Not for the first time, visions of His ascension plagued me in the night. It should have been a point of pride: a glorious rise of one god from the ashes of another, a violent rebellion against the ones I hated so virulently put into motion after more than a decade of striving tooth and nail, a final sacrifice crowning all the others as if it could make everything I had endured worthwhile. And yet…and yet…I envied them, the chosen ones sent to end me. They had the luxury of a normal life, of contentment, of tilling fields and raising children and growing old, albeit a future they were robbed of by Light and myself alike.
And even then, in defeat, they had the one thing He had denied me, most coveted of things: an ending.
Every sacrifice will be worth it, my rose, He promised me when He was still only him: a man of flesh and blood, whatever his ambitions, the warmth sharing my bed. Now I slept on the drafty floor below the window, knowing full well that whatever my normal rationale about being used to the hard ground of the campaign trail, nothing was harder than facing that bed and all of its ghosts.
I loved them too much to endure their sting, those echoes left behind. They wound around me like chains, biting like vipers, forged by our actions. Sleep allowed no room for escape. The devastation of seeing Him bathed in the light of the blue Flame of Truth, His flesh burning away into ash in the wind as undeath and godhood embraced Him at once, turning away to face His own meteoric rise and leaving me in His shadow…
That was the moment you lost the boy beneath the apple tree forever.
My eyes flicked open in the darkness of my room, catching the glint of steel and the gleam of eyes above me. In the low light cast by the last coals burning in the grate, I saw Shira struggling with herself, knife poised over my heart. My hand still curled around Woe’s hilt. In a moment, I could extinguish her as I had all those who had tried to kill me before.
She froze like a little bird in winter at the coldness of my gaze. I let go of my sword and used both hands to seize her clenched hands, pulling the blade close, until I could feel the coldness of its needle tip through my shirt, until a pinprick of blood started to well.
“Do it.”
Shira tried to flinch back, but my hold was iron. I held her in place when I felt her grip spasm to release the blade. I knew I could make her my murderer easily. A sharp pull of my hands, a slight twist of my torso, and the blade would go right between my ribs. I was only mortal, only flesh and blood. A blow to the heart would kill me as surely as it would her.
Her eyes welled with tears and her lips parted, but no sound came out. Even in a moment of terror, her vows remained. How could a woman of such conviction quaver at the ugliness of this moment? I couldn’t fathom it.
Maybe that was the difference between us. She still believed in something of the Light.
I released her hands and the blade dropped from nerveless fingers. I snatched it up effortlessly as I rolled, knocking her onto her back. I pinned her body with mine, holding the dagger to her throat. She struggled like a mouse in a cat’s claws, but I was the better combatant by miles. “You were foolish to squander that chance, Shira. Thousands of knights, priests, and kings would have given their immortal soul up just to have it. Even your peace-loving goddess would have taken it in a heartbeat.” A gall of bitterness dripped from every word. “Nothing to say in your own defense, priestess?”
Shira struggled against my hold, trying to twist free from the pin. We were a tangle on the floor and now she was putting up enough of a fight that maintaining a hold on both wrists of hers with one hand, even slender as they were, was a challenge. She managed to slip me with one hand, striking me in the cheekbone with a hammer-fist, just like I’d taught her.
She might as well have hit stone for how far it moved me. The dagger stayed tight against her throat, the wicked edge a whisper of cold not quite firm enough to break the skin. Even with her struggles, I was careful to control that. I always made it my policy to kill only with intention, not out of negligence.
“Why did you stop?” I demanded. “You had everything your goddess could ever ask of you clutched tight in your hands!”
A fresh trickle of tears spilled from the corners of her eyes. I couldn’t tell if she was realizing the magnitude of her failure or just certain I was about to slit her throat. I pushed myself up carefully, without pressing the knife any tighter to her throat, and then threw the blade as hard as I could. I heard it clatter against the door on the far side of the room. My anger faded like a summer storm dispersing when she started to fully cry, sobs croaking out of her never-used throat.
Hell’s fire, but I hated the tears of the innocent. They had a way of twisting at the last dregs of a heart I had.
“Stop it!”
Raising my voice only made it worse and I cursed myself.
Aleyr, you absolute brute, I could almost hear Melody chiding me. The poor girl’s been through enough between Varys and Vex. She doesn’t need you tormenting her too.
The thought made my chest ache. I let her go, moving off of her so she could scramble back, hitting her back against the foot of the bed. A knock sounded on the door, polite and precise.
“Not now, Haven,” I called, trying to decide how I was going to handle the hot mess in front of me.
“Are you alright, my lady?” The door remained closed, but I knew the wight had his hand on the knob, ready to enter.
I sighed, both exasperated and comforted by his presence. “Fine, Haven. The girl had a fright. That’s all.”
“Understood, my lady. Shall I put the kettle on?”
“Please.” It would keep him diverted for some time, since he’d have to rekindle the ovens and heat the water. I set Woe to the side and sighed, studying Shira in her distress. The sobs seemed to rattle her entire body like a leaf caught in a sudden gale. I reached out and she froze again in fright, but this time I just tucked her hair back behind her ear so it wasn’t hanging in her face. “If your concern is death or worse, you can put it out of your mind. I have no intention of harming you or you would be dead already.”
Her hands shook too much to clearly sign, but the tears only came faster now. It was as if the floodgates had opened and nothing short of an act of some deity could close them.
I rubbed absently at the small cut on my sternum. It stung and bled a little bit more into my shirt. Fresh bruising was starting to well on my cheek as I attuned to the ache in my head. It had been a surprisingly solid hit, probably because I hadn’t tried to go with it at all.
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Soothing people was really more Haven’s domain than mine and so I kept my silence and stirred up the coals in the fireplace until the tears finally started to peter out. Eventually, her hands started to move, still trembling slightly as they flicked and danced in the shaping of words without sound.
I’m not a murderer.
“Not like me, you mean,” I said coolly, watching her face carefully for any sign of deception. She wasn’t lying, but there was something else going unsaid. “Do not take me for a fool. I know you have divination magic now. What did you see?”
I expected a lie. Instead, her fingers shaped something else entirely. A future.
“Whose?”
Shira shook her head, the tears suddenly welling again.
“That terrible?” I supposed I couldn’t be surprised, not when my past contained horrors she had little conception of. I held out a scarred hand palm up, misshapen ring glowing in the light of the fire. “Show me. Those tutors have to be good for something.”
She shook her head again and pointed at my other hand, the one without the King in Black’s ring. I scowled. Whatever snippet of future she’d managed to glean, she apparently wanted to keep from His eyes: a recipe for disaster.
Please, she signed, movements jerky with desperation. You’ll understand.
I ground my teeth in irritation, but switched hands. Her fingers grazed mine and suddenly we were somewhere else entirely.
—a battlefield, not so different from the last, except I was lying on my back in a spreading pool of hot blood. A sword transfixed me through the chest, but instead of pain there was only creeping numbness.
Shira held my head and shoulders in her arms, cradled against her breastplate, blood smeared across the symbol of Ishal worked into silvery steel. Tears streaked down her face, rolling across my bloodied knuckles where my hand met her cheek. Seeing her tears hurt me more than my wounds.
“Hush,” I heard myself say, voice distorted with pain. “It had to be this way. We both knew this had its price.”
She started to shake her head, but the black creeping into my vision was quickly robbing me of my perception of everything. I looked down at the blade through my chest and realized distantly that I knew that battle-scarred, rayskin-wrapped hilt better than the back of my own hand.
Woe.
I sagged back into her hold more and turned my eyes back to hers, quickly becoming the only thing I could see. Death’s presence enveloped me like a lover’s embrace with a cold kiss against my unfeeling lips. I lost myself in Shira’s eyes of blue, the same color as the wildflowers that grew on northern slopes, once upon a time—
I recoiled like I’d been bitten. Not from the pain, but the intimacy of the moment felt so jarringly present compared to the absence I’d endured for centuries. I was no more certain than Shira what truth there was to the vision. Divination magic was finicky at best. After all, I’d destroyed certainties time after time with every prophesied champion I’d cut down. This could mean nothing or everything.
“It seems you may have a chance to correct the mistakes of others.” My words came blunt and forceful as a smith’s hammer.
I’m not a murderer, she signed again. Not a justicar.
I picked up Woe and rose to my feet. “It is a possibility. One I would be foolish to ignore.”
She tensed, waiting for a wicked blow from the scarred steel. Instead, I kept the blade in its scabbard and leaned it against my shoulder, hilt settled against my cheek. Her fingers flicked anxiously. What are you going to do?
“I could use a cup of tea.” I held out my right hand to her to help her up, the one without His ring. “Beyond that? I will break it, as I have broken every other gods-given vision of my end.”
By killing me?
I shrugged. “If you become a champion of Light, Shira, and bow to the whims of its gods and kings, I will offer you the same I have offered every other Chosen One destined to slay me: to turn away from that appointed fate or die. I would never deny you the power to choose your own destiny.”
She reached out timidly, placing her hand in mine as she signed with the other. Even after…? Her gaze flicked towards the discarded knife.
“If I made a habit of taking every attempt on my life personally, I would stand as an island in a trackless expanse of sea. Besides, you lost your nerve.” My expression hardened. “The next time it is yours to take a life, I hope you will not hesitate. Sanctum will devour the infirm of purpose.”
Why do you stay, Lady Frostborn? You speak of this place and so many of its denizens with contempt.
“My name is Aleyr,” I said curtly. The moment she was on her feet with my assistance, I withdrew from the warmth of her hand. “That or Frostborn will do.”
That’s not an answer.
I raised an eyebrow as I regarded her in the firelight. “And where would the Beloved of the King in Black be welcome in this world of ours, except at His side? Shall I run to Rusa and let them burn me on a pyre? Flee to the Free Lands and decorate a pike with my skull? Permit leopards to devour me in Madya, hang my corpse in thorns in Suzail, be drawn and quartered in Azov, or hacked to pieces in Haldaerk? Name me a place where my very epithet is not the vilest of curses, the worst of fates one could wish on another, and I will consider it.”
If you changed your path, Aleyr, you could–
I held up my left hand, the ring a flash of reflected flame in the firelight. “You fail to understand, priestess. I am His. If anyone should understand the power of a vow, it is you.”
Shira didn’t shrink from my gaze this time, meeting it head on. He demands everything and gives nothing. How can you love Him when he cannot even return the emotion? You are a means to perpetuate His rule, a thing, an object to him. At least Ishal rewards her faithful with love and protection.
It would have hurt less if she’d stabbed me, but this was an old wound that I knew well. “Does she?” I asked softly. “Where was that love and protection when Varys held you?”
She shuddered slightly at the reminder, eyes flickering closed for a moment as she tried to push away the thoughts of those horrors. She has not abandoned me, not even here.
“Beware of gods bearing gifts. You will find that in the end, they take with two hands and leave you scrabbling for their crumbs. As true of mine as of yours.” I took a deep breath. “Perhaps He has forgotten me. Perhaps I am reduced to only our bond, but I remember the love that set kingdoms ablaze and birthed a god, and I will be faithful to it until I am no more. I do not feel things by half measures, Shira. It is everything or nothing.”
You are like a woman walking through a world of light with her eyes shut, cursing the gods for her blindness, Shira retorted with the sharp movements of her fingers.
I fought down the bitter tide of anger as best I could. “Where were they when I cried out for them in bondage? Where were they when my innocence was taken from me? Where were they when I buried my children, one after another? At least He picked me up and dried my tears. As far as I am concerned, the Heavens are worse than empty: they are crowded with locusts fattened on prayers that devour all and return nothing.” When she stopped, stunned into silence, I pointed at the door. “Go. Haven has tea for you. I tire of talking and have no patience for your replies.”
Shira was wise enough to quit the field, leaving me alone in my bedroom, surrounded by the ghosts of memory.