"Book of Hours"
Title: Book of Hours
Author: penknife
Recipient: Ethie (ethereal_vision)
Pairing(s): Enrique/Carlos, Enrique/Magda
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Marvel owns them; I do not.
Summary: How the day begins, and how it ends. Set pre-series. Thanks to sionnain for beta reading.
Book of Hours
Matins
Carlos is woken out of sleep by someone else's sleeplessness. He slips from his bed with the confidence of knowing that he will encounter no one unless he wishes to, and seeks out the source of the restlessness. It is the darkest part of the night, and all should be quiet.
He finds Enrique walking in the herb garden, where no one should be at this hour. The moonlight silvers the man's fair hair. An unnatural color, some whisper behind his back. Brother Jorge says more sensibly that he has seen children with white hair before, but they had weak eyes that could not bear the sun, and fair skin that would not darken. Enrique's skin is bronzed by the sun, and his pale eyes are piercing and clear.
Brother Jorge will be annoyed if he finds Enrique disturbing his plants. He will, for that matter, be annoyed if Carlos makes some noise to wake him. Carlos puts himself where Enrique will see him, hoping the man will make no noise in his surprise.
He does not; he goes very still, and then comes to Carlos with the look of a child ready to take his punishment for some misdeed. It is not a look Carlos knows what to do with; they must be nearly of an age, although he hasn't asked. He is twenty, himself, and unused to the burden of anyone else's transgressions.
"Can't you sleep?" Carlos asks.
"That's no excuse," Enrique says.
"Take it up with your confessor. I'm not here to send you back to bed like a child."
"What, then?" Enrique considers him. He looks curious, but Carlos can feel the undercurrent of anger under his skin. He wonders what it's for. Maybe only for having interrupted his moment of quiet.
"I just wondered if there were anything I could do."
"About what?" Enrique looks equally at a loss. They might be speaking different languages instead of the same good Spanish.
"Do you know much about plants?"
"Not so much," Enrique says. He fingers a sharp-bladed leaf. "I'm not a botanist."
"I find it interesting," Carlos says. "All the different kinds, and how they change. That is, how God changes them."
"The ways of God are mysterious," Enrique says, but in a dry tone that Carlos finds both attractive and a little disturbing.
"We should go to our beds," Carlos says. "We'll be seen."
"Is that what concerns you?" Enrique says. There is a clear blue heat in his eyes. "Being caught?"
"I was concerned for my fellow man," Carlos says. "Would you have had me stay properly in my bed if you'd fallen and broken your leg?"
Enrique shrugs. "I'm not hurt."
That's not true. Carlos can feel his hurt like the ache of an old wound badly healed, although he has no idea what thorn has worked its way into his heart. It is probably the beginning of the end of all peace of mind when he tells himself that there must be a way to draw the thorn and heal the wound.
He's very young, and pride is his besetting sin. He's never yet learned anything he can't do. Much later he will thank God for the lesson, and hope to learn to bear it with good grace.
For now he leads the way back indoors, believing that the way his heart lifts when Enrique follows him is a sign that he has done right.
Lauds
They both take shameful advantage of the chance to talk while they're on the road. It's not exactly wicked license, walking most of the day and camping beside the road at night, eating bread and cheese and drinking fresh water and stale wine. Still, it's out in the fresh air, and it feels like a holiday. Carlos takes his pleasure in the journey as a sign that he was right to feel his calling lay in the priesthood but not the monastery.
They talk for hours, Carlos establishing a theme and Enrique challenging and countering. Sometimes he's fairly sure that Enrique is playing devil's advocate, arguing against whatever proposition he puts forth for the pleasure of it. It's an entertaining game, and it can't hurt to sharpen their skills at reason.
Of course Enrique argues with that when he says it. "And how many men have been led astray by reason?"
"Probably not so many as have been led astray by passion," Carlos says. "Anyway, how many have found the truth instead?"
"But is the truth worth the risk?"
"You think so, or you wouldn't look for it so vigorously."
"The fact that I think a thing doesn't make it right."
"Quite an admission, from you," Carlos says dryly.
Enrique falters for a moment. It's possible that he's not actually aware of the intensity of his intellectual arrogance. Carlos recognizes it, having learned to recognize it in himself.
"Is it, then?" Enrique asks, slightly less sharply. "Worth risking your soul?"
Carlos shrugs. "The truth comes from God."
"There are truths and truths."
One truth of which Carlos finds himself suddenly aware is that they shouldn't be on the road so late. He's not even sure how late it is, and it's a dark night; he can't see the moon through the patchy clouds. They meant to stop, he's sure, but Enrique can talk the night through easily without seeming to need sleep, and Carlos was distracted.
He draws breath to interrupt Enrique, and instead finds himself ducking, trying to dodge the man who throws himself out of the shadows at them. He should have felt their presence, he tells himself as he rolls under the weight of one man, others moving around him. He realizes that he did, but not soon enough or clearly enough. A risk of rhetorical debate he hadn't considered.
Carlos hasn't been in a fight since he was a child, but he thinks he still has the knack of it. He punches the man hard, and shoves him off, trying to wrap his hands around the man's knife hand. "Give me the knife," he says, low and intense, and the man's hand opens slack. "Now sleep." He's not sure if it will work, but he can feel the man relaxing under his hands, his breathing changing.
Two others are down. Enrique fights hard and gracelessly, but it's effective enough. He's struggling with the last. Let him take the knife, Carlos tells the man without words, but it's not working; there's too much emotion behind his attack, desperation and anger. It's hard to avoid getting caught up in the man's hunger, his anger at men who sleep within walls and have bread and good clothes --
The knife flashes as it comes down, and then it turns an inch from Enrique's breast, as if glancing off metal. The man stares, and Carlos hits him hard, using the knife handle to give the blow weight. He stumbles off-balance, and as he sags against Carlos the touch of his skin is enough to let Carlos drag him down into sleep. He eases the man to the ground.
"Leave them," Enrique says, and Carlos follows him, making their hurried way on in the dark until they've put distance between them and their assailants. Near dawn they're both so tired their steps are faltering, and the sky is lightening. They leave the road by mutual assent and find a clearing where someone has made a fire before. Carlos is fairly sure they've left danger behind them.
He offers Enrique bread. "Eat," he says. "There'll be people on the road today, and we may sleep within city walls tonight if we make good time." He can tell Enrique is in no mood to sleep, although he wishes he could.
Enrique takes the bread but doesn't eat it. The first light of dawn catches in his white hair and turns his hands on the bread gold. It's probably relief that makes Carlos think it such a beautiful sight.
"On the road ..." Enrique begins, and then trails off. Carlos can see the flash of the knife in his memory, and feel Enrique's lack of fear. He knew it would not strike true, that no knife ever made would have.
"I saw," Carlos says. He's aware that his next words matter. "God spared us both. We should be grateful."
"A mark of his grace?" Enrique asks. His voice is wry, but there's a genuine question underneath.
"We can seek to understand," Carlos says. "That doesn't mean we can ever know."
Enrique doesn't look satisfied with that as an answer, and Carlos has to admit he's not all that satisfied with it himself.
Prime
The church is small, and not the finest in the city, but Carlos is pleased with it. Enrique paces its length as if critiquing the architecture, which Carlos admits is not inspired but still finds beautiful.
"I don't know why you want to lock yourself away somewhere out of the sight of anyone important," Enrique says. "You might as well take yourself off to the cloister."
"They're all important," Carlos says.
"In a sense," Enrique concedes easily without for a moment taking his words to heart. "But anyone could do what you're doing here."
"I'm learning," Carlos says. "I'm not saying I want to spend my life here."
"Who is there to learn from here?" Enrique runs his fingers over the stained glass of a window, the lead straightening under his fingers.
Carlos doesn't say everyone, because he doesn't know how to tell Enrique the lessons he's learning from bakers and chandlers and young wives worried about their babies and their men. He thinks of saying that not everyone in his little flock is without influence, and that not all decisions are made by the great; some equally important ones are made by those who wait upon the great. Or that one has to walk before one can run.
He spares Enrique either explanation or platitudes, pleased at his company and unwilling to spend it all in argument. He can't deny that Enrique's ambitions are beginning to bear fruit, and he's pleased for his friend. "Stay and have dinner with me."
"Of course," Enrique says; under his hands, the lines of the window have grown razor-straight. Carlos isn't entirely sure it's an improvement.
Terce
Carlos never finds out where Enrique meets the gypsy girl. The first time he sees them together they are standing perfectly properly by the church wall an arm's length apart, and Enrique's heart is in his eyes. She looks up at him and smiles as one should not smile at a priest. Carlos thinks of stepping out of the shadows to see if they will spring apart in guilt, and instead turns and walks away.
Later, on his knees, he's very aware that concern for the state of Enrique's immortal soul was not the first thing that came to his mind, nor the second. The second, he's well aware, was jealousy. He knows that his love for Enrique is not the sort that leads him to wish only for his soul's perfection. He lives with that hunger as he lives with fast days and cold winter mornings, not perfectly or patiently but with determination, and tries to turn a flawed and carnal love to the best possible ends.
The first was fear for the girl. He wanted for a moment to warn her away from Enrique, and it troubles him that he could think such a thing about his friend. It's the barely-leashed anger always crawling under Enrique's skin that gives him pause, and the way that those who cross him are sorry for it. Of course, that's usually a matter of church politics, and Enrique is hardly the only one to play that game in deadly earnest. And Carlos has hardly protested when Enrique has made those who crossed Carlos sorry.
At first it seems that none of his worries will be borne out, except of course for the ones about the state of Enrique's soul. The girl is a gentle creature, bird-boned and quick to laugh, and Enrique responds to her with a trust that Carlos has never managed to inspire in him, despite knowing sometimes that Enrique feels the same hunger he does when their hands brush more or less by accident.
Possibly that's why he doesn't trust Carlos. Generally Enrique thinks of the desires of the flesh as an enemy. But some younger, less bruised part of him comes into his eyes when he is with Magda, and he smiles at her as if she is something precious and pure, not a ragged gypsy girl who's probably been had for the price of a meal.
He's aware that's hardly the spirit of Christian charity in himself. She's a lovely girl, and if she's been hungry, he understands the feeling. It's not hunger or desperation in her eyes when she looks at Enrique, anyway; he can see that it's love. He knows it's wrong, but he wishes them both good from it anyway, all the good that can come from what is flawed.
Sext
It ends as it must, with the girl with child. Enrique tells Carlos because he tells Carlos everything, or at least more than he tells anyone else. He paces the room with haunted eyes.
"You could marry her," Carlos says.
"Leave the Church?" Enrique says, as if this would violate some law of the universe.
"Leave the priesthood. It's been done."
"It would be wrong."
It was wrong to take her to your bed and leave her with child, Carlos wants to say, but he can't in the face of the look in Enrique's eyes. "Then what's there to do?" he asks as gently as he can. "Give her some money, if you have it." He wouldn't be the first priest to keep a mistress, although Carlos thinks it will be a dangerous secret for a man with ambitions. He doesn't feel that reminding Enrique of those ambitions at the moment would be a good deed.
"And what about the child?"
"Well, what about it? I suppose when it's of age to be apprenticed you can find it something, or there's always the church."
"The church." Enrique smiles, an expression entirely without humor. "It would be better sent there now," he says. "And not spend its childhood being introduced to sin."
"Aren't we all?" Carlos asks, lightly but seriously. He's not sure his words penetrate, though. Enrique is looking inward at some memory that tangles his soul around it into a dense knot. Carlos has the urge to push him toward simplicity, the things he knows to be true: he loves the girl, he wants to care for her and the child, and those things will be true even if he grows repentant in time for their sin.
He doesn't trust himself to change Enrique's mind, even if it's for the greater good. He wants too much for himself, and there's a limit to how far he trusts his own self-denial. Instead he just says, "If there's anything I can do ...," sure that there won't be.
He may be right; there's little enough he can do when Enrique stumbles into his room, weeks later, his face white. He can't find words for most of it, but Carlos can see it through his eyes. Outraged relatives, a scene, demands -- Enrique has never dealt well with demands. Carlos had assumed the girl was friendless and had long since spent her virtue. He feels the first tendrils of shame at having assumed so without reason.
Enrique hadn't meant the things he said, Carlos is sure. He hadn't meant that he would denounce them, whether as heretics or witchbreed or whatever crime had come easiest to his lips. He hadn't meant to say he would watch them burn and take the child. He'd only meant to lash out at them, words better than anything else he wanted to do when they'd held his arms so he couldn't twist free --
"She went with them," Enrique says, his voice breaking. "She said she wanted no more to do with me. That I was a monster."
"You're not," Carlos says, pulling Enrique to him and stroking his shoulders as if he were a child, as if he were the child he almost sounds like now.
"What am I, then?" Enrique whispers. Carlos can't tell if his horror is at the things he said or at the thing they both know, that he is one of the changed ones himself, no matter how long he goes on denying the way iron answers to his will.
He only has one answer either way. "What God made you," he says, and kisses Enrique on the forehead, wanting the kiss to be pure, wanting the words to be true. Enrique clutches at him like a drowning man, and he wants to deny his own relief, that now it is all over and Enrique has come home.
Not to me, but to God, he tells himself, and wants it to be true.
None
They walk together through the orchard behind Carlos's father's house, high enough up the hill that he can only see the clay tiles of the roof far below shining bronze in the late afternoon sun.
"What are you going to do with it?" Enrique asks curiously. He bends down the branch of an apple tree to inspect the apples, running his fingers over their curves.
Carlos shrugs. "Sell the house and the land, I suppose." He's never expected to inherit, having had his choice of profession determined by being the youngest of three sons and born to a father with traditional ideas about how to dispose of them. He supposes it's a reminder that no one knows how long their time may be.
"You could keep it," Enrique says. "For when you retire to the country." Enrique still thinks Carlos is wasting his talents. Carlos is beginning to think he may be right, but for a different reason. Too often when he should give his heart to the work of the Church he finds himself drawing back.
"I might," Carlos says, but as he says it he realizes that he wants to sell it so that he'll have ready coin for whatever he might need to do on a moment's notice. He doesn't want to think yet of what that will be, so he reaches up to pluck an apple instead.
"Not that one," Enrique says, turning it to show the blemish on its smooth skin. He plucks it himself and tosses it to the ground; Carlos almost picks it up again, but he lets it lie.
Vespers
"I can't understand your interest in the Inquisition," Carlos says.
"They find out things," Enrique says. "Interesting truths, or at least interesting lies. And they're called in whenever anyone finds something unusual. Surely you see the value of that."
"They torture and burn," Carlos says flatly.
"But in a good cause," Enrique says, his voice dry. "What better cause could there be than the salvation of souls?"
Carlos doesn't think he means it. He could know easily enough, but he keeps his hand carefully away from Enrique's on the table and his mind carefully behind walls. There are some truths that aren't worth risking his heart to know.
Enrique lifts his cup, and the setting sun turns his hands the color of the wine.
Compline
"It's not the end," Enrique says. "We can make this work to our advantage."
Carlos stops in his hurried packing, putting the book in his hands down. There's little enough that he owns, anyway. Little enough to show for the better part of a life. "How?" he asks. He half-hopes that Enrique has some answer he can't see, but he knows it's not likely. He doesn't let himself turn.
"In my position --"
"Your position -- " Carlos does turn, then, sick at heart but not quite disbelieving. "You can't mean to remain an Inquisitor."
"Of course I can," Enrique says calmly. "It's the best way to find witchbreed. It's my duty, now."
"And burn them?"
"I think in some cases the locals may be mistaken. It's easy to mistake the marks of grace for the marks of something far worse."
"And will anyone believe you that they are the marks of grace?"
"If they aren't marks that show."
"And if they are?"
Enrique's blue eyes catch the candlelight. "Then perhaps it is a judgment on their sins."
"You know that's not true."
"There are truths and truths."
"They're like us," Carlos says.
"If they believe, then it doesn't matter if they burn," Enrique says, and Carlos has no answer for the terrible certainty in his voice, no answer that will not destroy the only consolation Enrique has for everything he lost as a child. He's not even sure Enrique's not right. He just doesn't want to live in a world in which he is.
"It matters for the sake of your soul," Carlos says finally.
"Is that what concerns you?" Enrique says. He smiles a little without warmth. "I'm willing to take the risk."
"I'm not," Carlos says. He puts the book into his trunk. He means to take ship for England, where the Inquisition cannot reach. There is a cart waiting outside. In the morning they will find the church doors standing open, like a broken cage. He's a little ashamed at the thought, although he knows his relief is mostly for the things he will not now have to do.
"Where will you go?"
"Somewhere else," Carlos says. "Anywhere else."
Enrique catches at his arm as he turns away, drawing him closer than he expects, bending his head toward Carlos's as if he means to tell him a secret. He kisses him, his mouth hot on Carlos's own. "Away from me?"
There's frustrated hunger in the touch, and something that might even be love. Carlos wants to keep his touch on Enrique's mind light, so that he can believe that's the reason for it. But he can't help looking, and he sees what he expects, the hard determination to use Carlos's weakness to persuade him to do what Enrique thinks is right.
"For the sake of my soul?" Carlos says bitterly, but he can't help brushing his mouth against Enrique's one more time. He'll remember the taste for years, and the feel of Enrique's hair soft against Carlos's forehead. For a moment he closes his eyes, wishing they were back in the herb garden, with only the innocent temptation to touch each other like this to trouble the quiet night.
Then he turns his back on Enrique, and goes on with his packing; he's sure in time it will be some comfort that he knows he's right to walk away.
Author: penknife
Recipient: Ethie (ethereal_vision)
Pairing(s): Enrique/Carlos, Enrique/Magda
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Marvel owns them; I do not.
Summary: How the day begins, and how it ends. Set pre-series. Thanks to sionnain for beta reading.
Book of Hours
Matins
Carlos is woken out of sleep by someone else's sleeplessness. He slips from his bed with the confidence of knowing that he will encounter no one unless he wishes to, and seeks out the source of the restlessness. It is the darkest part of the night, and all should be quiet.
He finds Enrique walking in the herb garden, where no one should be at this hour. The moonlight silvers the man's fair hair. An unnatural color, some whisper behind his back. Brother Jorge says more sensibly that he has seen children with white hair before, but they had weak eyes that could not bear the sun, and fair skin that would not darken. Enrique's skin is bronzed by the sun, and his pale eyes are piercing and clear.
Brother Jorge will be annoyed if he finds Enrique disturbing his plants. He will, for that matter, be annoyed if Carlos makes some noise to wake him. Carlos puts himself where Enrique will see him, hoping the man will make no noise in his surprise.
He does not; he goes very still, and then comes to Carlos with the look of a child ready to take his punishment for some misdeed. It is not a look Carlos knows what to do with; they must be nearly of an age, although he hasn't asked. He is twenty, himself, and unused to the burden of anyone else's transgressions.
"Can't you sleep?" Carlos asks.
"That's no excuse," Enrique says.
"Take it up with your confessor. I'm not here to send you back to bed like a child."
"What, then?" Enrique considers him. He looks curious, but Carlos can feel the undercurrent of anger under his skin. He wonders what it's for. Maybe only for having interrupted his moment of quiet.
"I just wondered if there were anything I could do."
"About what?" Enrique looks equally at a loss. They might be speaking different languages instead of the same good Spanish.
"Do you know much about plants?"
"Not so much," Enrique says. He fingers a sharp-bladed leaf. "I'm not a botanist."
"I find it interesting," Carlos says. "All the different kinds, and how they change. That is, how God changes them."
"The ways of God are mysterious," Enrique says, but in a dry tone that Carlos finds both attractive and a little disturbing.
"We should go to our beds," Carlos says. "We'll be seen."
"Is that what concerns you?" Enrique says. There is a clear blue heat in his eyes. "Being caught?"
"I was concerned for my fellow man," Carlos says. "Would you have had me stay properly in my bed if you'd fallen and broken your leg?"
Enrique shrugs. "I'm not hurt."
That's not true. Carlos can feel his hurt like the ache of an old wound badly healed, although he has no idea what thorn has worked its way into his heart. It is probably the beginning of the end of all peace of mind when he tells himself that there must be a way to draw the thorn and heal the wound.
He's very young, and pride is his besetting sin. He's never yet learned anything he can't do. Much later he will thank God for the lesson, and hope to learn to bear it with good grace.
For now he leads the way back indoors, believing that the way his heart lifts when Enrique follows him is a sign that he has done right.
Lauds
They both take shameful advantage of the chance to talk while they're on the road. It's not exactly wicked license, walking most of the day and camping beside the road at night, eating bread and cheese and drinking fresh water and stale wine. Still, it's out in the fresh air, and it feels like a holiday. Carlos takes his pleasure in the journey as a sign that he was right to feel his calling lay in the priesthood but not the monastery.
They talk for hours, Carlos establishing a theme and Enrique challenging and countering. Sometimes he's fairly sure that Enrique is playing devil's advocate, arguing against whatever proposition he puts forth for the pleasure of it. It's an entertaining game, and it can't hurt to sharpen their skills at reason.
Of course Enrique argues with that when he says it. "And how many men have been led astray by reason?"
"Probably not so many as have been led astray by passion," Carlos says. "Anyway, how many have found the truth instead?"
"But is the truth worth the risk?"
"You think so, or you wouldn't look for it so vigorously."
"The fact that I think a thing doesn't make it right."
"Quite an admission, from you," Carlos says dryly.
Enrique falters for a moment. It's possible that he's not actually aware of the intensity of his intellectual arrogance. Carlos recognizes it, having learned to recognize it in himself.
"Is it, then?" Enrique asks, slightly less sharply. "Worth risking your soul?"
Carlos shrugs. "The truth comes from God."
"There are truths and truths."
One truth of which Carlos finds himself suddenly aware is that they shouldn't be on the road so late. He's not even sure how late it is, and it's a dark night; he can't see the moon through the patchy clouds. They meant to stop, he's sure, but Enrique can talk the night through easily without seeming to need sleep, and Carlos was distracted.
He draws breath to interrupt Enrique, and instead finds himself ducking, trying to dodge the man who throws himself out of the shadows at them. He should have felt their presence, he tells himself as he rolls under the weight of one man, others moving around him. He realizes that he did, but not soon enough or clearly enough. A risk of rhetorical debate he hadn't considered.
Carlos hasn't been in a fight since he was a child, but he thinks he still has the knack of it. He punches the man hard, and shoves him off, trying to wrap his hands around the man's knife hand. "Give me the knife," he says, low and intense, and the man's hand opens slack. "Now sleep." He's not sure if it will work, but he can feel the man relaxing under his hands, his breathing changing.
Two others are down. Enrique fights hard and gracelessly, but it's effective enough. He's struggling with the last. Let him take the knife, Carlos tells the man without words, but it's not working; there's too much emotion behind his attack, desperation and anger. It's hard to avoid getting caught up in the man's hunger, his anger at men who sleep within walls and have bread and good clothes --
The knife flashes as it comes down, and then it turns an inch from Enrique's breast, as if glancing off metal. The man stares, and Carlos hits him hard, using the knife handle to give the blow weight. He stumbles off-balance, and as he sags against Carlos the touch of his skin is enough to let Carlos drag him down into sleep. He eases the man to the ground.
"Leave them," Enrique says, and Carlos follows him, making their hurried way on in the dark until they've put distance between them and their assailants. Near dawn they're both so tired their steps are faltering, and the sky is lightening. They leave the road by mutual assent and find a clearing where someone has made a fire before. Carlos is fairly sure they've left danger behind them.
He offers Enrique bread. "Eat," he says. "There'll be people on the road today, and we may sleep within city walls tonight if we make good time." He can tell Enrique is in no mood to sleep, although he wishes he could.
Enrique takes the bread but doesn't eat it. The first light of dawn catches in his white hair and turns his hands on the bread gold. It's probably relief that makes Carlos think it such a beautiful sight.
"On the road ..." Enrique begins, and then trails off. Carlos can see the flash of the knife in his memory, and feel Enrique's lack of fear. He knew it would not strike true, that no knife ever made would have.
"I saw," Carlos says. He's aware that his next words matter. "God spared us both. We should be grateful."
"A mark of his grace?" Enrique asks. His voice is wry, but there's a genuine question underneath.
"We can seek to understand," Carlos says. "That doesn't mean we can ever know."
Enrique doesn't look satisfied with that as an answer, and Carlos has to admit he's not all that satisfied with it himself.
Prime
The church is small, and not the finest in the city, but Carlos is pleased with it. Enrique paces its length as if critiquing the architecture, which Carlos admits is not inspired but still finds beautiful.
"I don't know why you want to lock yourself away somewhere out of the sight of anyone important," Enrique says. "You might as well take yourself off to the cloister."
"They're all important," Carlos says.
"In a sense," Enrique concedes easily without for a moment taking his words to heart. "But anyone could do what you're doing here."
"I'm learning," Carlos says. "I'm not saying I want to spend my life here."
"Who is there to learn from here?" Enrique runs his fingers over the stained glass of a window, the lead straightening under his fingers.
Carlos doesn't say everyone, because he doesn't know how to tell Enrique the lessons he's learning from bakers and chandlers and young wives worried about their babies and their men. He thinks of saying that not everyone in his little flock is without influence, and that not all decisions are made by the great; some equally important ones are made by those who wait upon the great. Or that one has to walk before one can run.
He spares Enrique either explanation or platitudes, pleased at his company and unwilling to spend it all in argument. He can't deny that Enrique's ambitions are beginning to bear fruit, and he's pleased for his friend. "Stay and have dinner with me."
"Of course," Enrique says; under his hands, the lines of the window have grown razor-straight. Carlos isn't entirely sure it's an improvement.
Terce
Carlos never finds out where Enrique meets the gypsy girl. The first time he sees them together they are standing perfectly properly by the church wall an arm's length apart, and Enrique's heart is in his eyes. She looks up at him and smiles as one should not smile at a priest. Carlos thinks of stepping out of the shadows to see if they will spring apart in guilt, and instead turns and walks away.
Later, on his knees, he's very aware that concern for the state of Enrique's immortal soul was not the first thing that came to his mind, nor the second. The second, he's well aware, was jealousy. He knows that his love for Enrique is not the sort that leads him to wish only for his soul's perfection. He lives with that hunger as he lives with fast days and cold winter mornings, not perfectly or patiently but with determination, and tries to turn a flawed and carnal love to the best possible ends.
The first was fear for the girl. He wanted for a moment to warn her away from Enrique, and it troubles him that he could think such a thing about his friend. It's the barely-leashed anger always crawling under Enrique's skin that gives him pause, and the way that those who cross him are sorry for it. Of course, that's usually a matter of church politics, and Enrique is hardly the only one to play that game in deadly earnest. And Carlos has hardly protested when Enrique has made those who crossed Carlos sorry.
At first it seems that none of his worries will be borne out, except of course for the ones about the state of Enrique's soul. The girl is a gentle creature, bird-boned and quick to laugh, and Enrique responds to her with a trust that Carlos has never managed to inspire in him, despite knowing sometimes that Enrique feels the same hunger he does when their hands brush more or less by accident.
Possibly that's why he doesn't trust Carlos. Generally Enrique thinks of the desires of the flesh as an enemy. But some younger, less bruised part of him comes into his eyes when he is with Magda, and he smiles at her as if she is something precious and pure, not a ragged gypsy girl who's probably been had for the price of a meal.
He's aware that's hardly the spirit of Christian charity in himself. She's a lovely girl, and if she's been hungry, he understands the feeling. It's not hunger or desperation in her eyes when she looks at Enrique, anyway; he can see that it's love. He knows it's wrong, but he wishes them both good from it anyway, all the good that can come from what is flawed.
Sext
It ends as it must, with the girl with child. Enrique tells Carlos because he tells Carlos everything, or at least more than he tells anyone else. He paces the room with haunted eyes.
"You could marry her," Carlos says.
"Leave the Church?" Enrique says, as if this would violate some law of the universe.
"Leave the priesthood. It's been done."
"It would be wrong."
It was wrong to take her to your bed and leave her with child, Carlos wants to say, but he can't in the face of the look in Enrique's eyes. "Then what's there to do?" he asks as gently as he can. "Give her some money, if you have it." He wouldn't be the first priest to keep a mistress, although Carlos thinks it will be a dangerous secret for a man with ambitions. He doesn't feel that reminding Enrique of those ambitions at the moment would be a good deed.
"And what about the child?"
"Well, what about it? I suppose when it's of age to be apprenticed you can find it something, or there's always the church."
"The church." Enrique smiles, an expression entirely without humor. "It would be better sent there now," he says. "And not spend its childhood being introduced to sin."
"Aren't we all?" Carlos asks, lightly but seriously. He's not sure his words penetrate, though. Enrique is looking inward at some memory that tangles his soul around it into a dense knot. Carlos has the urge to push him toward simplicity, the things he knows to be true: he loves the girl, he wants to care for her and the child, and those things will be true even if he grows repentant in time for their sin.
He doesn't trust himself to change Enrique's mind, even if it's for the greater good. He wants too much for himself, and there's a limit to how far he trusts his own self-denial. Instead he just says, "If there's anything I can do ...," sure that there won't be.
He may be right; there's little enough he can do when Enrique stumbles into his room, weeks later, his face white. He can't find words for most of it, but Carlos can see it through his eyes. Outraged relatives, a scene, demands -- Enrique has never dealt well with demands. Carlos had assumed the girl was friendless and had long since spent her virtue. He feels the first tendrils of shame at having assumed so without reason.
Enrique hadn't meant the things he said, Carlos is sure. He hadn't meant that he would denounce them, whether as heretics or witchbreed or whatever crime had come easiest to his lips. He hadn't meant to say he would watch them burn and take the child. He'd only meant to lash out at them, words better than anything else he wanted to do when they'd held his arms so he couldn't twist free --
"She went with them," Enrique says, his voice breaking. "She said she wanted no more to do with me. That I was a monster."
"You're not," Carlos says, pulling Enrique to him and stroking his shoulders as if he were a child, as if he were the child he almost sounds like now.
"What am I, then?" Enrique whispers. Carlos can't tell if his horror is at the things he said or at the thing they both know, that he is one of the changed ones himself, no matter how long he goes on denying the way iron answers to his will.
He only has one answer either way. "What God made you," he says, and kisses Enrique on the forehead, wanting the kiss to be pure, wanting the words to be true. Enrique clutches at him like a drowning man, and he wants to deny his own relief, that now it is all over and Enrique has come home.
Not to me, but to God, he tells himself, and wants it to be true.
None
They walk together through the orchard behind Carlos's father's house, high enough up the hill that he can only see the clay tiles of the roof far below shining bronze in the late afternoon sun.
"What are you going to do with it?" Enrique asks curiously. He bends down the branch of an apple tree to inspect the apples, running his fingers over their curves.
Carlos shrugs. "Sell the house and the land, I suppose." He's never expected to inherit, having had his choice of profession determined by being the youngest of three sons and born to a father with traditional ideas about how to dispose of them. He supposes it's a reminder that no one knows how long their time may be.
"You could keep it," Enrique says. "For when you retire to the country." Enrique still thinks Carlos is wasting his talents. Carlos is beginning to think he may be right, but for a different reason. Too often when he should give his heart to the work of the Church he finds himself drawing back.
"I might," Carlos says, but as he says it he realizes that he wants to sell it so that he'll have ready coin for whatever he might need to do on a moment's notice. He doesn't want to think yet of what that will be, so he reaches up to pluck an apple instead.
"Not that one," Enrique says, turning it to show the blemish on its smooth skin. He plucks it himself and tosses it to the ground; Carlos almost picks it up again, but he lets it lie.
Vespers
"I can't understand your interest in the Inquisition," Carlos says.
"They find out things," Enrique says. "Interesting truths, or at least interesting lies. And they're called in whenever anyone finds something unusual. Surely you see the value of that."
"They torture and burn," Carlos says flatly.
"But in a good cause," Enrique says, his voice dry. "What better cause could there be than the salvation of souls?"
Carlos doesn't think he means it. He could know easily enough, but he keeps his hand carefully away from Enrique's on the table and his mind carefully behind walls. There are some truths that aren't worth risking his heart to know.
Enrique lifts his cup, and the setting sun turns his hands the color of the wine.
Compline
"It's not the end," Enrique says. "We can make this work to our advantage."
Carlos stops in his hurried packing, putting the book in his hands down. There's little enough that he owns, anyway. Little enough to show for the better part of a life. "How?" he asks. He half-hopes that Enrique has some answer he can't see, but he knows it's not likely. He doesn't let himself turn.
"In my position --"
"Your position -- " Carlos does turn, then, sick at heart but not quite disbelieving. "You can't mean to remain an Inquisitor."
"Of course I can," Enrique says calmly. "It's the best way to find witchbreed. It's my duty, now."
"And burn them?"
"I think in some cases the locals may be mistaken. It's easy to mistake the marks of grace for the marks of something far worse."
"And will anyone believe you that they are the marks of grace?"
"If they aren't marks that show."
"And if they are?"
Enrique's blue eyes catch the candlelight. "Then perhaps it is a judgment on their sins."
"You know that's not true."
"There are truths and truths."
"They're like us," Carlos says.
"If they believe, then it doesn't matter if they burn," Enrique says, and Carlos has no answer for the terrible certainty in his voice, no answer that will not destroy the only consolation Enrique has for everything he lost as a child. He's not even sure Enrique's not right. He just doesn't want to live in a world in which he is.
"It matters for the sake of your soul," Carlos says finally.
"Is that what concerns you?" Enrique says. He smiles a little without warmth. "I'm willing to take the risk."
"I'm not," Carlos says. He puts the book into his trunk. He means to take ship for England, where the Inquisition cannot reach. There is a cart waiting outside. In the morning they will find the church doors standing open, like a broken cage. He's a little ashamed at the thought, although he knows his relief is mostly for the things he will not now have to do.
"Where will you go?"
"Somewhere else," Carlos says. "Anywhere else."
Enrique catches at his arm as he turns away, drawing him closer than he expects, bending his head toward Carlos's as if he means to tell him a secret. He kisses him, his mouth hot on Carlos's own. "Away from me?"
There's frustrated hunger in the touch, and something that might even be love. Carlos wants to keep his touch on Enrique's mind light, so that he can believe that's the reason for it. But he can't help looking, and he sees what he expects, the hard determination to use Carlos's weakness to persuade him to do what Enrique thinks is right.
"For the sake of my soul?" Carlos says bitterly, but he can't help brushing his mouth against Enrique's one more time. He'll remember the taste for years, and the feel of Enrique's hair soft against Carlos's forehead. For a moment he closes his eyes, wishing they were back in the herb garden, with only the innocent temptation to touch each other like this to trouble the quiet night.
Then he turns his back on Enrique, and goes on with his packing; he's sure in time it will be some comfort that he knows he's right to walk away.