WALKING CORPSE

I could have killed him.

I want that understood, because later, when the broadsheets tried to make a story of it, they got the shape wrong. They wrote that I spared him out of mercy. They wrote that I spared him out of fear. They wrote, in one memorable column, that I was moved by a memory of lost love.

None of it was true. I stood in a ring of burning grass with the point of Ashbrand at the hollow of Alden Whitlock's throat, and I counted. It would have taken a quarter-inch. I knew the exact angle. I knew the exact pressure. I had killed seven creatures that month with that blade, and I had not enjoyed it, and I would not have enjoyed this. But it would have been simple. It would have been tidy.

And he had put his hand out to touch my shoulder.

That was what I could not forgive. Not the Menagerie, which he did not yet know he had committed. Not the Band, or the lie, or the lamplit speech. The touch. The assumption of it. The gentle, habitual, proprietary reach of a man who has never once been refused.

I kept the sword steady. Alden stood motionless. I could see his pulse jump under the skin.

"You're trembling," I observed.

"I'm not."

"You are. You have a rather elegant tremor in the left knee." I tilted the blade a fraction. "It does you credit. It means you've remembered what fear is."

He swallowed. The point moved with his throat. "If you mean to do it," he said, very low, "do it. I won't beg."

"No," I said. "You wouldn't. You'd negotiate."

His lips twitched.

I lowered the sword.

…

I did not sheathe it. I did something else.

With the point of Ashbrand, quick and light, I flicked at his coat. It was a small gesture. A flick of the wrist. The red-lit steel moved through the air with a sound like silk tearing, and the narrow sash of gold and midnight blue that hung across his chest, the badge of House Whitlock, fell in two neat halves from his shoulder.

It dropped to the ground.

It was a ribbon of heavy silk, embroidered with the House sigil in thread of gold. Every Whitlock wore one. It was passed to the heir at his coming of age. Alden had worn his every day for four years. It had been the first thing he touched in the morning and the last at night. I had once, in the winter, sewn a loose thread back into it with my own needle.

It lay on the burned grass, in two pieces, smoking faintly at the edge.

He looked at it.

For a moment he did not seem to understand what had happened. Then he looked up, and I saw his face change.

"You cut it," he said. There was a note in his voice that I had never heard. Not rage. Something lower, quieter, more bewildered. "That's the colors. That's the House."

"I know."

"You can't."

"I did."

"My father—my great-grandfather—"

"Wore it. Yes." I looked at the two halves of silk. "It's a pretty thing. It will mend. You must try to remember, when you ask your valet to sew it, that someone once did it for you without being asked."

His mouth opened.

"Alden," I said, in the voice I had learned from the Shade, level and dry and unfinished, "I want you to understand something. I am not angry with you. I have been angry. I have passed through it and come out the other side. I am telling you the plain truth." I looked at him steadily. "To me, you are no longer a man. You are a corpse, upright, that has not yet been told. You walk. You talk. You wear the colors. But everything that mattered in you has already been spent, and you have not noticed, because you are used to being carried."

His face went red, then white.

"You bitch," he whispered.

"There," I said. "That's more honest."

…

He did not draw his sword. I should say that. He had none. But I saw him weigh it, in that long moment, the instinct to strike with fists or magic or sheer outraged breeding, and I saw him look at the space between us, at the black ring on the grass, at the blade, at the way I stood. I saw him measure the distance between his Silver and my Bronze. It was a gap that any child could have read.

And I saw him understand that it was not in his favor.

It is a strange thing to see a man realize his own weakness. It does not happen all at once. It is a slow, silent unfolding, like a flower closing. His shoulders came down. His chin lowered. The anger drained from his face, leaving only something gray and old.

"I'll go," he said.

"A wise decision."

"My father will not accept this."

"Your father doesn't have to. He has the freedom to try."

He bent, with great care, as if each motion hurt, and picked up the two halves of the sash. He folded them together. He did not look at me. He turned and walked away across the field, toward the road, with the ribbon in his fist and the burned glove dangling from his wrist. The mist, still lingering in the hollows, swallowed him by degrees. The last I saw of him was the gold of his hair, small and bright, in the distance.

The thrush began to sing again.

…

"I begin to think," said the Shade, "that you ought to have killed him."

I turned. He stood at the edge of the burned ring, arms folded, his pale gray form quite solid in the morning light. For a long moment I thought I read something in his face that I had not seen before. It was not disapproval. It was weighing.

"Do you?"

"He will come back. Not as he was. Worse. A man who has been humiliated in front of a whole nation does not go quietly home and take up knitting. He grows in the dark."

"Yes."

"He has a House. He has a father who regards you as an asset. He has the Chancellor's ear and a ruined betrothed in a sickbed. He has, as of this morning, nothing whatever to lose."

"Yes, Declan."

"Then why?"

I thought about it. The grass hissed softly under my boots. The heat-haze had gone. I was suddenly very tired.

"Because it would be too quick," I said.

"Is that all?"

"It is the chief part." I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand. "I've done a great deal of dying. It is not as terrible as they say. It is simply an absence. A sudden end to all one's problems." I looked at the empty road. "He deserves to live with it."

A pause.

"That," said the Shade slowly, "is a very Sovereign thing to say."

"Is it?"

"The old Sovereigns were famous for their cruelty. They believed the proper punishment for a man who had lost his reputation was that he should keep it."

"Charming."

"I did not say they were nice." But his voice was odd. "I only say that you have, in two months, learned a thing I have spent seventy years failing to teach."

"What is that?"

He did not answer. He looked out across the field, at the empty road, and for a long time said nothing at all.

…

That night I walked out of the camp alone.

I told Nimbus to stay. He gave me a look of such ineffable disdain that I nearly relented, and then he turned his back and curled up on my cot as though the matter were beneath his notice. The Shade I did not have to tell. He simply did not follow.

I went out past the last of the sentries, past the line of canvas and the dying cookfires, to the crest of a low ridge on the edge of the camp. It was a clear, warm night. The stars were out, thick and white, spilled across the sky like a bag of salt. Below me the lights of Ravenport lay in a long golden crescent along the harbor. A little wind came off the sea. The Colosseum stood on its hill, a pale lantern in the dark.

I sat down on a rock.

I did not know what I expected to feel. Satisfaction, perhaps. Something to match the dull thrill of the arena. A trace of the old ache. I closed my eyes, and in the way one probes a bad tooth, I pressed my attention to the place in my chest where Alden Whitlock had been.

It was where it had always been. Under the breastbone, a little to the left. A small tender hollow. For five years of one life and three of another, I had never touched it without flinching.

I touched it now.

There was nothing there.

It was not numbness. I knew numbness; I had worn it for a year in a quiet room. This was something else. This was a clean, still, empty space, like the inside of a church at midnight. The hurt had gone out of it, and what remained was only a form, a shape, a place where a thing had once been, and had been taken out, and carefully cleaned.

I sat in it for a long time.

I thought: Is this what it is to be finished?

The wind stirred my hair. Down in the camp someone was singing, softly, a soldier's song, with the words blurred by distance. Far out over the water a ship's light winked on and off.

I felt a presence beside me. A cool, quiet shape, not quite touching.

"I didn't ask you to come," I said.

"I know."

"I came here to be alone."

"I know." The Shade sat down, a few feet away, on the rock, with his arms around his knees. In the starlight he was nearly transparent. I could see the constellations through his shoulder. "I will not speak, if you prefer."

"No." I hugged my knees. "No. You may."

He was silent for a long time.

Then he said, in a voice so low that it might have come from inside my own head:

"Forty years ago, a man I loved was sealed into the wall beside mine. They put him in a cell above this one. We could hear each other through the stone. For a year he sang. After that he stopped. I never learned his name."

I turned my head.

"I have thought about it every night since. I have wondered whether I should have called out. Whether it would have mattered." The pale eyes, in the dark, were fixed on the harbor. "You will have hollows, Tamsin. Whatever you do. The only choice is what you do with them."

I said nothing. I did not need to. I put my hand over my breastbone, and sat very still, and let the empty place be empty.

After a while he said, in his usual dry tone, as though nothing had passed:

"I need you to go to the Mistlands."

I blinked. "What?"

"There is a thing there. A relic. An Argent Relic, the Doctrine calls it. It is a Silver-age artifact, a vessel for the extension of the Sigil. Without it you will not pass Gold." A beat. "I cannot go. I am a ghost on a chain. But you can. And I think, if you leave in the next two days, you will be gone before Crane's men are ready."

I turned fully now, to look at him.

"You want me to leave the Gauntlet."

"I want you to leave it for six months. There is a recess after the semifinals. The remaining contestants will be dispersed to rest. It is customary. You will be missed by no one."

"And the thing in the Mistlands?"

"Only you can take it."

"Why?"

"It will respond to the Heart. And no one else's."

I looked at him. The stars wheeled slowly overhead.

"What is the price?" I asked.

He gave me a long, odd look.

"I haven't named one."

"You haven't had to. You're a Warlord." I stood, and dusted my skirt. "Everything you do has a price. I just want to know the denomination."

For the first time since I had known him, the Shade smiled. It was not a quick smile. It spread across his face slowly, like dawn across a field, and it was so entirely genuine and unguarded that I felt a small, sharp twist beneath my ribs, in the clean hollow where Alden had been.

"You'll find out," said the ghost of Declan Marrow, "when you get there."