Filian was staring daggers at me and I wondered why he didn’t command the guards to stop me – I supposed that too was Trin’s doing. Perhaps she thought I might not kill him if he didn’t interfere.
As I came closer to Trin, my rapier in my hand, I felt an eerie calm take over me. At first I thought it was simply the feeling of peace that comes when you’ve made your decision and no longer question it, then I realised it was something else. I tilted my blade up a few inches and saw her in its reflection.
‘Ethalia.’
‘Ethalia-who-shares-all-sorrows,’ she corrected me. ‘The Saint of Mercy.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
The Saint of Mercy
My plan had been so simple, so perfectly clever. I’d considered everything: the room, the furniture, the soldiers and their weapons, Trin, Filian – everything and everyone, except for the woman I loved.
White light reflected off my blade, blinding me for a moment, and the calm I’d felt a moment before began to weigh me down, pulling me to the floor. ‘You’re making a mistake, Ethalia,’ I said. ‘I’ve resisted the Awe of Saints before. I’ll do it again.’
I heard her footsteps coming up behind me and I found myself breathing more deeply, wanting to inhale the scent of her. All my talk of ‘friendship’, of leaving the future uncertain between us, had been rubbish. I loved Ethalia; it was as simple as that. The skin on the back of my neck awaited her touch.
It never came.
She walked right past me to stand in front of Trin. ‘Put away your sword, Falcio. Help me take Aline away from all this anger and destruction. Let us grieve for her together, and wait with her until she can be made ready for burial in the green grass behind this castle that she protected from madmen and Gods alike.’
‘Pulnam,’ I said.
‘What does—?’
‘She wants to be buried in Pulnam, on a little hill outside the village of Phan. That’s where her father was buried. The Tailor knows where it is. She can show you.’
‘Then we will take her there together.’
I shook my head. ‘You’ll have to do it without me. Kest will accompany you, keep you safe on the journey.’
The white light flared. ‘I can take care of myself, Falcio val Mond. Who will take care of you?’
‘Step aside now, Ethalia,’ I said. ‘This isn’t a place for Saints.’
‘Is it a place for murder?’
‘Without doubt. Aline died here, like her father before. This place has been consecrated with the blood of her family.’
‘And now you’ll kill Trin?’
‘I will. She caused this.’
‘And Filian?’
‘I haven’t decided yet.’
‘And me? Look at me, Falcio.’
I struggled to raise my eyes to see her. Her loose dress was covered with the dust in the air all around us. She looked tired. I caught my own reflection in the blade of my rapier, which I was still holding out in front of me even though every part of me screamed that it was an abomination to brandish a weapon in front of the Saint of Mercy. ‘I could never hurt you.’
‘Of course you could, Falcio. You just need to be angry enough to give yourself an excuse.’
Those were the cruellest words anyone has ever said to me. The thought that she believed me capable of doing her harm, after all the things I’d gone through in my life . . . ?
Then her light pulled back somehow, as if the air was being drawn out of me – but it wasn’t air. Something else – compassion. Mercy. I supposed it made sense that the Saint of Mercy might be able to withdraw her nature from a person if she so chose.
So this was how she planned to do it: to make me waver in my certainty by taking away her influence entirely, to make me long for that sense of compassion I always felt around her. How typical. She’d never truly understood the nature of a duellist: that we don’t care how we feel; we just do what must be done. This was Ethalia in her purest form. Manipulative. Deceitful. Using my love of her – the love she’d rejected – to bend me to her will when her Awe couldn’t do the job.
I took a step forward, and she flinched as if I’d struck her. I didn’t care.
‘Falcio, don’t,’ Kest said behind me.
He’d get up and try to stop me in a moment, once he realised what was about to happen. I was going to kill Trin, as I’d promised to do, as I should have done ages ago. Ethalia thought she could stand there and stop me, but she was wrong.
I’d never realised before just how sick I was of people who were supposed to care about me trying to force my hand, to handcuff me to their own weakness. I could have saved this country years ago, if only the King hadn’t commanded me to step aside while the Dukes brought their armies into Aramor. I could have ended this mess and saved Aline if only I’d killed Trin back in Avares. Did Ethalia really think I was going to stop now? I wasn’t. I wanted to kill her almost as much as I wanted to kill Trin – in fact, I could just drive my rapier through Ethalia’s heart and straight into Trin’s neck, and then I would be free. At long last, the torment inside me would go away and I would drift back into that blessed madness that had sustained me for so long, before Ethalia had taken it from me.
I took another step towards her, towards Trin, towards freedom.
One lunge. One perfectly executed lunge, just like in the old fencing manuals. Don’t think of Ethalia or the future or anything else. Let the explosion begin in the calf of the rear leg, the muscles carrying the force up into the body, the arm forming the perfect line, the tip of the blade piercing skin then flesh, scraping past bone and through the other side and into Trin’s neck.
Freedom. Freedom from all of them is one lunge away.
Part of me kept expecting my wife Aline to appear, or perhaps King Paelis: hallucinations, memories from my past, come to haunt me into good behaviour. Nothing.
As I began the strike, I looked into Ethalia’s eyes, so sure was I that nothing there could stop me. Her own gaze was peaceful, serene . . . no . . . it was something else: confident. She was convinced I wouldn’t do this. How stupid. Aline, my King’s daughter, used to look at me that way, so absolutely positive that I would stop whichever assassin had come for her – and I’d done it, too; time after time I’d found a way to save her . . . Until now. Was this all I’d ever been? A reflection in the eyes of others? A man with no dreams of his own, who only tried to live up to the expectations of those he cared for? And if that was true, then this, right now, the one act of my own choosing, the only thing I’d ever done for myself, was going to be an act of murder.
No.