The False Martyr

by H. Nathan Wilcox

  “Stop. He’s telling the truth. Teth, please, there was never a boat. There was never going to be an escape.” The voice was familiar but not right. Teth looked to the side for its source. It had been the voice of a man, she realized, but she expected it to fit with a woman. A shape emerged from the shadow by the door and closed on the bar. Another joined it. Teth recognized one as Mr. Tappers. The others should have been his wife, but it was not. “Put the knife down, child,” the voice said. Teth squinted. It had the shape of Mrs. Tappers, wore a dress, had the great mountain of hair, but somehow, it wasn’t her. “This is not who you are.”

  “This is exactly who I am!” she screamed back. “It is who they made me. I just killed twenty men. I . . . I slaughtered them. I am a killer. That is all I am. That is all they made me to be, so why shouldn’t I just do what they made me to do?” She leaned toward the valati, begged her hand to move. What are you waiting for? He did this to you. You butchered twenty men at his bidding. One more, then yourself, and it will finally be over.

  “No,” the voice said. “That may be what they want you to be, but you are still a person. You can still decide. No matter what you have done in the past, you can decide where you go in the future. The only way they win is if you let them, if you stop fighting to be the person you want to be. You have to make the choice, have to fight for it, have to live by it every day. There is no easy way out, no easy solution. Do you understand? You can still have the life you want. We would not have been part of this if we did not believe that, but if you kill him, then you really will be the monster you think they’ve made. They will have won, and all of this will have been for nothing.”

  “Who are you?” Teth shrieked at the shadow.

  “My name is Martin,” the voice said, “though I have been Margot for so long I barely remember that name. I am joined to Mark Tappers and have been for more than twenty years.”

  Teth looked again and saw Mrs. Tappers step into a patch of light. It looked just like her, but there was no lilt in the voice, no softness to the posture. And even in the dress, even with the hair, Teth knew the truth. She convulsed as yet another rug was pulled from beneath her, yet another truth became a lie. “You’ve been lying this entire time,” she moaned. “You tricked us. You betrayed us.”

  “Tricked and betrayed, but never lied. Mrs. Tappers, Margot, is who I am. It is who the Order made me. I tried for a long time to live as someone else, to live as the counselors told me I should live, but that was not who I was, that was not the person the Order made me to be. And in trying to do that, I became so lost, I fell so far that you would see yourself as a saint in comparison. Then I met Mark, and he convinced me that I could still be saved, that I could still chose, that I didn’t have to be that terrible person that I hated. Do you see? Despite everything the counselors said, we made the choice. I chose to become Margot. We chose to be joined. We made this inn is our home, the residents our children. And we fight every day to keep the life we have built, to be the people the Order made us even if that means defying what the counselors say we should be.”

  “If you believe that, then why did you help this monster? Why didn’t you let us chose?”

  “In the beginning, it was because they would have exposed us, but the truth is that it was never a choice. All this was done and decided before you ever arrived. Lareno had every aspect planned, and every one of us played a part. Even if we wanted to, we had no way to help you. There was never a boat, there was never going to be an escape. But even if all that were not true, we knew from the first day where you were headed – we knew because I was in the same place when Mark found me. And we resolved to never let you get there.”

  “Do you see, Teth?” Valati Lareno brought a hand up and eased Teth back from him. She was too stunned to resist. “It was never about the invaders, the city, the revolt, or the people in that camp. It wasn’t even about Dasen. It was always about you. And there is still much that you must hear before your journey continues.”

  Teth felt like she was in a dream, thinking back over the past weeks, seeing all the pieces slide together, reliving all the machinations. It had all been magnificently, meticulously planned. Garth, the Tappers, Kian, the conversation she’d overheard on the hill. Dasen, Lady Esther, the miracles, the revolt, the attack on that caravan. Even her desire to end it all. They had all been part of the plan. They had used and manipulated her to perfection, and she had never even seen it happening. She fell into a chair. The knife was still in her hand, but it dropped to her lap, resting there lifeless.

  Valati Lareno turned to the Tappers. “Can you bring a rag for her face? I cannot bear to look at it any longer. Then you may leave us. Your part is done.”

  Mrs. Tappers is the one that brought the rag. It was warm and wet, smelled of flowers. When Teth did not move to accept it, she – he, Teth reminded herself – rubbed it gently but firmly across her face, scrubbing away the blood and grime. The rag was red by the time he was done. Teth barely noticed. She watched the knife in her lap and thought about the terrible joke that had been played on her.

  “I’m sorry, my dear,” Mrs. Tappers, Martin, said. “I meant what I said about letting Dasen love you. I meant what I said about putting the past behind you, about accepting what the Order has made you. I hope one day you will see that.” With those few words, he left and his husband went with him, leaving her alone with her tormentor.

  “That is better,” Valati Lareno said. He tried to be calm, but Teth could tell that his heart was pounding, his breaths were pants, his hands shook. This was not the Weaver from the commune who welcomed his death with an idiot’s glee. The valati may have manipulated them, but he was not the Master. “Now, I have some things to tell you.”

  Teth saw that he had sheaves of papers before him. They were covered with spidery writing. Instructions. “Was everyone part of it?” she asked, voice lost and distant, mind still trying to encompass the breadth of their betrayal.

  “Everyone but Kian and the twins,” the valati answered. “I hired Garth and the others before the battle in Thoren. They were already in the boat when we rescued Kian. They were only here for Dasen.”

  “But not me?”

  “No, you were not part of the deal. As I said, this was always about you, about your course.”

  “And Kian?”

  Likely dead by now. His revolt was never meant to succeed. It was all just a . . . necessary distraction.”

  “And then you cast him aside like a piece on a board?” Teth couldn’t help her dark chuckle at that. “That is all any of us is to you, isn’t it? Pieces on a board to be maneuvered whichever way you wish and sacrificed without thought or conscious.”

  “Yes, but I am not the one playing the game. You see, Teth, I am a Weaver but not a very powerful one. I can see the Order to an extent, can manipulate events close to me in small ways, but all of this is far beyond me or any one man. I am but one small part of it. I had no more choice than you.”

  “Bullshit! We all make choices.”

  “Just as you did today?” The valati stared at her until her defiance faded to doubt. “No, we make false choices. They seem to present themselves, but they are no choices at all. They are almost always certain. Sometimes, we need a push, so the Weavers provide one. Sometimes that push is obvious, but usually it is so subtle that we never see it, never feel it guiding us. That is the power of the Five, that is the power of the Order.”

  “And we are just supposed to go along. I am supposed to just keep playing this stupid game. I’m supposed to allow your fucking Master to turn me into a monster, into a killer, yet never have that one thing I want, to never have happiness? Why? Why don’t I just end it?” She brought the knife back out, held it to her throat.

  “You won’t,” the valati said with certainty. He sat forward but there was no urgency in his posture.

  “Why not? I have nothing to live for. Why not end it? Why not have peace?”

  “Because you love him.”

 
; “Love?” Teth wailed, voice breaking, nose crumpling, tears welling. “You won’t let me have love. You promise it to me, but then jerk it away, tell me that I can never have it. That is worse than never knowing it. I could live knowing that I would never have love. But being in love and knowing that it can never be fulfilled, that it must end, and that he will never understand. That is . . . . I . . . I . . . .” She tightened her grip on the knife, willed her hand to move, felt the terrible ache, wanted nothing more than for it to end.

  Valati Lareno laughed. Teth gawked. She was going to kill herself, going to slash her throat before him, going to spray him with her blood, and he laughed. “We’re liars,” he said and threw his head back. “What did the Master tell you? Did he tell you that Dasen would reject you, that he would fall for another, that he would . . . ?”

  “No!” Teth moaned. Those things were terrible, but they were nothing compared to the truth. “He . . . he said . . . he told me that . . . .” she sputtered to a stop, unable to find the words.

  “That you could not have children?” the valati attempted, amusement obvious. “That he loved men, like Mark and Margot? That he had bad breath, a tiny cock, a venereal disease?”

  “Fuck you!” Teth yelled. “He said that we could never be together, that I could never have him, that if I did he would die, that the Order would fall, that I would live to see it happen.” The thought was so terrible, just saying it sucked the life from her so thoroughly that she dropped the knife back to her lap. Her head hung, shoulders slumped.

  “I am sorry, Teth,” the valati mumbled after a long pause. He seemed to consider his words. “That is a terrible thing to believe. Not only must you deny your love, not only must you live with the pain of never fulfilling it, but you must live with the idea that the very fate of the world hangs on you never having the one thing that you want most. It is cruel beyond belief. And you should take it for what it is?”

  “And what is that?” Teth snuffled but lacked the energy to cry. She took a deep breath and tried to build herself back up to the only action left her.

  “A lie,” the valati said the words at little more than a whisper. They hit Teth like the crossbow bolt that should have ended her. Her eyes rose. The valati crumpled the papers before him – off his script or nervous about his lines? He took a long, slow breath. “You saw the Master of the Five?” Teth nodded numbly. “You are one of the only people in a hundred years to do so.” The valati cleared his throat. “Even the the other members of the Five were said to have only seen him a few times. The only reason he would bring you to him is that he needed to guide you directly, that there was no other way to create the outcome he desired. Do you understand the significance of that?”

  Teth did not and did not bother to say so.

  “The Master could weave his patterns across decades, across thousands of miles. He could make nations fall and empires rise, but he brought you, the orphan daughter of a blacksmith, to his tower. You, not Dasen, not me, not the King of Liandria. You. Why? So that you would do what he wanted. He weaves the Order as his followers weave their tapestries. He pulls it, twists it, draws its threads together or pulls them apart. He sees and controls the Order, and is, therefore, above it.”

  Teth thought about her encounter with the Weaver, the empty sockets that saw everything, the fused ears that heard, his hands in constant motion, the rocks flying from the window, the papers, the vials, the spiders. And she realized the truth of what the valati said. He had even told her, had said that his every motion was planned, carefully choreographed to create ripples in the Order, ripples that would echo through time and space until a wind rose and destroyed a smithy, until a girl picked up a bow, until a boy came and made her fall in love. Until a river carried her to him.

  “To the Master, there is no truth,” Valati Lareno continued. “There are possibilities that he must manipulate. There are outcomes that he desires, but there is no truth. His every action, his every breath is to serve a purpose. So too was every word he said to you.”

  “What . . . what are you . . . I don’t understand. Are you saying he lied to me?”

  Valati Lareno sat back in his chair, eyes tired and sad. “It is not that simple,” he admitted. “The Master is a creature beyond me. I cannot hope to understand his purpose. Even the Xi Valati, who was the least of the Five, worked in ways that confounded those of us with some ability to see. What I do know is that he told you what he did because he wanted you to act in a certain way, to do certain things. I know from the letter before me that he wanted you to come here. I know that he wanted us to find you. I know that he wanted you separated as much as possible from Dasen. That he wanted you on that road, facing those men, in a mind to see yourself die. I know that he wanted Dasen to be taken from you. Is what he told you something that would make all those things happen?”

  “The Order be damned,” Teth mumbled, entirely missing the irony. “I would have insisted that we leave the boat sooner. I never would have allowed us to come here. And even so, we would have been gone long ago. Kian could not have held me here. I only stayed because I saw a way to end it. I pushed Dasen away because I couldn’t stand to see him. I left him today because I could only think of myself. I couldn’t see past that one warning. With one phrase, he changed everything, he made it all happen. I did exactly what he wanted me to do.”

  Valati Lareno nodded slowly. His face and eyes were sad. “I do not understand the pattern that my master was weaving, but I see now that it was a cruel one.”

  “You see that now.” Teth’s anger flared. All the wasted time, all the heartache and pain, everything because these bastards were playing a game. And now he was gone, Dasen was to be turned over to the invaders, and she was sitting here talking with one of the traitors that had made it happen. She picked up the knife, rose from the chair, clasped the valati’s hair, and brought the blade to his throat. “Where is he? What have you done with him?” Her emotions fought: anger, elation, worry, grief. The Master had been lying. But Dasen was gone. She could be with him. But she may never see him again.

  “Garth took him.”

  “Where?” Teth asked again, pressing the knife against his throat so that the skin bunched around it. The slightest flick and he would die.

  “North,” the valati squealed. It seemed they were off his script now. “They had a boat. They were going to go north and deliver Dasen to his father outside Lianne.”

  “Arghh!” Teth felt her anger rising. He was gone. She knew it. She was finally free, and he was gone. Because of this bastard. He had done it, had made her feel all this pain, had allowed her to be miserable, to nearly kill herself, to ruin everything. He could have stopped it any time, but he let it happen. Even if it was at the order of his master, he was complicit, he deserved the same fate as his asshole of a master. She pressed on the knife, waited to see the blood flow, to add it to the sheen that already covered her. “Join your fucking master,” she growled.

  The valati braced himself. His bladder released, he held his breath, he mumbled a prayer.

  He knows, Teth suddenly realized. He knows I’m going to kill him. He has known this entire time. “Arghh!” she screamed again, lips inches from the valati’s face. Through the greatest force of will in her life, she pulled the knife from his throat and planted it between his hands in the polished surface of the table. She pounded her hands down after it. “Fuck your fucking Order! I won’t do it!”

  “You aren’t . . . I mean you won’t . . . .” the valati stammered, hand to his throat. “You’re not going to . . . .“

  “Shut your lying mouth!” Teth roared. She snatched the wad of papers from his hands, paged through them, saw every facet of the plan, every piece, all the words he had said. It was all here. It was all planned. Every detail was described. She threw the pages aside one after another until she reached the last. She scanned down the page until she found what she was looking for. She will kill you, the paper said. The last words scrawled in that ragged script, pre
ceded by an exact explanation of everything that had happened to them in the past six weeks. It was all there, spelled out like prophesy but far more detailed and exact. Teth plucked her knife from the table, used it to cut out those last words, then drove the knife back through them. Every word except those.

  “You . . . you have to . . .” Lareno stammered. “It is part of . . . the pattern . . . the Tapestry is . . .”

  “The Maelstrom take your pattern. And your fucking tapestry too. It’s all a lie.” She laughed a mad laugh. “You said it yourself. Maybe he wrote that planning on me seeing it. Maybe he wanted you to think it was true. Maybe he told you to explain all this to me, so that I will do exactly what I am doing now. It is all lies. The only truth is that we cannot know. We can never know where the lie ends and the truth begins. Which means there is no reason to try. It is just as Mrs. Tappers said, we have to choose to live the life we want, can only fight to be the people we want to be. And that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t care what your Master says any longer. He can manipulate me all he wants, but he will do it silently.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I am getting him back,” she said with certainty. “I am going to get him, and I am going to love him because that is what the Order made me to do. It is what I want. It is what I need, and if it brings the world to an end, then at least I won’t be trapped in this . . . maze of lies.”

  “But . . . but the Tapestry. The pattern must be . . . .”

  “Fuck your tapestry! If your Weaver is so powerful, then he has already planned for me to say that, he knew that you would tell me those things and I would do exactly this. And if he’s not, if I destroy his precious tapestry and cast us all into the Maelstrom, then he should have been a fuck-load clearer. Now, get me food, water, and a bow. I have to find Dasen. And when I do, I am going to do exactly what I should have done all along.”

  Valati Lareno rose from his chair and scampered from the room. Teth returned to her chair. She sat back and looked at the ceiling. I’m coming Dasen, she thought. We will be together again, I promise, and this time I’ll let you win.