After the paladin left the tent, Ghislain turned to Joseph, his right-hand man. “Well? What do we do if he reports our plans to my brother?”

“You were the one who wanted to include him, Ghislain. I always tell you that you’re far kinder than I am, but surely this proves it.” Now that they were by themselves, Joseph dropped all formality. It had taken Ghislain a few years to convince him to do so, and he was glad he did. He couldn’t stand all that peerage nonsense. He wondered if Mathieu, always so stiff and stoic, even allowed his wife to call him by his forename.

“It just…bothers me to see someone like that. Even if it’s a paladin.” Ghislain spoke slowly; it was hard for him to voice his emotions. He often admired Joseph who was always softness and smiles.

Ghislain truly didn’t have a good impression of Divine Paladins. Coincidentally, his first encounter with them was Sir Ferdinand, who had stopped by the Palace of Yvailles when Ghislain was still in his preadolescence.

The 28th Divine Paladin was haughty and cruel. During his brief stay, he had barely glanced at Ghislain; instead, his focus was on the palace maids. It became well-known that if he tapped a maid on her shoulder, she would be called to attend to him in his bedroom that night. The poor maids would return in the morning, deep abrasions to their lips and jaws, and a wide-eyed shock about them.

Berthe, his favorite maid who would often sneak him snacks from the kitchen and was the only person who seemed to prefer him over his brother, had been called upon one night. When she woke him up in the morning, he noticed a panicked silence had come over her. Ever so slightly, her back was trembling, and she took slow, uneven steps. He had cried to his brother, but all Mathieu could do was order some expensive herbs to treat the wounds hidden by her uniform.

Ferdinand was untouchable. There were two reasons. The general policy in the palace was to indulge the paladins and celebrate their every achievement. They had to feel valued so that they didn’t rebel against or betray Calorin. On one of the rare occasions in which his father had spoken to him, he simply said, “You treat them like kings, but you never let them forget that you’re the king.”

Of course, there were limits to their hospitality. However, there was something about Ferdinand and the Divine Paladins that only the Royal Council knew. To some extent, a paladin’s numerical rank was both arbitrary and not.

By the end of a paladin’s first year or so, the Royal Council would review his accomplishments and the intensity of power he could draw from the Lord’s Favor, and then assign the paladin a numerical rank. The lower the number, the more they expected from that paladin.

Last he checked, there were a hundred-something paladins, some of whom were either dead or missing, so being the 28th Divine Paladin implied a position of immense power. As a result, Ferdinand’s perverse nature was disregarded, and the tales of his accomplishments never mentioned his violent abuse of the palace maids or how, after he had routed the enemy army in the forest, he had led a troop of soldiers back to the enemy’s capital to plunder and pillage the defenseless citizens. This had come after the enemy commanders had already surrendered, and when questioned on why he had taken action, Ferdinand claimed that the messenger – who had mysteriously gone missing – never arrived to tell him the news of their surrender.

To say “life is unfair” was not only trite and cliché, but also overly simplistic. No, if one were to pull at the blinders of his own naivety, he would discover that it was not enough to say that the world was unfair. Life was cruel and violent and merciless, and Sir Ferdinand’s existence was the first example of a lesson that Ghislain would learn repeatedly throughout his life.

However, sometimes, he met people who were not perpetrators of life’s violence but victims of it. People like him.

What had first piqued his interest in Roel was the brief flash of anger he had seen from him when they had spoken the first time. The paladin’s words were laced with a deep bitterness, but then, immediately after, he had lowered his head and there was that same downtrodden expression on his face as if he hadn’t said anything at all. There was something tucked deep inside the man, and what Ghislain felt then had been both empathy and disgust at seeing someone who felt, in some way, like he did.

“I never thought I would meet a paladin, someone given so much power, who looked so defeated,” he said.

“I don’t quite understand what you mean,” Joseph said. “He certainly is humbler and more somber than most, but that’s all I gathered.”

“It’s…something about the way he talks. Or looks. Something’s a bit off.” He sighed, frustrated. “It’s hard to explain. Maybe because you and he are so different.”

“You’re going to make me jealous now,” Joseph teased.

“I’m serious,” he said with irritation.

“I know. If you want to trust him, then I will as well.” Joseph had a soft smile on his face. “If we can save one more person, why shouldn’t we?”

“Well, he’ll have to carry his weight,” Ghislain said, feigning displeasure.

“Of course, of course.” Joseph often humored him like this. “Tonight has been eventful. We should prepare for the long journey tomorrow.”

“I suppose.”

They snuffed out the two candles and retired to bed together.

The next day, Sir Roel didn’t say a thing to him about last night. As they marched, the man just looked straight ahead, his eyes alert. He was a strange man, but there was something stranger about his silence today. Something had changed since last night.

“He’s been too quiet,” Ghislain said in a low voice to Joseph who was riding next to him.

“Just give him some time,” Joseph said.

If Sir Roel heard them, he didn’t react to it. At times, he would disappear into the trees and re-emerge later with a tired expression on his face. Sometime around noon, he disappeared again but for much longer. When he finally came back, the sun was beginning to set, and they were setting up camp. He was dragging along a large, bloodstained carcass that resembled a large wolf. Somehow, the paladin looked more defeated than he did before, and his eyes, much like the dead wolf’s, were glassy and unfocused.

“Gone for a long time, weren’t you?” Ghislain called out.

“My apologies, Your Highness,” he said as he got off his horse. “This one was hard to pin down.” He held up the dead wolf. “I had to track it for hours.”

“Did it occur to you to let it live?” He meant to say it jokingly, but when the words left his mouth, they sounded mean-spirited and sarcastic. Joseph was the only one who ever laughed at his jokes, and that was not because the jokes themselves were funny but because his attempts to make them were so awkward.

“It did occur to me, yes,” the paladin said, and he must’ve thought he was being mocked because his voice was low and serious. “But I never have much of a choice.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing, I suppose.” The paladin set the wolf’s carcass on the ground. “Besides, I don’t like to take risks. Better dead than alive.”

“A risk-averse paladin is a new one. Your kind is famed for your adventuring.”

“I’m assigned adventures, yes. But I am not adventurous.” Finally, a smile emerged on his face, but it was a small one, the slightest lifting of the corners of his lips, that was tinged with self-deprecation. Ghislain realized it was the same one that the paladin had on his face when he had questioned him about the Lord.

“Do you really stand by your words?” he found himself asking. “That even with all the senseless violence, this was the best possible world?”

“I’m sorry?” Sir Roel asked, confused.

“You said it when we first met again. That the Lord did His best to protect us. I’m asking you if you really meant that or was that just some religious rhetoric forced upon you?”

“Oh, that’s what you meant. I like to believe it, yes.”

He scowled. “Like to believe? That’s not the same thing.”

“Do you…” The paladin hesitated before continuing. “Do you not believe in the Lord?”

“I don’t.” He knew he would be in trouble if someone heard him, but his words were spoken firmly. “You’ve been around the royal family long enough, haven’t you? You really think we’re the closest descendants of the Lord?”

The paladin cast his eyes to the ground and didn’t answer.

“If you grew up in the royal family, your faith in the Lord wouldn’t remain intact,” Ghislain said angrily. “I am the youngest child of twelve. And now, only my brother and I remain. Illness? Accidents? Do you believe any of that?”

The paladin met his gaze but maintained his silence. He seemed to have an inkling about what transpired between his siblings over the last few years.

“I’ll confirm your thoughts: they killed each other over the throne. Berthe, my maid, died from poisoned food that was intended for me.” He could feel the bitterness, years of it, rising up his throat. He didn’t intend for the conversation to take this direction, but he was never one to deny or stifle his anger.

It was impossible to forget the details of Berthe’s death. She had brought him some honeyed nuts, but he was preoccupied. Mathieu had suggested planting some trees near the pavilion in the palace gardens. Always one to follow his brother, he had agreed to start digging that afternoon.

Like a nagging mother, Berthe warned him that she would eat all the nuts if he didn’t get to them soon, and he had just ignored her warnings. She was saying something, he couldn’t remember what, when she started choking. He looked over and gave a shout of alarm just as her body went limp and hit the floor. He could do nothing but watch in horror: her dilated pupils, her sprawled body convulsing, one leg in the air desperately kicking, both arms clawing at her stomach.

“Hemlock poisoning. My sister Adele had intended to kill me because she knew Mathieu doted on me and she wanted to punish him for killing our eldest brother the previous month. Well, he got his own revenge when Adele happened to fall down an open well later that year.”

“And King Maxime permitted this,” the paladin said softly.

“You know my father. He encouraged it. Shook with joy every time one of us died, I’m sure. If this is the Lord doing His best, then He’s useless to me,” Ghislain concluded. Some of the soldiers had been staring at them. Although there was more he wanted to say, there would be time for it later. “Anyway, I still expect your answer about last night.”

“Ah, yes. I –”

“Come by my tent tonight. We can talk about logistics.”

“Yes, Prince Ghislain.” The paladin gave him a low bow, and Ghislain thought it was strange how tightly his right hand was gripped around the hilt of his sword.