“You’ve got to rest,” Valiana said, pulling on my arm to try to keep me from mounting my horse. “We’ve been riding for two days without stopping—you’re going to kill yourself.”
“I’m fine,” I said, trying for the third time to get my foot into the stirrup.
Horses can last only so long when they’re ridden hard and so we sold ours after the first day when we reached a town large enough to buy fresh ones, and then again early on the second day. But the horses weren’t the problem. I was.
“Here,” Kest said, holding out a small square packet the size of a man’s thumb. “You must be out of the hard candy by now.”
I pushed his hand away and reached into my pocket. “I’m fine,” I said as I withdrew my own packet and popped the last remaining sliver into my mouth. Almost immediately I felt that strange sharp focus coming to my eyes and my heart beating faster. “You should save yours. It won’t do for you to be tired while you’re fighting all those people.”
“What will you be doing?” Kest asked.
I leaned my head against my horse’s saddle, waiting for the dizziness to pass. “Watching, mostly. I might cheer you on occasionally, if you think it will help.”
Nehra, sitting astride her horse, nudged closer to us. “What precisely will you do when you get there?”
“Writing a story, are you?”
“I’m Bardatti. It’s what I do.”
“Well,” I said, humoring her, “if all goes to plan, we’ll arrive before the Dukes have assembled so that when they get there with whatever Knights and guardsmen they still trust, I’ll be able to warn them that a group of Greatcoats are about to arrive with the sole purpose of assassinating them all.”
“Won’t they send their Knights and guardsmen to arrest you? Especially as you’re wearing greatcoats?”
“I’ll do my best to explain the difference.”
Nehra frowned. “Do you always run headlong into certain death?”
“Sometimes he walks,” Dariana said. “Occasionally he shuffles. Once I’m pretty sure I saw him amble into certain death.”
Nehra rolled her eyes. “You risk your lives on foolish odds.”
“We risk our lives to make them count,” Valiana said. “It’s what we do.”
I lifted my head and smiled at her. Saints, but I loved how brave she was. What happened to the princess who saw everyone else as a servant? Where was the mad orphan child, desperate to die before anyone could tell her she didn’t have a right to live? All I saw before me now was a Greatcoat. King Paelis would have adored her, I thought.
Dariana mounted and set off, followed by Valiana, Nehra, and Kest. I put a hand on Ethalia’s arm before she could do the same. “Wait,” I said.
She turned and I saw the sadness and resignation in her eyes. She knows what I’m about to do. I pointed to the fork in the road ahead of us. “That road goes south through Aramor and then into Baern.”
“Oh? And have you decided to leave behind this madness and come with me?”
“I can’t, Ethalia. I just can’t sit back and let the country be destroyed. I can’t have the last thing people remember about the Greatcoats be that they came and committed murder to throw the country into civil war.”
She turned away from me. “So you ride into danger, yet you ask me to stay behind like some poor fisherman’s wife hoping the storm won’t drag your boat under?”
“I’m going to have to fight,” I said. “I have to . . . And I can’t do it if you’re there, Ethalia. I need to—”
“You need to throw away your life recklessly,” she said, “and you’re afraid that my presence will make it that much more difficult.”
“No, damn it.” I reached out to her and pulled her toward me, although I expected her to pull away—it’s what I would have done if I’d been her. But Ethalia always had a deeper wisdom than me; she’d known from the start that our time together was a gift and anger the thief who would steal its most precious moments. “I don’t want to die,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“There is one path that leads to life and happiness, and another that leads to pain and death. You’ve got a pretty poor sense of direction, Falcio.”
I laughed. We’d known each other a short time, really; I don’t think I’d realized how funny she could be. “Of that you can be certain. But let’s not forget it was that same poor sense of direction that led me to you in the first place.”
She tilted her head up and kissed me. “Nonsense,” she said with a wry grin. “Some loves are foretold by the stars and demanded by the world, and not even the Gods dare stand in their way.”
“It’s not the Gods I’m worried about—although the way things have been going recently, I probably shouldn’t speak too soon.” I stepped back and held her at arm’s length, trying to imprint the memory of her face in my mind forever. “You know I have to do this. I can’t sit back and let everything the King fought for become corrupted, the way everything else is in this damned world.”
“I haven’t asked you to stop being who you are, Falcio—I would never do that.”
“Then go south and find happiness, if for no other reason than I’ll fight better knowing you’re in the world.”
“And what world is left for me if you’re not in it?” she asked.
“The one where I loved you.”
She kissed me then, on the cheek. “Go then—but love is not a cage, Falcio. You have to remember that when the time comes.”
I walked back to my horse and set off to follow the others, leaving Ethalia and all she represented—all she promised—behind me. She was wrong, and so was Birgid: love was a cage, and I couldn’t do what I had to do next while locked inside it. Another few hours, I thought, and then the Tailor and I were going to have a very long conversation about the direction of the country. Unless she killed me first, of course.
The five of us galloped along the back roads that ran through central Aramor, using every shortcut Kest and I could remember from the days we’d spent exploring with the King. Finally, just before nightfall, we came to a small hill a few hundred yards from Castle Aramor. We dismounted and made our way to a vantage point near a copse of trees that looked down on the castle.
“Just a few minutes rest,” I said, doing my best not to fall to the ground. “Then we go down there and do what we came to do.”
Kest walked up the rest of the hill, Dariana and Valiana following close behind. Nehra came and stood beside me. At least she had the decency to pretend she was tired too.
“I won’t be fighting with you,” she said.
I turned my head to look at her. She had made no complaint since the moment she’d been captured by Heryn’s men. Colwyn had died, and yet she hadn’t even once sought revenge from Dariana. “I’m sorry about Colwyn,” I said. “I didn’t know him, but—”
“Please don’t say stupid things, Falcio. That’s not the reason.”
“You don’t agree with what we’re trying to do? You think civil war and chaos are legitimate ways to—”
“And a second time you show your ignorance, First Cantor of the Greatcoats,” Nehra said. “Come, give us a third, for the Gods love things in threes.”
I looked at this strange woman who was so plain in herself and yet who could make music that transformed everyone around her; who said little, yet knew every story there was . . .
“It’s about the story, isn’t it?” I asked. “You have to witness the story of what happens here today.”
She slapped me on the back. “You see? It appears you’re not entirely without wits. I’ll be there when whatever happens, happens, but I can’t be part of it, not now, not when the tale must be heard, for it must be told.”
I stood up and stretched my back and rotated my shoulders. Stiff, I thought. Still too stiff. “I’ll do my best to give you a good story, then,” I said. “Try to get my name right, will you?”
She looked at me then without a trace of ire or sarcasm in her expression, then leaned over and gave me a soft kiss on the cheek. “I will, Falcio val Mond of the Trattari,” she said, and then walked away down the hill.
I winced. “Please stop calling us Trattari.”
I heard the sound of steel being drawn and looked up the hill. The three of them had their swords in hand and I raced toward them, drawing my own rapiers. “What is it?” I asked. “Are they here already?”
Valiana turned to me, looking sick. “We’re too late.”
I moved past her and looked down the hill. The lawn in front of Castle Aramor was designed to hold great assemblies. It had been created more than a hundred years ago by uprooting several acres of trees from the forest at the edge of the castle’s walls. The King used to call it “the green gauntlet” because it looked as if a giant had left an eight-hundred-yard-long glove on the ground, with the castle on one side and thick forest on the other. And there, lying all over that lush green grass, were dozens and dozens of dead bodies, scattered as if that same giant had dropped them all from a great height.
The bodies wore greatcoats.