“We killed them all. Every man in that fortress is dead.” I looked to the Queen. “Every woman. Lady, scullion, drudge, and whore.” My eyes fell to her belly. “Every child, every babe in cradle.” I raised my voice. “Every horse and dog, every hawk and every dove. Each rat, and down to the last flea. Nothing lives there. Victory does not come in half measures.”
Father lurched to his feet.
In one pace I stood almost nose to nose with him. I couldn’t read what his eyes held, but the old fear had left me, as if it too had trickled from my hands.
“Give me my birthright.” I kept all colour from the words, though my jaw ached from the strain of it. “Let me lead our armies, and I will take the Empire, and make it whole once more. Set aside the heathen. And his plans.” I glanced toward the new queen at that.
I should have kept my eyes on him, should have remembered where I got my mean streak.
I felt a sharp pain under my heart. It made me bite off my sentence, nearly my tongue too. I tasted blood, hot and copper. One step back, two, staggering now. I saw the blade, exposed in Father’s hand when I slipped from it.
Is this a dagger I see before me? The quotation bubbled up, and laughter too, breaking out of me, crimson with spittle. I wanted to speak, but for once words escaped me, leaking away with my life’s blood.
The throne-room swam before me, its architecture no longer certain in the face of such betrayal. Every eye watched my retreat toward the great doors. Their stares lanced me, lords and ladies, Princess, Queen, and King. The legs that had borne me league upon league from Gelleth now turned traitor, as if each mile from the ruin of the Castle Red settled upon my shoulders and left me drunk with weariness.
He stabbed me!
There was a time when I loved my father. A time remembered, in dreams, or in rare waking moments, like the shadow of a high cloud crossing my mind. There’s a laughing face from a year I no longer own, from a season when I was too young to see the distance between us. The face is bearded, fierce, but without threat.
Is this a dagger I see before me? My mouth wouldn’t frame the joke. The laugh burst from me, and I fell, as if the knife had cut my strings.
For an eternity I lay before them, my cheek to the cold marble. I heard Makin roar. I heard the clatter as he went down beneath too many guards. The slow thud of a heartbeat filled me.
When I fell I saw the blackness of my father’s hair, darker than night, with the faintest sheen of emerald like a magpie’s wing.
“Take this away.” He sounded weary. The slightest hint of human weakness at the last.
“Will he lie by his mother’s tomb?” A new voice. The words drew out to fill an age, but somewhere in me they echoed and I saw their owner, Old Lord Nossar who bore us on his shoulders, Will and I, a lifetime ago. Old Nossar, come to carry me one last time. I heard the answer, too faint and deep for distinction. My eyes went blind. I felt the floor scrape against my cheek, and then no more.
38
I swallowed darkness, and darkness swallowed me.
Without light, without the beat of a heart to count the time, you learn that eternity is nothing to fear. In fact, if they’d just leave you to it, an eternity alone in the dark can be a welcome alternative to the business of living.
Then the angel came.
The first glimmers felt like paper-cuts on my eyes. The illumination built from a distant pinpoint, splinters of light lodging in the back of my mind. A dawn came, and in an instant, or an age, darkness fled, leaving no hint of shadow to record its passage.
“Jorg.”
Her voice flowed through the octaves, an echo of every kind word and every promise fulfilled.
“Hello.” My voice sounded like a cracked reed. Hello? But what do you say to heaven when you meet her? Two syllables, weakness and doubt underwriting both.
She opened her arms. “Come to me.”
I crouched, naked on a floor too white for any shadow to dare. I could see the dirt on my limbs, like veins, and blood, blood from the wound that killed me, dried and black as sin.
“Come.”
I tried to look at her. No point in her held constant. As if definition were a thing for mortals, a reduction that her essence would not allow. She wore pale, in shades. She had the eyes of everyone who ever cared. And wings-she had those too, but not in white and feathers, rather in the surety of flight. The potential of sky wrapped her. Sometimes her skin seemed to be clouds, moving one across the other. I looked away.
I crouched there, a knot of flesh and bone, with only dirt and old blood to define me beneath the scrutiny of her brilliance.
“Come to me.” Arms open. A mother’s arms, a lover’s, father’s, friend’s.
I looked away, but she drew me still. I felt her breathing. I felt the promise of redemption. I had but to lift my eyes and she would forgive me.
“No.”
Her surprise fluttered between us, a palpitation of the light. I felt tension in the muscles of my jaw, and the bitter taste of anger, hot at the back of my throat. Here at last were things familiar to me.
“Put aside your pain, Jorg. Let the blood of the Lamb wash your sins away.” Nothing false in her. She stood transparent in her concern. The angel held her gifts in open hands, compassion, love.. . pity.
One gift too many. The old smile twisted on my lips. I stood, nice and slow, head bowed still. “The Lamb doesn’t have enough blood for my sins. May as well hang a sheep for me as a lamb.”
“No sin is too great to repent,” she said. “There’s no evil that cannot be put aside.”
She meant it too. No lie could pass those lips. That truth, at least, was self-evident.
I met her eyes then, and the wash of her love, so deep and so without condition, nearly carried me away. I dug deep and fought her. I manufactured my smile once again, cursing myself for a slackjawed fool.
“I left few sins untasted.” I took a step toward her. “I cursed. .. in church. I coveted my neighbour’s ox. I stole it too, roasted it whole, and finished it off with gluttony, a deadly sin, the first of the Seven, learned at my mother’s breast.”
The hurt in her eyes hurt me, but I’d lived a life striking blows that cut two ways.
I moved around the angel, and my feet stained the floor, leaving bruises that faded in my wake.
“I coveted my neighbour’s wife. And I had her. Murder too. Oh yes, murder and more murder. So few sins untasted… If I’d not died so young, I’m sure I’d have met you with a full list.” Anger closed my jaw. Any tighter and my teeth would have exploded. “If I’d lived but five minutes longer, you could have put patricide at the head of the tally.”
“It can be forgiven.”
“I don’t require your forgiveness.” Veins of darkness reached across the floor, growing outward from where I stood.
“Let it go, Child.” A warmth and a humour ran through her words, so strong it nearly carried me with it. Her eyes stood as windows to a world of things made whole. A place built of tomorrows. It could all be made right. I could taste it, smell it. If she weren’t so sure of her success, she’d have had me, there and then.
I held to my anger, drank from my well of poison. These things are not good things, but at least they’re mine.
“I could go with you, Lady. I could take what you offer. But who would I be then? Who would I be if I let go the wrongs that have shaped me?”
“You would be happy,” she said.
“Someone else would be happy. A new Jorg, a Jorg without pride. I won’t be anyone’s puppy. Not yours, not even His.”
The night crept back like mist rising from the mire.
