Dariana said nothing as she helped Heryn’s men to position the troubadours upright against a handy tree trunk. She pulled their arms behind them and tied them at the wrist. Nehra, the woman, gritted her teeth from the pain. Colwyn just screamed.
‘Careful,’ Heryn said. ‘They’re not to be harmed.’
Really? I thought incredulously. This is where you decide to draw the line on cruelty? Did someone proclaim it ‘Be Kind to Troubadours’ week when I wasn’t paying attention?
The men let the ropes slacken a little, enough to ensure that Nehra and Colwyn, though not exactly comfortable, were also not in agony.
‘There now, that’s better.’ Heryn clapped his hands in approval. ‘Can’t have a performance without an audience, can we?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but is today’s torture that you try to confuse me to death?’
Heryn walked over to the troubadours. He stood in front of Nehra for a moment, then reached out and with a finger traced her jawline. She didn’t try to twist out of the way, just glared at him and said, ‘Think on what you do here, Unblooded. You betray your ancestors, and that will not soon be forgotten. What is seen by the Bardatti is ever known to the world.’
‘I’m counting on it,’ Heryn said.
He walked back to me and helpfully explained, ‘I’ve had these two brought here to witness the Lament, Falcio: to record what takes place here and ensure it is remembered for ever.’
An absurd thought entered my mind and I couldn’t stop myself from chuckling. ‘Really? I’m afraid that if it’s facts you want remembered, you’ve captured the wrong troubadours.’
Heryn smiled at my joke. ‘Well said. This bravado suits you, Falcio val Mond.’ He turned his head and stared at the troubadours. ‘Remember him here, like this: his courage, his daring. When you tell this story, make sure everyone knows that Falcio val Mond was valiant in the face of the Lament.’
‘All this, just because I beat a couple of your Dashini brethren? Heryn, could it be possible that the world’s greatest assassins are also history’s sorest losers?’
Heryn returned to me. There was no ire in his tone. There was no emotion at all. ‘You should be grateful, Falcio. Most men live and die and no one remembers their names – but you? For a hundred years your story will be told, over and over. It will be whispered in the dark, and even with the sun high up in the sky it will be spoken of in frightened tones. Idealistic men and women will look around and say, ‘The world should be a better place. Injustice should be answered.’ They will think about the stories of the Greatcoats, and wonder how a man or woman might fashion such a coat and take up sword and song to make the world a little more fair.’ He placed a hand on each of my cheeks. ‘Then they will remember the tale of Falcio val Mond and the agony and terror he endured, how his mouth was struggling to scream even after his heart had stopped beating. And then they will go back to their sad little lives and try their best to forget there ever was such a thing as a Greatcoat.’
Heryn knelt down again and opened up his leather bag and pulled out another dark blue cloth, then a bottle made of mottled green glass and finally another needle, this one with a tiny hook at the end. Rising to his feet he said, ‘A hundred years from now, Falcio val Mond, your greatest contribution to the world will be that from this moment forward, no one ever dreamed of becoming a Greatcoat again.’ He paused for just a moment, then smiled. ‘So, shall we begin again?’
*
Pain for days on end will, eventually, drive a man to unconsciousness. Turns out the Dashini have found a solution for this aggravating little problem.
‘—oh, no, First Cantor, you can’t miss any of this,’ Heryn was saying as Dariana waved a blue bottle beneath my nostrils, and suddenly I was completely awake and all the aches and pains that made up my body were magnified a millionfold.
I wondered why I’d stopped screaming, then I dimly realised I still was – it was just that my voice was now so hoarse that it was nothing more than a slight crunchy whisper, like wind passing through dead leaves.
There is no crime in feeling fear, nor any virtue in acknowledging it. ‘I’m getting bored,’ I whispered. ‘Why don’t you kill me?’
‘There are nine deaths in a Lament, Falcio. You should know by now that it’s not about killing you. It’s about destroying you utterly.’
‘How many have I had so far?’ I asked. I looked over at the troubadours. Nehra was watching me, her jaw clenched as if it took an act of great will to look at me. She was crying.
‘We are still on the third death,’ Heryn said. ‘Shall we proceed?’
*
On the fourth day I tried to force myself to stop breathing, and when that didn’t work, I tried to bite off my own tongue. When I was able to open my eyes again, I realised my vision was blurred and it was hard to see. The world had become a fog made of grey clouds infused with red tendrils that reached out to me, filling my nostrils and my mouth and even my ears.
I thought about the stories of old men who lost their wives and then, for no apparent reason at all, died in the night. They just . . . ended. There was nothing ahead for them but solitude, so their hearts simply stopped beating. Like a drunken fool or a madman I started imploring my own heart. Stop! I told it. Stop beating. Your wife is dead. You should have stopped then but you didn’t, belligerent child. Your King is dead. Your country is dead. The world has shrunk to this tiny prison.
‘Ah,’ a voice said. It was Heryn’s. ‘I see you’re coming around. Kind of you not to take as long this morning. Perhaps we’ve made a terrible mistake and you’re enjoying the pain?’
Stop. Beating. Stop.
‘Shall we proceed?’
*
Madness. Madness was the answer. I had been trying to make myself die, but that was stupid, a fool’s gambit. You can’t make yourself die.
Insanity was the answer: insane people don’t feel pain – or, well, they feel it, but they don’t comprehend it. They scream and they moan and they laugh and they giggle and they spit and they swallow and they do all the things human beings do, but they don’t understand any of it.
Understanding was my big problem, it turned out.
Knowing what day it was – that this was the fourth day – and knowing there were still five more before they finally killed me: that was the problem.
So insanity was what I needed now.
‘Good morning,’ Heryn said.
My eyes opened and I saw him looking at me. My stomach churned at the sight of him. Nothing in his face or his body or his hair had changed and yet every part of him, everything about him, made my limbs tremble and my eyes shed tears. The stupid part of me, the part people used to call Falcio, tried to hold his gaze, as if that would make anything any better.
Fool.
I forced my head to turn and saw the Bardatti woman was still tied to the tree. She mouthed a word at me.
Fight.
It took me a while to work out what she meant.
Fight.
Fight what? I wondered.
‘Are you ready to proceed?’
Her eyes went wide and I wondered why that simple phrase had so bothered her; after all, Heryn had uttered it every day since they took me.
Then I realised why she looked so horrified.
Heryn hadn’t said it. I had.
*
There was something in my mouth: a metal apparatus forcing my jaw open. Small needles set into its frame jabbed me in my gums, my tongue and the roof of my mouth. The apparatus got larger and larger until I realised its metal form was the entire world and I was simply a bloody cloth hanging over it to keep it from rusting in the rain. The apparatus was all there was, and the only sensation was the dull, pulsing pain I felt every place it touched me. The only taste was its metallic flavour in my mouth. The only sound was . . .
. . . something was wrong with the sound of the apparatus. It should have been hard and thin and piercing, and yet . . . The sound in my ears was warm and soot
hing, and felt like something which must have once existed, maybe before the apparatus . . .
People.
I had it then. It sounds like a person. But not a person talking, something else . . .
It’s called singing, you fool.
I realised then that the two troubadours were singing. The song was the crackle of fire and the warmth of good winter wool. I didn’t understand the words and yet I knew they told of trumpets and horses and a cause worth fighting for. They told of a time – whatever time was – a time after a battle, a time for relief, for respite. A time for peace.
For a brief moment I became a man again and not a red rag draped over the apparatus, because the troubadours were singing a death song.
They’re trying to help me die. The pain didn’t lessen; I could still feel every single spike, every burn, every crack and piercing, on my skin, through my flesh, in my bones. But the pain was simply . . . pain. You can feel pain, but pain isn’t a crime. Pain is in the body, in the mind, in the heart, but there is something else. There’s a fire burning inside and the pain can’t reach it – the pain doesn’t even know it’s there. No one knows it’s there because it’s a secret. It’s just a word written on a boy’s hand. He’s just learned it; it’s part of a story about men and women in long leather coats. The boy didn’t understand the word and so he’d asked the storyteller to write it on his hand. ‘Can you read?’ the storyteller asked. ‘Of course not,’ the boy said. ‘But I only need to know the one word.’
I was reaching for that word when Heryn’s voice broke through the song. ‘Remarkable,’ he said. ‘It appears that there is more to the legends of the Bardatti than I had given credit.’ The voice changed, as if it were moving in a different direction. ‘Gag them,’ he said. I felt a hand on my cheek. It sent a little tremor through the apparatus and the pain magnified again. ‘This won’t do,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to start again now.’
*
They gave me something on the seventh day – a liquid. I didn’t know its colour, or its taste. Such things were beyond me now.
I gagged on the liquid at first, but it wormed its way down my throat and into my stomach and from there it travelled along my arms and my legs and into every other part of my body. It radiated outwards to my hands and feet and then to my fingers and toes.
My eyes opened. I could see the clearing, and Heryn and Dariana and the two troubadours, and it took me a moment to understand that my sight had returned, and that I knew what ‘sight’ was. The agony was still there, but this time it was worse because I didn’t just feel it; I understood it as well. For the past few days I had become enveloped in pain, and in so doing had forgotten anything else existed.
‘You tried to escape,’ Heryn explained. ‘But you can’t. Not yet.’
A laugh escaped my throat as my eyes wandered down my chest to examine my body. I was a proper mess: bound to a post with needles sticking out of my face and my naked torso and through my torn and soiled trousers into my genitals. I hardly looked as if I’d moved a finger, never mind tried to escape.
But that’s not what Heryn meant and I understood that. A part of me liked the fact that Heryn was worried I might be going mad. I would have been content to die like that: the broken, drooling wreckage of something that had once been a man. I imagined it would have infuriated Heryn to find me incoherent and unable to fully absorb the torment he was so patiently exacting on me – after all, what was the sense in a performance without a proper audience?
For perhaps the first time I truly accepted that I was going to die, and not just lose my life; I was going to die alone and in pain, filled to bursting with the sick vapours of a lifetime of failures. Fine, I thought. Let it be just as Heryn said. Let them tell stories of Falcio the fool; of Falcio who, like a child, believed that the world can change just because you want it to.
I blinked. Do what you want to me, Dashini or Unblooded or Greatcoats or whatever you want to call yourselves, for I’ve found a shield you can’t penetrate with your needles and your pins.
Acceptance.
I accept.
What will you do now, Heryn? I accept everything: the pain, the misery, the regret. I want it.
I welcome it.
A surge of joy sparked in me. Let them continue. Seven days, it’s been. Let it go on for seven more, or seventy, or seven hundred.
It would have been a good way to die, I think. It wouldn’t have been bravery, exactly, but it didn’t need to be. It would have been enough.
I was captive and bound, but I believed that I was becoming free.
Unfortunately, late on the seventh night, something pulled me back and brought me more sorrow than any of Heryn’s toxins or potions ever could.
Valiana tried to rescue me.
*
She did her best to be silent, but she lacked the training and of course they heard her coming. She did her best to be swift, but she lacked the speed to outpace them. She did her best to fight, but she was still suffering from the wounds she’d taken in Rijou.
In the end, the only thing she did well was to be brave. She lasted five strikes before Dariana got around her and held her by the neck.
Heryn walked over and put his hand on Valiana’s face. He did that a lot, I’d noticed.
‘You were right, Dariana.’ He turned to me and shook his head in disbelief. ‘I said we’d need to go out and find the girl, that she’d never be so foolish as to come looking for us – and yet here she is: a pretty bird come to rest in our clearing.’ He let her go, walked over to me and reached up to the needle stuck between the bones of my wrist.
I screamed.
He removed the needle that was lodged between the bones of my elbow and I suddenly felt as if my arm was no longer there.
He moved one by one to each of the needles he’d placed so carefully at the nerve endings on each of my limbs, chatting away as he worked. ‘Congratulations, Falcio val Mond,’ he said, ‘we finally have what we need to give you your ninth and final death.’
They’re going to kill her, I realised. This is how they do it. This is how they break through the shield of my acceptance.
And yet something was off.
‘I think you skipped a day,’ I whispered.
‘You’re quite right,’ Heryn said. ‘The girl is a vital participant in your final death, but one thing remains first.’
‘You should probably get on with it then,’ I said, more eager to die than I had ever been to live.
‘He’s right,’ Dariana said, examining my face. ‘He’s not long for this world.’
Heryn shook his head. ‘No, we will wait. We have an agreement. It must be honoured.’
‘She should have been here by now,’ Dariana said, eyeing the night stars above us.
‘We will wait,’ Heryn repeated. He turned to the troubadours. Nehra and Colwyn were hanging limply from the ropes holding them to the tree and I realised suddenly that Colwyn had died at some point, but they’d just left him there. So much for ‘They must not be harmed.’
‘Stay vigilant, little Bardatti. She will be here soon, and what happens then will be something no one has witnessed for a hundred years.’
*
It was still the seventh night, just on the edge of morning, when she came to me. My sense of time came from the coolness of the air fighting against the burning sensation that emanated from the ropes and radiated across the damaged canvas of my skin. I could hear the buzzing and whirring of insects and the rustling of the small animals of the forest, louder than normal, as if they were trying, through their normal and natural behaviours, to cover the atrocities being committed in their habitat.
My eyes were closed, but I could see her.
‘It’s nearly time, Falcio.’ The night breeze was playing in her hair. I’d forgotten how curly it was. I don’t think I should be blamed for this, though. She’d been dead for more than fifteen years.
‘Time for what, sweetheart?’ I asked, though the sound that came from my
lips was barely more than a moan.
‘Time to be brave,’ Aline said.
I felt the faintest touch of tears underneath the lower lashes of my eyes. The sensation was so small, and yet I felt it just as strongly as the splitting pain in my bones and the stabbing ache in my flesh.
‘I’ve been brave,’ I said plaintively, like a child being accused.
She brought her hand close to my face. I so longed to feel her skin against mine. I had forgotten the lines of her face but I could remember every callus on those hands, every curve of her fingers; that the first joint of the third finger on her left hand had a slight bend in it which always made it hard for her to put on her wedding ring. Better to simply keep it on for ever, she’d said to me one day, and I’d agreed, for ever. For ever and ever. But though I remembered every part of her body, all I had was the memory, and even in my hallucination I couldn’t feel her hand against my face.
‘Why won’t you touch me, Aline?’ I asked. ‘Should a woman not touch her husband when they’ve been so long apart?’
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘They’ve taken that from us.’ I imagined her dark eyes to be sad, though not full of tears. Aline was never one for crying.
‘That’s unfair,’ I said. ‘The torture I can understand. The murder is inevitable. But a man should at least be able to hallucinate his wife stroking his face, don’t you think?’
She gave a little laugh. I’d always been able to make her laugh, although I didn’t think the things I’d said had always been very funny, so it made me wonder if all those times she’d only laughed to make me feel better.
‘You’re going to have to be very brave now,’ she said.
‘You said that already. Haven’t I been brave enough for this world yet? Haven’t I stood my ground all those times, even when outnumbered by Knights and bully-boys and assassins? Haven’t I tried to do right even when the trying was hopeless? Didn’t I put a knife in my King when he asked me to? I’ve been brave, Aline. I’m not afraid to die.’
‘You’ve been so brave, my darling. And now you must be braver still.’
Knight's Shadow Page 47