‘Kest, no!’ I shouted. ‘You can’t fight now. He’s too—’
‘Don’t worry, Falcio,’ the boy shouted back, grinning, ‘I’ve still got two legs to lose, and then my head after that!’
The thunder cracked once again. How long had it been since the last time? Surely this had been the longest gap between beats? With a force of will that was far beyond what I could have imagined, I reached into the clouds and grabbed Kest by the shoulder, hauling him back before he could disappear into the blackness.
‘Stop!’ I said, not just to him, but to the world around us. ‘Stop!’
My command had an odd effect: the landscape shifted again, returning to the unlit white I had seen when I first arrived. I could move again without strain. I was so furious with the boy’s reckless desire to protect me that I spun him around to shake him, but when I did, he had become the Kest I knew again, with a man’s form and a man’s face, his limbs returned to him except for the right hand I had severed months before. He was crying.
‘What in hells are you doing?’ I demanded.
‘Please, Falcio,’ he said, the tears streaming down his cheeks. ‘Please . . .’
I let go of him. ‘Please what? What is it you want?’
He wiped a bare arm across his eyes, then held out the stump towards me. ‘Just let me die.’
*
The thunder that came next was softer than the others, the last tired rumbles of a fading storm. My limbs felt exhausted. I looked down to see that they too were taking on the tired white of the landscape around us.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, not for the first time.
‘Of course you do,’ Kest said, his voice devoid of any emotion, even the ambition to sway me. ‘You just prefer to pretend that you don’t.’ He walked a few feet away where a dim shadow of his warsword lay discarded on the ground. He knelt down and picked it up in his left hand, the muscles on his face contorting with pain. ‘Look at me,’ he said, holding the sword out, tremors running along the length of his arm as he struggled to keep it from falling back to the ground.
‘It’s only been a few months,’ I said. ‘The healers warned that you might experience ghostly pains—’
Kest laughed at that, a cold, bitter sound. ‘“Ghostly pains”? Falcio, this isn’t real. You and I aren’t made of flesh in this place. This sword isn’t made of steel, it’s not made of anything. It’s just a hallucination.’
‘Then why—?’
‘Because it still hurts!’ he screamed, and threw the blade to the ground. It landed without a sound. ‘Don’t you see what’s happened to me? It’s not the sword that gives me pain, it’s the very thought of holding it!’
Another echo of thunder, this one barely a stutter, with no sign of lightning following it.
‘We have to go, Kest.’
He looked away from me. ‘I spent every day of my life since I was twelve years old trying to become the best swordsman in the world, trying to protect you, trying to fight for the things you believe in.’
‘The things we believe in,’ I said, but the words sounded hollow even to me. All my life I’d wanted to be a great swordsman, someone who defended others. Instead, they had all been protecting me.
Kest shook his head. ‘I would do anything to go back and stop her from dying, Falcio. When you met her, those first couple of years . . .’
‘Don’t,’ I warned.
He ignored me. ‘I thought maybe you would set aside all your talk of Greatcoats, of fighting the horrible things of this country. I thought you would be happy, that maybe I could find a way to be happy for you. Then . . . Then they took her. A few vicious men in a tavern do the kinds of things such men have been doing for a thousand years and just like that, they broke the world.’ He turned back to me. ‘Do you think, in whatever hell Fost now occupies . . . do you think he marvels at what he unleashed on the world?’
‘Don’t blame this on Aline,’ I said. ‘And don’t blame it all on me. It was the King’s dream we all—’
He waved me off with his remaining hand. ‘Don’t start with that shit all over again. There isn’t a man alive who loves you as much as I do and even I can’t stand to listen to you any more.’
The words stung, a leaden weight as if my heart was too busy trying to push out one last beat to be worried about such trivial things as discovering your best friend can’t abide your presence. I looked at his sword lying between us like a line meant not to be crossed. ‘So what, then? If you can’t be the greatest swordsman in the world then you can’t be bothered to live?’
The tears were still streaming down his cheeks. ‘Is that so wrong? I’ve practised every day of my life, read every book, trained with every living master. I’ve studied everything from fencing to dancing to research every possible way of moving, of perfecting my skill with the blade, all so I could become someone who mattered. Something other than just your . . . I don’t even know what to call it.’ He held out the stump of his right hand to me. ‘What am I now, Falcio, if I can’t be who I was?’
The sky sputtered for a moment – barely a sound now – and I wondered that Kest could feel such pain when there was so little life left in us. I glanced around me: the stillness of the landscape was broken by terrified men and women, scurrying to hiding behind rocks and trees, their hands clasped in prayers that would never be answered.
‘Go,’ Kest said, ‘before it’s too late. Do me this one service, this one favour in exchange for those I did you. Live your life and fight the Gods and shout at the oceans; just let me be.’
I waited a moment before replying. I knew my answer, but it was a dangerous thing to say. ‘You can be less,’ I said at last.
He just stared at me for a long while. Then, ‘Less.’
I knelt down and lifted up his warsword. It felt weightless, insubstantial. ‘You’ll never be the swordsman you once were. Hells, maybe you can’t ever hold a blade again at all.’ I tossed the weapon away. ‘Maybe you never were as good as we all thought; maybe Caveil whose-blade-cuts-water just had an off-day when you met him.’
‘This is not helping,’ Kest said.
I didn’t care. ‘We’re all less than we were, probably less even than we believed we were.’ I pointed to the fading landscape behind us, the cold white slowly turning to an empty grey. ‘And our enemies are worse than we thought, and stronger. There’re more of them, and I don’t think it’s ever going to end. We’re less than we were, less than we believed, and less than the world needs. Ever since this started I’ve been haunted by the fear that maybe this time we can’t win.’
‘You really do save your best speeches for other people, don’t you, Falcio?’ He snorted then, an uncharacteristic action that made me wonder if all this really was just in my head. But it doesn’t matter if it’s real, I thought. It still needs to be said. ‘Maybe I don’t have any good speeches left. But there’s this one question that’s been nagging at me every day, even when I’ve discovered how badly I’ve screwed things up, even when we’re outnumbered, even when they send a fucking God against us.’
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
I pointed to hazy figures in the distance, looking around themselves and discovering that in the growing emptiness, there was nothing left to hide behind. ‘If not us, then who? Who’s going to stand when everyone else kneels? Who’s going to argue for the law even when there’s no justice to be had? Who’s going to try even when the trying is too damned hard?’
We looked at each other a long while before Kest finally said what he’d been holding back. ‘They’re going to kill you, Falcio. Please don’t make me watch while it happens. I won’t be able to save you this time.’
I nodded. He was probably right. ‘Fair enough. Chances are I’m going to lose my head, my life and my country. So just answer me this: if you’re beside me, are my chances of failing more or less than they would be without you?’
‘Less,’ he said. After a moment he smiled, just a little. ‘Son of a bitch. I can�
��t believe I fell for that.’
A feeble crack barely lit the sky before fading into a sigh.
‘Come on,’ I said, reaching out a hand. ‘It’s getting harder to hear Ethalia’s heartbeat and it will be peculiarly embarrassing if this all ends up being for nothing.’
Kest took my hand in his. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Follow the thunder,’ I said. ‘That’s usually where the trouble is.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The Awakening
I woke to the sound of crying. Oddly, it wasn’t Ethalia.
‘Hello,’ she said, leaning over me.
My head was in her lap, she held one of my hands over her heart. I looked to my right and saw my other was still on Kest’s chest. He was breathing slowly but steadily. When I looked back up at Ethalia I said, ‘My heart beats for yours.’
She nodded. ‘Apparently so.’
‘So I must not entirely dislike you.’
She smiled at me, the little crinkles appearing around the edges of her eyes, and I felt a little better. ‘And it’s possible I don’t entirely detest you, Falcio val Mond.’ She held that smile a long time, long enough that had I blinked or looked away for just a moment I might not have seen how it faded. But I’m clever sometimes, so I knew what to watch for, and so I saw the illusion break.
‘I hear her when she talks to you,’ she said at last. ‘Sometimes she speaks to me, too.’
‘My wife is dead,’ I said, trying to keep the shame and resentment I felt from creeping into my voice. ‘Those are memories – hallucinations. How is that even possible?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I simply imagine her, too.’ She looked into the distance, as if she could see someone calling to her. ‘I’m sorry I can’t love you the way Aline did.’
I’ve never asked you to, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. I’m no Bardatti but I know the ending of a song when I hear it. I couldn’t resent Ethalia for concluding that our time together had reached its end almost as quickly as it had begun. Love is supposed to take time to build, but ours had been a bright spark that we had mistaken for a flame, until it had been smothered, over and over, by death and violence and, finally, this Sainthood that was more curse than gift to her. But none of that was the true cause; I knew this. I had loved a woman once who had been taken from me, who I refused to let go. I didn’t know if Aline was a ghost, or a memory, or just a dream of a woman who, like the King, had never really been who I thought she was. None of that mattered, though: she was going to be with me always. I was as defined by her loss as I was by the shape of my face or the sound of my voice. I was a widower, still married.
So when Ethalia looked back down at me and we found ourselves staring into each other’s eyes, I blinked, to signal my acceptance. Very gently, she moved my head onto a pillowed blanket. ‘I should look to Kest,’ she said.
I turned over and very slowly got back to my feet. The sound of weeping caught me again, and I looked around to see Brasti, sitting on a tree stump, his face in his hands.
‘Sorry,’ I said, as I got close to him. ‘I’m afraid Kest and I are both going to live.’
Brasti sniffed and rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his coat. ‘Erastian’s dead, in case anyone cares. He isn’t coming back.’ He gestured to the Saint’s body. When I looked down, I saw what I could have sworn was a smile beneath the blood and dirt.
I extended a hand to Brasti. ‘Get up,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m going to hug you, you idiot.’
He turned and looked up at me, his eyes and nose red. ‘They’ve got a God, Falcio. A fucking God.’
‘They do at that.’
‘They’ve got a God who can snap his fingers and Kest – Kest! – drops dead in his tracks.’
‘Just a little death,’ I said. ‘He’s fine now.’
Brasti slapped my hand away. ‘Oh, well then, I suppose I should just forget the fact that the actual living God of this shithole of a country is out to get us. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t know you had a unique ability to piss people off, Falcio, but even I underestimated just how truly skilled you are at making powerful enemies.’ He sniffed again, an embarrassing sound that would have made both of us laugh were it not so full of anguish. ‘You made me kill you. You made me hold your mouth closed and pinch your nose until your heart stopped.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said.
‘“Sorry”? You arsehole! You’ve got the church, the Inquisitors, the God’s Needles and now an actual God after us. Oh, but it’s okay because Falcio val Mond is sorry. Great, now fuck off. I can’t think of one reason why I’d want to hug you.’
‘I can think of one.’
‘Yeah? What would that be.’
‘Because if you don’t get off your arse and stand up so that I can hug you, I’m going to kiss you right on the mouth.’
Brasti looked up at me, eyes narrowed for a moment, then he said, ‘Hells. I suppose there are some things worse than death.’ He rose to his feet and I pulled him to me. His breath came in big, sudden bursts, as if he were laughing. It took me a moment to realise he was crying again.
‘This isn’t going to help our reputation one bit, you know.’
I expected a joke in reply. What I got instead was, ‘I’m going to destroy him, Falcio. I swear it. Before this is done, I just want one chance. I don’t care if he kills me afterwards but with the last arrow I fire I’m going to murder a God.’
*
We carried Saint Erastian’s body with us for more than twenty miles until we were free of the Condate of Verderen. We knew the old man well enough to be sure he would not have wanted his mortal remains left in that particular hell.
Eventually we decided to lay him to rest behind the ruins of a little church dedicated to Phenia, one of the many names of the Goddess Love. We spoke no prayers as we dug Erastian’s grave, being fairly confident the Goddess could no longer answer them.
‘He really was an ugly old codger,’ Brasti said, wiping the sweat from his brow. Lacking proper tools for grave digging, we made do with branches broken from the copse of trees that had grown through the broken stones of the church.
‘Perhaps someone else should compose the eulogy,’ Ethalia suggested. She was standing in the three-foot hole we’d dug, using her cupped hands to remove the loose dirt.
‘It’s the truth,’ Brasti insisted. ‘Foul-tongued. Mean spirited. Hard to imagine how he ever inspired anyone to fall in love.’
Kest pushed the edge of his branch deeper into the dirt to loosen it. I’d told him to leave the work for us, given that he’d been on the wrong side of death only a day ago, but he’d insisted he was fine. ‘Perhaps for some romance is about more than just beauty.’
Brasti snorted. ‘Speaking from all your expertise on the subject, are you? Do you know, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who, when he says he’s going off to polish his sword, really means he’s going to polish his sword!’
‘I’m not sure I follow the distinction,’ Kest said, then gave a slight smile to show he had, in fact, understood. Despite the awkwardness of working with only one hand, Kest stood tall, easy. He looked more like his old self than he had in months. I knew it for an illusion, though. He was simply clinging to the pretence of normalcy the way a man being pulled down a raging river hangs on to any branch he can find.
My stick kept hitting more and more rocks beneath the soil. ‘That’s probably as deep as we can go,’ I said, turning to Ethalia for her consent to place Erastian’s body in the grave.
‘Kest is right,’ she said, lost in her own thoughts. ‘Romantic love isn’t merely attraction and pretty words.’ She stepped up out of the pit and knelt next to Erastian’s body. ‘I never understood until . . .’ She stopped and looked up at me. ‘He was the Saint of Romantic Love not simply because he embodied its virtues, but because he above all others understood its strength, and because he was willing
to fight for it.’
Brasti looked dubious. ‘I still don’t see—’ He stopped talking when he caught Kest’s look, clearly telling him to let her be.
Ethalia spoke as if she’d forgotten the rest of us were there. ‘Birgid was always so kind . . . so full of serenity. I thought that’s what it meant to be the Saint of Mercy.’
It made sense, but on the three occasions I’d met Birgid-who-weeps-rivers she’d never evoked much of that ‘perfect serenity’ for me. Perhaps now’s not the best time to mention that.
‘I was such a fool,’ Ethalia said, rising to her feet so that Brasti and I could pick up the body and place it in the grave.
‘There is nothing foolish about seeking to bring peace,’ Kest said gently.
She began picking up handfuls of dirt and tossing them onto the body. ‘Peace has no currency in this world. Even Mercy must be paid for with violence.’
We passed the next few minutes in silence, heaping dirt down upon the still form of the dead Saint, giving whatever last thoughts we could to the strange man we’d known for such a short while. Brasti was right: Erastian looked nothing like how one would picture the Saint of Romantic Love – in fact, nothing at all like the statues made in his honour that adorned the gardens of wealthy and sentimental nobles. You were rude and disagreeable and shockingly unhandsome for a Saint of Romantic Love. But if I knew how to pray, I’d pray to you, old man.
*
We rode south to Castle Aramor and whatever hell awaited us there. We three were back to wearing our proper greatcoats again, as we’d seen no more no hordes of shuffling pilgrims – only the signs of their passing mocked us: the long tracks left by their wagons, the abandoned remains of their fires by the side of the road, the hastily dug toilets they didn’t bother to cover up. This is what you do when you stop giving a shit about the world because you’re so convinced a God is going to solve all your problems for you.
At night we rested the horses, and ourselves, talking through plans, debating strategies. Kest theorised about whatever force it was that acted upon our will, preventing us from rising up against the Blacksmith’s God. Brasti suggested traps, like digging a pit deep enough that the God might fall in and we could just bury him there. I tried to envision ways we could force one of the masks of infamy onto him, in the vain hope that that might make a difference. It’s not that we thought these suggestions would do any good – none of us had a clue how to defeat a God – but you can wallow in defeat for only so long.
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