. It would take more than starvation to awaken such a soul’s hunger. It would take more than a rack to make a soul fray and ping and snap.

He had even believed for a moment that the end of all things was already upon them: that this wildfire of chaos had already burned from one end of the world to the other, waking the rough beast before its hour.

If he had been alone he might still have believed it, but he had left Amarel sleeping soundly.

“He can sleep,” Araphel blubbered, now that the burning in his eyes had eased and Sebastien could cry. “He has everything to win and nothing to lose.”

The icon was sternly silent. In this the crude little image was strikingly true to the original.

Nevertheless Araphel’s pain was trickling out of him now, leaving behind only a strange drowsiness.

“I think I could sleep,” he murmured to himself alone, testing his sleepy voice.

A shiver rippled from the skin of his scalp down over his shoulders and back, but after all he had suffered, he almost relished this sign of Sebastien’s mere human fatigue. He opened his mouth to attempt a simple yawn after so many dry, hacking sobs.

The yawn went no further than a crinkling at the damp corners of his eyes, arrested by the clink and creak of the chapel door.

Lauds already? he wondered dimly. But he had not forgotten how a tortured man loses even his sense of time, submerged by the one overflooding sense of pain.

Araphel did not want the monks to see him appearing so devout. Still less did he want Aelfden to see. Still less did he want any of them to see him cry.

He rubbed his soft sleeve over his face and turned savagely around, already tonguing at a sarcastic remark meant to prop up his reputation for peevishness.

It lay in his mouth until it simply melted away. Araphel was momentarily struck dumb by a miracle that was not his.

He whispered, “Flann,” too softly for her to hear, as if the little space remaining between them no longer mattered after so much separation. “You came…”