At first, the world is made only of dust. Tiny specks of light, of sound. The briefest flicker of sunshine reflecting off the blade of a small knife. The scratch of thin strands of rope resisting and then giving way. The sensation of falling . . .
Voices.
“. . . needs . . .”
“. . . no time . . .”
“. . . he’ll die . . .”
“. . . anyway . . .”
The dust begins to disappear, replaced by a seamless gray that goes on forever and ever. This absence of sights and sounds and sensations has a name. Sleep. I think I like sleep. I want to hang onto it, but I can’t.
The world becomes slivers: sharp, nasty seconds that cut through the peaceful gray.
“Stay away from him! You don’t touch him or me again!”
“I’m . . . little bird, I swear, I’m so sor . . .” The word melts into a single heartrending sob. And that too dissolves, replaced with iron. “We don’t have a choice, damn you! We can’t fight them all at once. If they catch him—”
Cold, and wet. Something against my neck and back. Messy. Dirt. Pressure against my arms and shoulders. I’m sinking, but not very far, just a few inches. I know what “inches” are. Something sprays on my chest, my face, into my mouth. Dirt.
Oh Gods, don’t bury me.
Don’t. Just. Don’t.
Gray. Sleep.
The world is made of shards, broken bits of smells and tastes; of coughing and choking, of water, of crying, of something soft, like silk—no, not silk, hair. Hair on my face. Valiana’s, I think. Her head is on my chest. Is she listening to my heart? Or sleeping?
Sleep. Gray.
The world is a single cold and callous voice.
“Your body is healing,” Dariana said, “but it isn’t healing fast enough to outrun the fever inside you.”
There is a great deal of heat, yes, but who cares? I taste something wet and salty around my lips: sweat. I’m sweating all over. Everything around me is soft, though, so I don’t mind. There are blankets under my body, a pillow under my head.
“I have to bring you a healer,” she said.
Wouldn’t it have been easier just not to have tortured me to death? I wondered—no, I actually heard the words. The voice was familiar. It was my voice.
“It’s better if you rest. We’re in a forest near the border of Aramor—we’re safe. Valiana and Nehra stand guard for you. I’ll get a healer now. Rest.”
Good advice. Excellent advice. Exactly what I’m going to do. Rest. No words. No questions.
“Why?” my voice asked. “He . . . for eight days, he . . . Why did you wait until the last moment?”
I tried opening my eyes, but the light was harsh. Just sleep, I told myself. Go back into the gray.
You’ve probably realized by now that I’ve never been good at taking advice, least of all my own.
A room came into view, only it wasn’t a room. The walls were wooden, but they were logs, and someone had stuck them into the ground at slightly odd angles. Trees, stupid. The ceiling was a canopy of leaves. I was outside, of course. There was a fire behind me.
I hope it doesn’t burn down the rest of the room.
Dariana, on my right, was leaning over me. “Now isn’t the time,” she said, and started to turn.
I grabbed her wrist, surprised that my arm could even move. “No,” I said, “now.”
She shook off my hand. “The neatha is gone from your body. That’s why you aren’t waking up paralyzed. If I’d stopped Heryn any sooner, you would be dead by now.”
It took a few seconds for my mind to make sense of the words because there were so many of them. I separated each one, looked at it by itself, and then joined it to the others until what she said made sense. It was logical. And yet . . . “You’re lying—you didn’t know . . . You couldn’t have known.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s just that I didn’t remember who I was. I knew my name, I knew my history, but none of it was real . . . not until—”
“You’re lying again,” I said. Doesn’t this woman know I’m a Greatcoat? We interrogate people for a living, lady. You think I can’t tell that this is just another lie, too? I mean, of course it’s true, but it’s not the real reason, is it?
The way Dariana looked at me hardened. “Fine. You want to know why? I was fourteen years old when King Paelis sent me to infiltrate the Dashini. I spent nearly twelve years in that monastery. I was beaten—no, not just beaten, tortured. I was trained—tempered. I’m a sword made from sorrow and grief and the stupid, useless anger of a fourteen-year-old girl too innocent to know what she was volunteering for. And yet your fucking King Paelis sent me to that place, to those men. You want to know why I waited so long to save you, Falcio? It’s because until that exact moment I couldn’t decide which side I was on.”
She left.
The world is made of fragments.
There have been three moments in my life when I have experienced true joy: a sensation so strong it breaks through every ache or pain or regret.
The day Kest’s father called me “son” was one of those. The day I married Aline was another. The day I took up my Greatcoat was a third. Happiness is a series of grains of sand spread out in a desert of violence and anguish.
When I woke up in the forest the next day with the last embers of the fire reaching up to greet the dim light coming down through the leaves above me, I had my fourth such moment.
“Ethalia,” I said.
She was kneeling down, looking into my eyes, and she was crying, which I assumed meant I didn’t look very good. But she was there, which made me complete. I wanted the moment to go on for as long as I drew breath, but after a few seconds she wiped away the tears and turned to someone I couldn’t see. “Get my bag. We have work to do.”
I strained to turn my head and see who she’d been speaking to. It took a moment to make out his features, lit as he was by the light of the rising dawn. After a second I realized it was Kest.
And that was the fifth moment.
For a while I just lay there looking at him. He had a thick growth of beard, which was unusual for him, and without conscious thought I stretched out my hand and felt my own face. A thick, scratchy covering of coarse hair greeted my fingers and I wondered what I must look like. I thought I might have something funny to say about that, but Kest shook his head before I could speak.
He stood over me a few moments longer, then looked around for something to sit on. His eyes settled on a flat stone that he lugged over and positioned by the side of my bedding. He sat down next to me and stared at what was left of the fire.
Ethalia held a small jar in her hand. She dipped a finger in it and gently ran her finger along my lips. “Try not to swallow it,” she said. Then she turned to Kest. “I have preparations to make. You can speak with him for a few minutes, no more.”
“She sounds worried,” I said. “You must look really bad.”
Kest smiled, but still he stared at the fire. “Ah, Falcio,” he said at last, his voice deep and resonant, and yet I thought I could hear a note of fragility. That’s when I noticed he had tears in his eyes.
“Hey,” I said, “I’m fine. Really. Just a little miscommunication with—”
“The entire world?”
“Dead people like me just fine, you know. They all say nice things about me.”
“That’s because they think you’re one of them,” Kest said. “How’s your fever?”
Awkwardly I reached a hand up to my forehead. It came away slick with sweat. “My fever seems to be doing extremely well, thank you. How’s yours? Because if you’re planning on glowing red and trying to kill me, you should know that I’m considered quite handy with a sword.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.
I waited a while before asking the question, but in the end I had to. “I take it you found the sanctuary.”
“I did.”
What was it like?’
“Peaceful,” he said. “Humbling. After a few days, extremely boring.”
“Boring sounds better to me these days than it used to. Did it work?”
He nodded. “When the Sainthood passed from Caveil to me at the end of our duel, it was like . . . it was like I could suddenly see everything in front of me with perfect clarity. I could feel the balance of my sword in ways I’d never understood before. It was . . . overwhelming.” He chuckled. “It also made me completely defenseless, by the way.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Just then? At that precise moment? I was so enthralled that if a six-year-old with a rusty kitchen knife had attacked me he could have cut out my liver before I’d worked out what was happening.”
“Think how surprised that six-year-old would be once he started glowing red because he’d just become the Saint of Swords.”
“I understand it better now, Falcio. It’s not what I expected. It’s like . . . like having a question you have to answer, but you don’t have all the information, even though the question is always there, burning inside you.”
“So how do you answer it?” I asked, genuinely interested.
“I’m not sure. But everyone you meet holds a piece of it. Some just have the tiniest sliver, others . . .” He paused and looked at me. “Others have more.”
“That’s not a reassuring look you’re giving me. That reminds me, how did Dariana find you?”
“She didn’t.”
“Then how?”
“A troubadour told me, if you can believe it.” He held up a hand. “It’s too long a story. Suffice it to say, the Bardatti are every bit as strange and mysterious as the stories suggest.” He looked at me again. “As are you, apparently.”
“Me? I’m just your everyday, bog-standard traveling Magistrate.”
“Who survived the Greatcoat’s Lament. Falcio . . .” His eyes filled with an infinite sadness. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there when they—”
“Stop,” I said. I understood what he wanted to tell me; I just couldn’t stand to hear it, not yet. “If Brasti were here he’d say, ‘Stop fawning over everything Falcio does! Sure, it was torture, but you know what else is torture? Having to hear about it, that’s torture!’”
Kest laughed for a moment, then he touched me gently on the arm to let me know he understood. Some things we don’t talk about.
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about Brasti?” I asked.
He smiled, and this time it was genuine. “As a matter of fact, I heard two separate stories on the way here, of someone people are calling ‘The Archer’, who’s apparently defeated several bands of the Black Tabards. He picks up five or ten decent bowmen from a village, takes them out, and ambushes groups of these Knights before they can cause too much trouble.”
I grinned at the thought of Brasti and his archers. “Five or ten bowmen? Isn’t that just like Brasti to think in terms of drips of water when the enemy has an ocean?”
“I don’t know,” Kest said. “I suspect that if Brasti were here he’d say, ‘Five drips here, five there, pretty soon you’ve got a whole cup’.”
I started laughing, ignoring the pain that came along with it. “Kest, that is by far the worst Brasti impression I have ever heard.” I began to feel tired. “I could use a little gray right now,” I said.
“I don’t understand,” Kest said, looking around the room.
“Sleep, I said sleep.”
“You said gray.”
“Really? That’s . . .”
The world began to shrink down again, from fragments to shards, from shards to slivers, from slivers to a single mote of dust. I heard a woman’s voice calling out. “Quickly . . . water . . . heat . . . Falcio, listen to . . . need t . . .”
Gray.