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Milius is killed on the day of the fleece fair. Philip doesn’t see it happen, but he hears his muffled voice through the cloister door. It’s a low, vengeful swear drowned out by Jack throwing his shoulder against wood.
A cold dread in Philip’s stomach– he’s never heard him like that before.
After William’s men pass, he returns to the cloisters. It’s not hard to find his body– his fellow brothers have crowded around him in glassy-eyed, terrified prayer. For a moment, his chest flares with indignant anger, because how dare you gawk at him like some grotesque object of speculation? Then he realises he, too, is staring. Milius is lying on the ground, dead eyes and legs taut. His boots are steeped in a thick layer of mud– below them, fresh grooves on the ground where his soles caught and slid (he fought, oh God, he fought). There’s blood pooling on his neck, staining his chin and his dark cowl. Philip nearly retches when he steps back and it dawns on him that the mud below his feet is slick with crimson. I’ve stepped on him, he realises in horror.
The monks’ eyes are all on Philip now, expectant and afraid. He knows why. There are no ordained priests or bishops around to administer any rites of death (but he would sooner spit in Waleran’s eye than let him touch his friend, he thinks fiercely). Milius will have to do with a prior’s sendoff. Philip kneels by him, tries his best to fight the flicker on his face when his knees squelch into bloody mud.
Offer him this one dignity. He lifts a hand to Milius’s face.
Philip has done this before– once, with his parents, an entire lifetime ago. He was just six then, and he’d knelt by his father’s body just like this. His fingers were fat and stubby, and they shook as they moved, but Abbot Peter had been there beside him, guiding his hand. Now it’s just him. And his hand hasn’t stopped trembling.
Up close, it is even harder to look at his face. There’s just half a human expression on it (him. him. him). His mouth is twisted in the remnant of a sneer. What little he can see of his teeth is stained crimson. The rage and bile written in the lower half of his face appears to be entirely divorced from his vacant eyes. They are dark and glassy and devoid of anything remotely Milius and they stare into and through Philip.
Arrogant fool, he spits through bloodstained teeth.
He closes one eye, then the other. He’s stopped staring. Thank God, he’s stopped staring.