Kest, Dariana, and I spent the next six days pursuing the Dashini assassin, following him from the dungeons of Rijou, through the city and south into the northern forests of Aramor. Each day took us down increasingly rough, untraveled roads until the path split into two tracks too narrow for our horses to navigate.
“We’ll have to leave them behind,” Kest said.
I dismounted and started to tie my reins to a tree when I stopped. Who knew if we’d be coming back this way—or coming back at all? It would be cruel to leave the horse tied up in the middle of nowhere. I left the saddlebags on the ground and pulled out the single small pack of dried foodstuffs and vital supplies I keep prepared for such an eventuality.
“Let’s go,” I said, hoisting it onto my back and setting out along the forest path.
“Why exactly are we chasing after some traitorous Dashini?” Dariana asked, running to catch up with me. She’d asked the same question half a dozen times already; I was hoping she’d get bored of it at some point. “You said it yourself: it was the Knights who took Tommer, and they’re all dead now.”
“Toujean and the others were waiting for an opportunity,” I replied. “They knew someone would be sending an assassin for the Duke and they used his arrival to take Tommer.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I don’t know why!” I repeated for the sixth time. “All I know is that until I understand how the Dashini are involved in all of this I won’t be able to put a stop to the killings.”
“We’re getting closer,” Kest said, looking down at the muddy ground.
“Of course we are, you idiot! He’s leading us to our deaths! Falcio is so determined to learn his secrets that he’ll see us all dead before we uncover them!”
I stopped for a moment and leaned back against a tree. The path had gradually curved upward and we were now steadily ascending the side of a mountain. I slipped my hand into my pocket and pulled out a little oil-cloth-wrapped package—a considerably smaller package than it had been a week ago—and broke off a piece of hard candy. It was probably a bit bigger than it should have been; I examined it briefly, then popped it into my mouth.
“That’s another thing,” Dariana said. “How much longer do you think you can fend off sleep with that concoction you keep eating when you don’t think anyone’s paying attention?”
It wasn’t an unreasonable question. Since we’d left Rijou I’d stopped allowing myself to close my eyes for anything more than a few minutes; I was afraid the paralysis would overcome me and we’d lose the trail. So that was six days relying on the hard candy to keep me going: six days of virtually no sleep, which was a day longer than I’d ever gone before and two days longer than the King’s apothecary had pronounced safe.
“She’s right,” Kest said. “You can barely stand on your own, Falcio.” He’d been quiet for most of the journey, fighting his own battle inside himself. The urge to draw his blade was so strong that it was burning him up inside.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just saving it all up so that I can have a really memorable nap later on. I just need a minute to rest.”
“No, you don’t ‘just need a minute to rest’—you won’t last for another day like this, Falcio. You’re barely able to keep up—and when we do catch up with the assassin, what if he’s not alone?”
“Exactly,” Dariana said. “He knew he couldn’t beat all of us in Jillard’s castle so he’s playing on your world-famous need for answers to lure us into a trap.”
“He’s definitely drawing us on,” Kest agreed, pointing to the path through the forest ahead of us.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It only stopped raining an hour ago.” He picked up a bit of bramble lying beside the footprint in the mud. “Look: the fibers inside the break are dry.”
This wasn’t the first time this had happened. Each time we thought we were close, the assassin’s trail disappeared, and when we eventually picked it up again, it looked days old. There were times when I was certain he’d lost us, and then a few hours later we would suddenly see signs of him again.
I examined the wood. “So that means he only just passed this way. We’re close.”
“No,” Kest said, “look at the depth of the prints. He passed this way yesterday. Then he came back around using another route and walked through again, stepping in his prints again. The second time was when the branch fell in the print.” Kest turned to me. “We’re not close to him, Falcio: he’s close to us. He told you to follow him and now he’s making sure we do exactly that. He wants you, Falcio.”
I gave a hoarse laugh. “I think you’ve got an overinflated sense of my importance.”
Dariana’s hand came out of nowhere and slapped me across the face. “Fucking fool! You still tell yourself these things? Why? Why is it so fucking important for you to convince yourself you’re just another Greatcoat out trying to enforce simple laws?”
I was genuinely surprised by her overreaction. I expected her to want nothing more than to kill the Dashini after what they’d done to her mother. Dariana was reckless at the best of times, and this was a chance for her to get revenge. “Because that’s what—”
“It’s all about you, Falcio!” she shouted. “Haven’t you figured that out yet? You said the assassin told you he’d stayed in his cell because he was waiting for the chance to kill Jillard—so why didn’t he kill him during all that chaos with the Knights in the cell? Or even afterward? He could have slipped through Jillard’s guards and put a blade across the bastard’s throat like he was supposed to—but instead he betrayed his purpose just so he could lead us on this damn fool chase—and why? Why would any Dashini ever do that?” She pushed a finger into my chest. “Because destroying you is even more important to them than their damned oaths, that’s why!”
I looked at Kest. “You think we should stop?”
He hesitated for a moment, then said, “No. Everything Dariana’s said is likely true, but what you said about the Dashini being connected to the chaos and civil war that’s taking over the country? That is also true. That means you are right: until we know their role in this we’ll never put a stop to it.”
“And just what do you think following his trail is going to do for us?” Dariana asked angrily. “He’s playing with us; he’s herding us like the stupid sheep we are. He loses us, and then he helpfully comes back to make sure we are able to find his trail again. This is just a game to him: a chance to wear us down before he kills us.”
“Then it’s a game he’ll regret,” Kest replied.
“Are you well and truly mad, o great ‘Saint of Swords’?” she demanded. “What if it’s not just one of them who happens to be there, wherever ‘there’ is? What if there are dozens and dozens, and what if—imagine this!—they decide not to just line up for you and stand there patiently waiting as you defeat them one at a time?”
Kest ignored the question and climbed over a fallen tree that was obstructing the path. Dariana wasn’t done with us, though. “They’re not fighters, Kest, they’re killers,” she shouted. “Their fucking name means ‘the hunt once started ends only in blood’—don’t you get it?”
Kest wouldn’t let go, though. “Then we’ll find another—”
Dariana’s words finally struck me.
The hunt once started ends only in blood.
“Shut up,” I said.
They both looked at me. “What is it?” Kest asked.
“Just shut up—both of you.”
Saint Zaghev-who-sings-for-tears! Is that truly what this is about? Could they really be doing all this just to draw me out? I’d never stopped to consider the implications when I killed those Dashini while Aline and I were trying to survive Blood Week in Rijou all those months ago. I’d just been trying to keep Aline alive—and yes, keeping myself alive was quite high on the agenda too. But Jillard’s agents had taken me down right after that fight, so I’d not given it much thought after that, on account of being too busy being tortured. But now I was stopping to give the matter due consideration, I could see that I might have left the Dashini with a bit of a problem. After all, if you’re an ancient order of assassins famed the world over for never failing to kill your target, and you’ve just . . . well, failed is probably the right word here . . . It’s just that murder isn’t just a job for them; it’s their religion.
So I have to ask myself: would they really do all of this just to capture me in some insane elaborate, ritualistic way?
“What do you mean, ‘of course they would’?” Dariana asked.
“What?”
“You were mumbling to yourself. You said, ‘of course they would’.”
I looked at the path ahead of us, and at the footprint so carefully pressed into the mud. Here we were in the middle of nowhere, at the bottom of a mountain of loose shale, rocks and other hazards that should have made it impassable. “I know where we are,” I said. “I know where he’s leading us.”
Dariana followed my eyes. “Up there? There’s no way to get up there.”
“There’s a path,” I said. “One that only a few have walked before us.”
“You think it leads to our assassin?” Kest asked.
I nodded.
“Do you think that Dariana’s right? Will there be more of them?”
I nodded again.
“How many?”
“All of them.”
Kest’s eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t make any sense. That would mean he’s taking us—”
“It’s the Dashini monastery,” I said. “The assassin’s leading us to the place where they’re raised, where they’re trained, where they’re taught to kill.”
“But that would be . . . Falcio, the Dashini monastery has been hidden for hundreds of years—no one’s ever been able to find it. So why on earth would they give that up?”
“Because they know we’ll come,” I said, “and they don’t plan on us leaving—not alive, at any rate.”
“Then we have to run,” Dariana said, seizing on the chance to change our course. “We go and collect ourselves an army and then we come back and destroy them, once and for all.”
“They’ll be long gone by then,” I said. “The Dashini don’t believe in sacred places. They won’t hesitate to destroy a monastery and move if they need to.”
“So how do we fight them?” Kest said.
The answer was so feeble I could barely bring myself to say it out loud—but even they had a right to know the bet on which I was about to risk their lives. “Years ago the King began sending Greatcoats to infiltrate the Dashini, one at a time, year after year. He believed there was a chance a handful of us could make it inside: we’d learn their secrets, and ultimately we’d bring them down before they could destroy us—and the country.”
Kest didn’t look convinced. “That was years ago, Falcio, and we’ve never heard back from any of them. What evidence do you have that any of them—even one of them—is still alive? The odds are—”
“We’re the Greatcoats,” I said portentously—it felt like a moment for grand declamations, after all. “Since when do Greatcoats care about the odds?” I gave him a grin, but inside my heart was cold. It wasn’t that I believed any of the King’s spies really had succeeded in infiltrating the Dashini. I just couldn’t see any other way of us surviving what was coming next, and if all I had to cling to was false hope—well, I’d take that over despair any day.
Two Dukes were already dead, the murderers set up to look like Greatcoats. Chaos was growing as the nobility, already nervous of peasant uprisings, were now afraid for their lives—and they had pretty good reason, thanks to the mysterious Knights in black tabards who were wreaking havoc and spreading mayhem through the duchies. There was no doubt in my mind: the Dashini were fomenting civil war and creating hell in Tristia.
So either a dozen Greatcoats were waiting for us inside that monastery, or my world was about to come to its end.
The hunt once started ends only in blood.
You’ve got that right, you bastards.
As the going got much steeper I needed more and more help from Kest. Though the path looked impassable, with impenetrable walls of vicious thorny vines everywhere the eye could see, we were led us to cunningly concealed hollowed-out paths that slipped beneath the bramble barriers. Other times, we’d find deadly shale beneath our feet that shattered into a million treacherous shards, almost guaranteeing a fall off the edge into the ravine hundreds of feet below—except for a narrow path that had been carefully cut away.
The assassin shepherded us past one danger after another, each step a reminder that without him, we would be lost; it was beginning to look horribly like the Dashini really could do things we mere Greatcoats could not.
I began to feel like I was just too damn big; I’d been transformed into a lumbering oaf following awkwardly behind a dancer of unsurpassed skill. How had I ever been fast enough, precise enough, that night in Rijou, to kill two of them? Whatever God or Saint had blessed me for those few minutes during that deadly fight had obviously abandoned me now. Even when the neatha wasn’t dulling the feeling in my fingers and toes, I knew I was far slower than I had been that day and I started to wonder if I would manage even a few moments when it came to pitting my blades against theirs.
I slipped on a mat of pine needles made slick by frost, but as I lost my balance Kest caught me, stopping me inches before my head collided with a rough-trunked tree.
He’ll survive, I thought. So that had to be our plan. If Dariana and I can blunt their attack for even a moment, Kest will make it back. No matter how skilled or fast the fighter, his opponent is always twice as dangerous if he isn’t trying to survive.
The thought of my imminent death, of finally being free of the pain and obligation that shackled me to a dead King’s daughter, came as a sudden, enormous relief. I can’t beat them—you can’t expect that of me. Better demand that I cut down the mountain with my rapiers than that I fight the Dashini for you.
Just at the point of sunset we passed single-file through a shattered outcropping of rock rising up from the edge of the mountaintop and there, nearly a quarter of a mile away and yet looking if we could reach out and touch it, was the Dashini monastery.
The very sight made my heart sicken: a blackstone tower in the center of a clearing, as tall and thin as if it had been patterned after a Dashini poignard.
“It’s as if someone stabbed a black needle into the country itself,” Dariana said.
Kest looked as ill from the sight as I felt. “It’s been right here all along, in the middle of Aramor,” he whispered.
The Duchy of Aramor had been the seat of the Kings of Tristia for as long as we had had stories of Kings to tell—and for almost as long there have been stories of the Dashini, of their dark mysticism and their dedication to the art of assassination. As Greatcoats we had spent much of our time learning to duel any opponent, and yet every one of us had always feared the Dashini. And here, not fifty miles from Castle Aramor, was the place where the Dashini were trained. Had they wished, every one of their assassins could have marched down the mountain, one at a time, in pairs or all together, and been at our doorstep within a few days.
They could have killed the King any time they’d wanted.
“I asked him to let me go,” Kest said.
“What?” I was still transfixed by the tower.
Kest looked at me. “The day the Dukes were coming? When he gave us each our missions? I asked him to let me find the Dashini. But he said no, enough good men and women had died trying, and he would never send another. And anyway, I was the last person in the world he’d send for such a task.”
I found myself staring at him in wonder: Kest was my best friend in all the world and yet I kept discovering new ways in which he had never let me in. If any man had a chance to deal with the Dashini, surely it would have been Kest? “Why did he refuse you?”
Kest kept his gaze on the tower. “He said I lacked the patience.”
“He didn’t want you to die for nothing,” I said.
Dariana’s eyes went wide and her face contorted with anger. “So Saint Paelis decided you were too important to risk?”
I looked at her. “I’m sorry, Dariana, I know you think the King should have done more after your mother was killed, but he—”
“What you know, Falcio val Mond, is nothing! I’ve spent quite enough time running around after you on your mad fucking quest. You think King Paelis had some master plan? So tell me how that works, because right now I’m pretty sure he was the second dumbest man in all of Tristia.”
I ignored the jibe. “Go back down to where we left the horses,” I said. “If we haven’t returned by morning, go and find the Tailor—and no, I have no damned idea where she is—and tell her the Dashini are behind all of this. If you can’t find the Tailor—well, just tell everyone who will listen. The Dashini are attempting their greatest feat ever, to wipe away the stain of the defeat they suffered. They want to assassinate the country.”
“Fine,” Dariana said simply, and she turned and started back down the path. For some reason I’d expected her to argue with me, to refuse to leave us. “Those Greatcoats the King sent are dead, Falcio,” she called back after a moment. “You are too.”
Kest looked up at the fading sun. “We’re losing the light,” he said. “We should wait until it’s full dark.”
“No,” I said, pulling one of my rapiers from its sheath, “we go now.”
“Now? Why go while there’s still light for them to see us coming?”
I pulled one of my rapiers. “Because they prefer the dark,” I said. “They like the dark.”
As we set off for the Dashini monastery I started preparing myself for either a quick and brutal death, or a miracle.
It turned out I was wrong. I wasn’t at all prepared for what came next.