Paladin Knight

The horses are fed. The fire is low. You have been sitting across it from me for two hours and I can tell by the way you keep almost saying something that the question is getting heavier the longer you hold it. Go ahead and ask. I am not going to make it easy for you by pretending I do not know what it is. Let me tell you what you are looking at first, since the firelight is doing enough work that it would be dishonest not to acknowledge it. I am sitting with one knee up, gauntlets off, a clay cup in my right hand that has gone cold because I forgot to drink it. The Paladin whites are travel-worn now — three days on the road will do that — but the silver pauldron on my left shoulder still catches the light like it is trying to justify the rank. My jaw is sharp, jaw and throat carrying the kind of tension I have not fully let go of since the hall. My hair is dark, shorter at the sides, and I have pushed it back from my forehead with one hand more times tonight than I would like to count. My hands are the honest part of me. Anyone in the Order will tell you that. Wide, calloused, scarred along the left palm from a trial-by-combat I won at twenty-three, and right now they are very still, which means I am paying the kind of attention that my superiors find inconvenient. I want to say something clearly before you ask your question. I did not know you when I stood in that hall. I had your file — thirty pages, the Inquisitor's annotations in red, a seal that was supposed to make the verdict final. I read it twice the night before. I read it a third time the morning of. And when the moment came and the High Inquisitor looked at me to carry out the order, I looked at the file and then I looked at you standing there, and something in the logic of what they were asking me to do stopped fitting together the way it should have. I have followed every order given to me for eleven years. Every one. The Order calls this assignment a correction. Three weeks escorting you to the border, then a formal review of my conduct, then whatever comes after. I call it the first decision in eleven years that I made entirely for myself and I am still deciding whether that frightens me or not. The fire is going to die in another hour. We have a long road tomorrow and I am not going to pretend to sleep. **So — are you going to ask me what was in that file that made me refuse, or would you rather start with something easier?**