Knight's Shadow (42 page)

Dariana drew and took aim at Kest. ‘No!’ I said, running backwards several steps and cursing myself in advance for what was to come. ‘At me! You’ve got to throw it
at me
.’

‘What? Are you mad?’

‘Just do it,’ I said, ‘
now!
’

Kest looked confused for a moment, then he realised what I was planning, but not even he was fast enough to bridge the distance in time. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dariana pull back and throw, at which point it occurred to me that I probably should have been a little bit more specific about where exactly she should aim for.

The blade came through the air and landed in my left shoulder and I screamed long and loud from the pain. It turns out that knowing what’s coming isn’t any kind of a pain reliever.

Kest’s eyes went wide. ‘Fool! You damned fool! You haven’t got a chance now!’ His voice was desperate, almost pleading.

I fell to my knees.
Damn, but a knife in the shoulder hurts
. I hoped it hadn’t damaged the muscle – if I somehow managed to live through the next few minutes I would probably need it again soon. ‘Sorry,’ I said, pulling the knife out of my shoulder and wincing from the pain, ‘but I’m not in any shape to give you a fair fight.’ I dropped the knife to the ground, just in case. ‘Maybe if you wait a few weeks, then when I’m all healed up I can give you the spanking you sorely deserve.’

Kest roared incoherently into the night sky. The red glow around him looked like it was burning him up now, eating away at his soul. He threw his warsword through the air and it flew past me within an inch of my face, stopping only when it impaled the trunk of a tree behind me. I watched as he fell to his knees a few feet away from me and began to pound his fists into the ground, over and over and over, until they came up red, but not from the glow, from the blood on his fingers.

‘Stop,’ I said, and forced myself to my feet. ‘That’s enough.’

At first I didn’t think he could hear me, but just as I reached him he stopped and his head dropped as if all the strength had left his body. He wasn’t screaming or shouting now; he was crying. ‘What’s happened to me?’ he moaned. ‘How do I make this stop?’ He began to shiver.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, and knelt down and put my arms around him.

We stayed like that for a while. I could hear Dariana moving around behind us, likely retrieving her knives.

Eventually Kest pushed me away. ‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘What—? Where?’

‘The Saint – Birgid – she told me to come with her, but I refused. I told her I needed to stay with you, to
protect
you.’ He laughed hollowly.

‘How will you even find her?’

‘I . . . She told me about this place, a kind of temple. It’s called Deos Savath. It’s in Aramor – it’s where we’re supposed to go to complete the ritual and gain control over ourselves. I refused, though. I told her I could resist. Gods, Falcio, I’m such a fool.’

Part of me wanted to smile. Kest had always quietly insisted that the limitations of normal human beings did not apply to him. But the other part of me realised I was about to lose my best friend. ‘How long will you need to go?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about this. I thought . . . I thought defeating Caveil was a victory. I thought it would make me better, but it hasn’t, Falcio. I’m no better a swordsman than I was before. When I first felt the . . . well, whatever it is that passed from Caveil to me, when I beat him, it was like . . . I don’t know. It was like being somehow completely drunk and yet completely clear-headed. But something inside me broke then. Before, I fought because I wanted to, or because it was needed. Now I . . . I
have
to . . .’

‘I know,’ I said quietly. I had spent several years of my own life driven by a madness that had nothing to do with courage or necessity. Ethalia had helped heal me of it, but I didn’t think she could do the same for Kest. I thought about what the Tailor had done, and what I had to do next, and how much I needed Kest beside me to do it, which made it all the more difficult to say, ‘You have to go. You have to go to that temple and find Birgid.’

Kest looked up at me. ‘But I don’t know if it will work, Falcio – I don’t know if I’ll be able to come back. If I can’t get control over this . . . whatever “this” is, then—’

‘You’ll come back,’ I said firmly, and I walked over to pick up our coats, trying to ignore the dagger wound in my shoulder that was sending spikes of fire through my body with each step. ‘You’ll figure this out and then you’ll come and find me and we’ll save this shitty world from itself.’

‘How do you know that?’ he asked.

I tossed him his coat. ‘We’re Greatcoats,’ I said. ‘It’s the only thing we’re good at.’

He laughed for a moment.

‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘I just thought, if Brasti was here he’d say something funny, but I couldn’t think what that would be, and then I thought, this is when Brasti would make fun of me for not knowing, and then I started laughing. Odd, isn’t it?’ He put on his coat before walking over to the tree and retrieving his sword, and then he walked away into the forest, alone.

‘You’re doing quite a bit of bleeding there,’ Dariana said.

I looked down at my shoulder and saw the blood seeping through my shirt. ‘Not as much as it could have been. You managed to get me without tearing the muscle. Nice shot.’

‘Couldn’t have you dying on me, could I?’

I reached into my coat and pulled a roll of thin gauze from one of the inner pockets and began wrapping it around my shoulder.

‘Here,’ she said, ‘you’re doing it wrong.’ She took the gauze from me and put it aside.

‘What are you doing?’

She pulled a small bottle of salve from her own coat. ‘Not much point in wrapping the wound just so you can bleed to death a bit more slowly.’

She was right: I’d forgotten to put salve on the wound. I watched as she carefully rubbed a thin layer of the black salve on the hole in my flesh, and then wrapped the bandage deftly around my shoulder. She moved slowly, carefully.

The waiting was driving me mad. ‘Can’t you do this any faster?’

‘I don’t want to go through all this just to have you keel over and die before we even get started,’ she replied.

‘Start what?’ I asked.

She finished tying the gauze and helped me put my coat back on. ‘There, see? All better.’

I looked into her eyes and she smiled. ‘So you’re not dead, and you don’t seem to be accompanied by twelve secret Greatcoats, so what did you learn up there?’

‘The darkest truth,’ I said, repeating the old man’s words.

‘What does that mean?’

‘There was an old man there and he said something about what we feared most being ourselves.’

If the Dashini had all committed suicide after I killed two of them in Rijou, then the assassins tearing Tristia apart aren’t Dashini. So who else could they be? I thought about it, and the answer became clear. It was obvious, really – in fact, people had been trading rumours and gossip about just such a thing for years. My stomach sank, and the sound of my heart became dull and flat in my chest. Who else other than the Dashini could sneak into castles, past guards and Knights, to defeat those protecting the Dukes – hells, not just the Dukes but to kill them all, and then get out without being caught? Only one other group of people that I knew of had the skills and training to complete such missions.

‘What is it?’ Dariana asked.

The truth that makes our courage fail and our hearts surrender. What we fear most is simply ourselves
. ‘The assassins are Greatcoats,’ I said sadly. ‘Our own people are doing this.’

‘What? Are you—? Are you sure?’

I ignored the question. Had I ever been this alone in my life? I’d spent the last weeks fearing being paralysed, isolated inside my own body – and yet here I was, even without the paralysis, trapped and alone.

I looked at Dariana and felt the sadness threaten to reveal what I knew. ‘Thanks for the salve,’ I said. I walked over to my rapiers and picked them up, but I didn’t sheathe them.

‘Expecting more trouble?’ she asked.

I tried lifting both my rapiers into guard but the pain in my left shoulder nearly made me pass out so I had to let that rapier fall back to the ground. ‘You weren’t scared,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Of Kest. He said he’d take you next and yet you weren’t afraid – in fact, you didn’t look all that surprised at what happened.’

‘Are you out of your mind? Of course I was scared! But what good would running around crying do? I saved your life, remember?’

She looked confused and even angry; there was not a sign on her face of deceit. But I’d been at this a while. ‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘You knew he was going to do this.’ I looked around at the red rocks that surrounded the clearing. I hadn’t given them any thought before. ‘Those rocks – they weren’t here when we came by the first time. You put them there to make the Saint’s Fever worse, didn’t you?’

Her expression didn’t change at all, but she held her forefinger just an inch or so away from her thumb. ‘Just a teensy bit,’ she said. ‘He’d been heading for it for some time. We just couldn’t be sure he would boil over when we needed him to.’

I thought about shouting for Kest, but I knew he was too far away by now. I might have tried it anyway, but there was something else that was bothering me.
She hadn’t been scared
. ‘So how many did you bring with you?’ I asked, scanning the trees around the clearing. ‘They’re very good at hiding.’

Dariana nodded, as if we’d just come to an agreement of some kind. ‘There are nine of us,’ she said. ‘And Kest is far enough away now.’

Figures emerged from the trees, moving silently into the clearing one by one and encircling me. Their swords were drawn. They wore greatcoats.

‘It’s better this way,’ Dariana said. ‘If there were fewer of us you might try to fight, and that wouldn’t serve you or the Tailor.’

‘You think I’m going to just let you kill me?’ I asked.

‘Kill you? No, First Cantor, that wouldn’t solve anyone’s problems. You want to confront the Tailor? Yell at her? Threaten her? Fine; we’ll take you to her.’

I looked at the figures around me. ‘You know she’s going to destroy the entire country, don’t you? Assassinating the Dukes? Arming the peasants and pushing them to rebellion? It’ll be civil war and chaos for a decade.’

Dariana looked at me as if she was trying to decide if I were joking. ‘See, that’s what I don’t understand about you, Falcio.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You actually care about these things.’

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Blame

‘Well, you’ve really cocked everything up again, Falcio,’ the Tailor said, locking eyes with me.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, looking straight back at her. Her so-called Greatcoats were surrounding us, but they hadn’t taken away my rapiers and that told me they weren’t the slightest bit afraid of me. I tried to pretend that didn’t annoy me.

‘All you had to do was stay out of the way,’ she said. ‘You could have gone away with your little whore – you could have been happy with your “Sister of Mercy”. Instead you’re here, forcing me to do this.’ Her voice was thick with anger and hurt and something close to indignity – as if I was the one who’d betrayed
her
. She reached a hand out towards me and for just an instant her expression softened.

I was filled with such a desire for this to all have been some kind of terrible mistake – a misunderstanding between friends that could be solved with words and not weapons, but it took only a quick glance at the murderers standing with her, making a mockery of the coat of office that had meant so much to me for all these years, to remind me that peace between us wasn’t possible, not any more.

‘You betrayed my King,’ I said, my voice and my heart as cold as the neatha running through my veins. I drew my rapiers.

Almost as one, the false Greatcoats drew their swords as well, while the Tailor looked at me with eyes so hard I could have sworn the irises were little black rocks ringed by angry copper veins. ‘He was
my son
, damn you. He might have been your King but he was
my son
– speak of him that way again, First Cantor, say those words again and I’ll wring your throat myself.’

One of the Greatcoats started to speak but she stopped him. ‘Keep your mouth shut. I know our agreement.’

I didn’t need Kest to tell me the odds; my chances of surviving this encounter were slim-to-none, but I had stopped caring. The neatha poisoning was reaching its inevitable conclusion; my fingers were numb and I was struggling to grip my rapiers. Each thump of my heart felt like it might be the last beat of a drummer too exhausted to continue. But when I closed my eyes, I saw the victims of Carefal before me, lying in smouldering heaps upon the ground, and when I opened them, I saw the traitors of my King’s last, best hope.

‘To the hells with each and every one of you,’ I said. I liked to believe I was goading the Tailor to make a mistake, something that would give me the means to get a blade at her throat and take her captive. With that – and an unimaginable amount of luck – I could then effect my escape. But in truth I was just angry and heartbroken. Maybe my death would be as empty as my life, but at least I would see the blood of these false Greatcoats pool on the cold ground next to mine before I was done here.

‘Stop!’ a thin voice called, and Aline ran out from behind one of the trees and stumbled to the ground between the Tailor and me.

‘Stop,’ she cried again, picking herself up. ‘Don’t do this, Falcio!’ Her hair was matted against her scalp; her arms and legs were too thin, her skin too tight on her face. The Tailor took her by the arm and pulled her close.

‘You brought her
here
?’ I demanded incredulously. ‘To see this?’

‘She has to stay with me.’ The Tailor’s voice was sad, but unapologetic. ‘Only I can keep her safe.’

‘
Safe?
Is that how you justify this to yourself?’ I turned to the others standing around me with their swords at the ready. ‘Do any of you know the real reason why she ordered you to kill Duke Isault? To kill Duke Roset? It’s not because they were plotting against Aline, I promise you. Isault had given Aline his support.’

‘Fool. He would have betrayed us to Trin the moment she threatened his borders.’

‘Then why did you send me to him?’ I demanded. ‘Why make me—?’

‘Because I needed to send the person they’d most expect to try to kill the Dukes – all around the countryside people are telling the story of Falsio the Brave; Falsio the Duke-slayer. Falsio the Fool.’

‘So you sent me there to die? Or just to frame me?’

‘No, you great ass – I arranged for the villagers in Carefal to rise up because I knew Isault would want to use you to put down their rebellion. Once he sent you—’

‘Your assassin would kill Isault.’

‘And you would be out there with his Knights, which would keep anyone from believing the Greatcoats responsible. I didn’t anticipate you’d be so damned stupid as to actually convince the villagers to put down their weapons.’

‘And then you went and gave them more,’ I said, ‘and you got them killed.’

‘Don’t be such a damned fool. You think I kept
extra
caches of weapons lying around just in case the villagers decided to sell the ones I gave them?’

She sounded sincere, but I remembered the stench of the smoking corpses piled high in the main square, and too many of them had steel sword-hilts branded into the flesh of their palms. So she was lying – but why bother, when I was about to be dead? But if she didn’t re-arm the people of Carefal, then who did . . .?

‘Isault’s troops would have destroyed them,’ I said.

‘And instead it was the Black Tabards. Do you suppose the dead of Carefal take satisfaction in the difference?’

‘Then I suppose we must put the blame on the person who put them in that position in the first place.’

The Tailor barked a laugh. ‘For once we agree, Falcio. Do you think for even a second I could’ve convinced them to rise up if it hadn’t been for all your damned heroics in Rijou?’ She started slow-clapping. ‘Congratulations, Falcio. You’re the reason this happened, every single part of it. You’re the one who made it all possible.’

I ignored her and turned my attention to her Greatcoats. ‘Are you proud of yourselves? This madwoman has turned you into assassins.’

A few of them laughed then, but the Tailor silenced them with a gesture. ‘Boy, you think you’re so clever, but you really haven’t figured it all out, have you?’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why would you do this? You’re going to send the country into civil war. How will that put Aline on—?’

The Tailor looked down and patted the matted hair of the girl hugging her leg as she wept piteously. ‘Aline can’t take the throne – isn’t that obvious? She’s too young – she isn’t ready. The
country
isn’t ready!’ She looked back at me. ‘And damned Trin is out there, busy securing all the support she’ll need, and once she’s on the throne, that’s it, Falcio, for all of us.’

‘So you’d rather throw the country into chaos?’

‘Aye, I would. Five years, that’s what we’ll get: five years of the nobility falling all over themselves fighting each other for control while the towns and villages are rising up against them.’

‘Five years where innocent people will die,’ I said.

‘Innocent people are dying already, Falcio – they always have been. At least this way they die on their feet.’

A small, weary part of me – the part that was too tired to fight any more – wanted to believe there was wisdom in her words, that we might reach some kind of accommodation. ‘And then what happens?’

‘Then the country will remember how much better it was with a proper monarch on the throne. They’ll crave someone who can rule with compassion, someone who can keep the country together. And in five years’ time Aline will be ready to lead them and they’ll be hungry for her to take the throne.’

It was a perfectly logical argument, one built upon the innate political truths that had always governed the people of Tristia. A sensible, pragmatic person would immediately agree. There was only one problem. ‘The King could have done that,’ I said, trying to ignore the fact that my vision was growing blurrier by the minute. ‘He could have spread death and chaos to keep his throne – but instead, he sacrificed himself for the greater peace.’

The Tailor’s voice was harsh and angry and full of resentment. ‘“For the greater peace”? Is that what you still tell yourself, Falcio? He was
dying
, you damned
stupid
fool!’

She let the words hang there for a good long while before she said, ‘He’d been sick his whole life and he was dying then, just as you are now, Falcio.
That’s
why he made the Greatcoats step aside;
that’s
why he let the Dukes take him.’ The old woman stepped close to me, ignoring my rapiers, and stuck her face in mine. ‘It’s so easy to be brave and self-sacrificing when death already has you in its clutches – that’s why you’re always so bloody noble, isn’t it? You died long ago, back when your wife was slaughtered, and ever since then you have walked the earth praying for someone to put a blade in you. My son was the same.’ She slapped me hard on the left cheek. ‘Damn you for trying to make him a Saint when he was only a man.’

I tried reaching deep inside me, looking for anger to match the Tailor’s own, but all I could find was bitter cold and loneliness. Everything she had said was true. In my heart, Paelis was bold and daring and full of life, and yet in every memory he was coughing and wheezing, his features pale and his voice thin. She was right of course; he was dreadfully sick, so his death could no more be called an act of bravery than a leaf falling from a tree could be said to be aiming for the ground. I had always known that the King was a man like any other. I just couldn’t live with it being true.

‘So it was all for nothing,’ I said at last.

‘No,’ the Tailor said, grabbing my chin and looking me in the eye. ‘There is still the girl. Aline will rule this Kingdom one day. Let that be the King’s legacy. Let her—’

‘You’ve committed murder in her name,’ I said, my voice sounding hollow and tired. ‘How will she rule when people find out? How will she—?’ I looked at Aline, desperate to see her face again.

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. ‘Falcio . . .’ she said, her voice almost pleading.

‘You
knew
,’ I whispered. ‘The Tailor didn’t trick you – she didn’t lie to you.
You knew
.’

‘I . . . what did you want me to do, Falcio?’ she cried. ‘I
told
you I was scared. I
told
you I don’t know how to do this. I don’t want to die!’

‘So instead you let this madwoman send her dogs to assassinate whole families. Did she tell you she was murdering the sons and daughters of the Dukes? Did she tell you they were . . .’ My voice caught. ‘They were
children
, Aline, younger than you. They—’

‘I never ordered those children killed,’ the Tailor said. ‘
Never.
’

‘Why should I believe you?’ I said, my voice so full of rage that Aline cowered behind the Tailor.

‘What good does it do me to have them dead? Alive, the Ducal Concord would have chosen Ducal Protectors, weak men of low ambition who would never think of seizing the thrones for themselves. My plan worked better with the children
alive
.’

‘And yet your hounds killed them. I saw the bodies of Isault’s children myself.’

‘And I’m telling you that wasn’t my orders and it wasn’t my Greatcoats.’

‘Don’t call them Greatcoats,’ I said. ‘Don’t you
dare
—’

‘Fine,’ she said, ‘they’re Queen’s Blades. They’re what you and Kest and Brasti and all the others should have been.’

‘They’re
murderers
,’ I said, my eyes on them, ‘and I will see those coats off their backs and them in chains before this is done.’

She let out a hoarse laugh. I was really beginning to tire of her sense of humour. ‘So much outrage – odd, really, since not one of them would be here without you.’

I looked around at them. They were all young, younger than most of us were when we joined the Greatcoats – and yet I had seen them in action and I knew they were already deadly fighters. The Tailor couldn’t possibly have found enough ordinary men and women and trained them to be so skilled, not in so few years, and that meant they had to have training already, and probably their whole lives. But they didn’t fight like Knights, and other than Knights and Greatcoats, no one else studied duelling at this level. No one except . . .

I felt bile rise in my throat even as fear filled my heart. ‘They’re Dashini,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ the Tailor said. ‘Of a sort.’

‘But that’s impossible. I was at the monastery – I saw the corpses.’

‘You saw the Blooded Dashini: those who had taken their final vows and slain their targets. These’ – she gestured around her – ‘are the Unblooded. The ones in training.’

‘But why aren’t they—?’

‘Why aren’t they dead? Because the Unblooded are not permitted ritual suicide until the Blooded are fully consecrated in the ground. Can you imagine that? They’re supposed to sit there for months, waiting for the corpses of their masters to rot away to nothing before they’re allowed to kill themselves.’

‘But you convinced them otherwise.’

‘I knew what would happen once you killed those two in Rijou – and I suppose I should offer you my congratulations, by the way. You’re the only man alive to have defeated Dashini assassins. Now do you believe me? Without you, none of this would be possible.’

‘So it’s true: the entire Order committed ritual suicide just because I got lucky and killed two of them?’

‘The Dashini are only Dashini if they are undefeated,’ she said. ‘I went to the monastery knowing the Unblooded would be there, knowing they would be leaderless and without direction, so I generously gave them a better opportunity. I offered them a chance at greatness.’

‘And what did that cost?’ I asked.

But I already knew the answer:
I
was the price. I was the gold with which the Tailor had purchased a hundred assassins.
The hunt once begun ends only in blood
. The illusion of self-righteous anger retreated from the Tailor’s face, leaving only sadness and shame in its wake. I understood then why the Tailor had felt the need to tell me all this, why it was so important to her that I understood the reasons for her plans. She wanted my forgiveness.

She looked at me for a moment, waiting for me to speak, but for once in my life I found I had no words. Finally she turned to one of the Greatcoats. ‘Dariana, take Aline away now. It’s getting dark and she should have some supper.’