IF I HAD CHOSEN YOU

We did not need to go to the Falls.

He met us at the foot of the hill.

I saw him from a mile away, a small dark mark on the white road that ran between the foothills and the plain. He was walking. He walked slowly, unevenly, with a lurching drag in his left leg, as though each step were a separate labor. He had no hat. He had no luggage. He wore a gentleman's coat, torn at the shoulder, and a nightshirt, and a pair of boots he had evidently pulled on in the dark, without socks. His hair, once gold, hung in lank gray ropes round his face.

I pulled up the mare. The others drew rein beside me.

"That's never him," said Josie, in a small voice.

"It is."

"He looks—" She stopped. "He looks like a corpse."

"He is not far from it," said Nimbus. He was perched on Hawk's saddle-bow with his ears flat, his tail lashing. "He smells wrong. He smells of the Hollow. I do not like it."

"The Choir got him," said Hawk grimly.

"Yes."

"Poor bastard."

I said nothing.

I sat in the saddle for a long moment, looking down the road. I had expected something. I had prepared a thousand sentences on the way down the mountain, in the cold gray noon, with the mare's hooves clopping and the wind in my face. I had rehearsed a dozen meetings. A deathbed. A sneer. A last, bitter, exquisite word. I had not rehearsed this: a stooped gray stranger in a nightshirt, on a dusty road, who had apparently forgotten how to hold his head up.

"Stay here," I said.

"Tam—"

"All of you." I dismounted. "I'll go alone."

I felt a presence beside me. I did not turn. I knew the weight of that step, the slight rustle of a cloak.

"Declan."

"I shall stand at the edge of the road," he said. "I shall not come closer. I shall not speak." The voice was low, quite level. "But I shall be there."

I nodded.

…

I walked down the road to meet him.

The sun was high. It beat down on the gravel and made the air shimmer. There was no wind. The hills stood hushed on either side, tawny and still, and the sky was a vast pale blue, empty of clouds. My boots crunched. My coat hung heavy on my shoulders. I felt the Archmage tree on my arm, glowing dully, warm as a coal.

I stopped fifty yards from him.

He looked up.

For a moment nothing happened. He stood quite still, with his arms hanging, and his eyes, which were red and swollen and sunken in their sockets, rested on my face. They did not light. They did not widen. They were the eyes of a man looking at a piece of furniture.

Then he began to fall.

It happened slowly. His knees gave way. He sank to the dust in the middle of the road, bit by bit, like a candle melting, and ended on all fours, with his palms flat on the gravel and his head hanging. He stayed there. I could hear him breathing. It was a thin, dry, shuddering sound.

He began to crawl.

I did not move. I watched him come. He dragged himself across the gravel on his elbows and his knees, with his coat trailing, and the stones cut his hands, and left small bright smears of red. He did not look at them. His eyes were fixed on me. He crawled thirty yards. He crawled forty. He stopped about ten feet away, at the edge of my Field, where the dust turned black, and the air shimmered with heat.

He raised his head.

"Tamsin," he said.

It was hardly a voice. It was a croak, a dry scrape, with all the music gone out of it.

"I came," said Alden Whitlock.

…

I looked at the sky.

I do not know why. I had meant to look at him. I had intended to face him squarely, as I'd faced every other thing in my life, and let him see my face. But I could not. I turned my eyes to the horizon instead, to the long blue line of the plain, where a faint haze lay, and a hawk was circling very high. I fixed my gaze on the hawk.

The wind lifted my hair.

"I'm sorry," said Alden.

He was weeping again. I heard it. It was a harsh, painful, dry sound, without tears.

"I know it's late. I know it's worth nothing. I came to say it anyway." His voice cracked. "I don't know what I've lost. They took something. I can't remember your face. I try, and there's nothing, nothing, only a sort of—a hum." A sob. "But I remember that I loved you. I know it. It's the one thing I have left. It's like a stone in my pocket."

I said nothing.

"I don't understand what I did." He dragged himself a foot closer. His hands scrabbled in the dust. "I don't understand what you said, on the balcony, about the room. About the drain. I don't know where it comes from. But I believe you. I believed you the moment you said it. I believe that I did it. I—I must have been a monster."

"You were not a monster," I said.

My voice surprised me. It was quite level.

"You were a boy who had never been told no."

He lifted his ruined face.

"Tamsin." The tears were running, thin and silent, down the creases of his cheeks. "If I had chosen you. If, in that life, when it came to it, I had chosen you, instead of..." His voice failed. He swallowed. "If I had been braver. If I had been a better man. If I had said no to my father, and to the Chancellor, and taken your hand and gone. Could we—do you think we might have—"

He stopped.

He couldn't finish. His mouth worked. His eyes, red and wet and wild, searched my face.

I looked at the hawk.

…

The silence was very long.

I have thought about that silence many times. I have wondered what I might have said. I could have said, yes. It would have been a mercy. It would have cost me nothing. I could have said: yes, perhaps. If you had been another man, in another life, we might have been happy. I could have given him that, as one gives a dying beggar a coin. He would have taken it, and gone, and died holding it.

I could have said, no. I could have said it cruelly, or kindly. I could have told him what I thought of him: his weakness, his vanity, his sweet, shallow, incurious heart. I could have told him about the room. I could have told him about the sand.

I did neither.

I stood in the sun with my eyes on the sky and said nothing at all.

It was not cruelty. It was not mercy. It was simply that I could not, for the life of me, find anything to say. The hollow place in my chest was perfectly empty. I searched it, patiently, down to the floor. I found no anger, no pity, no regret. I found no love, no memory, not even the old ache. I found only a quiet, a stillness, and in the stillness a single clear fact.

He does not matter.

It was not a thought. It was a recognition, like the recognition of a tide going out. I had spent two lives on him. I had loved him, hated him, mourned him, killed him in my dreams. I had built a whole woman out of what he did to me. And now, standing in the road, I looked at the thing that remained, and it was small. It was a man on his knees. It was a gray stranger in the dust.

It was nobody I knew.

"Alden," I said.

He looked up. A wild spark of hope leaped in his eyes.

"I forgive you," I said.

His face broke open.

"I forgive you," I repeated, quietly, "because it costs me nothing. Because you are not worth the trouble of carrying it. I would like you to know that."

I raised my hand.

…

I did not do it in anger.

I want that understood. I have heard the stories. I have read them in the broadsheets: the Sovereign's wrath, the vengeance of the Reeve. They are all untrue. I did not strike him down. I did not condemn him. I did the only thing I could think to do, which was to end it.

I lifted my right hand, palm out, and I let the Cinder go.

It was not a blast. It was not a field. It was a single quiet sweep, a gesture like a woman brushing a crumb from a table. A wave of red light, soft as a breath, left my fingers and crossed the ten feet of road between us. It touched him.

He did not scream.

It seemed that he had expected it. His eyes widened, a little, in surprise, and his lips parted. He looked at his hands. They were fading. The gray flesh was going translucent, like a cloud before the wind. A thread of red light ran up his arm, and the arm came apart in a drift of ash. The coat went. The nightshirt. The torn boots, the scar, the lank gray hair.

I saw his face for the last time.

It was the face of a boy. It was smooth, and young, and vacant. The lines were gone. The gray was gone. He looked, for a moment, exactly as he had looked in the Great Hall on the day of the Ceremony, in a coat of midnight silk, with a lock of gold across his forehead. He looked at me with grave, bewildered, innocent eyes.

His lips moved. I read them.

Thank you.

The ash lifted off the road in a soft gray cloud, and was carried away by the wind. It drifted east. It rose over the hills. It thinned and spread and scattered, until there was nothing left of it at all, and the road lay bare and white in the sun.

There was no body. There was no stain on the stones. There was not a grain of dust where he had knelt.

I stood there with my arm lowered.

"You were not worth remembering," I said, to the empty road.

The hawk, very high, circled once, and drifted off.

…

I turned and walked back up the road.

They had not moved. They stood in a ragged line at the foot of the hill: Hawk, with his hat in his hand; Josie, with her fists pressed to her mouth; Nimbus, small and silent, on the saddle-bow. Beyond them, a little apart, at the very edge of the gravel, stood a man in a torn shirt with a star on his breast. He had not moved from his place. He had not spoken. He had stood there through all of it, with his arms at his sides and his gray eyes fixed on me, motionless as a post.

I reached him.

I stopped. I looked up. I had thought I would say something. I had a speech. It was a good one, concise and cool. It had to do with debts, and accounts, and the dignity of a clean ending.

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

He looked down at me. His face was grave. There was no judgment in it. There was nothing in it at all but attention, a deep, patient, unwavering attention, as though I were the only thing in the world.

I took a breath.

"Now," I said, "Crane."

Something moved in the corner of his mouth. It was not quite a smile.

"Now, Crane," agreed Declan Marrow.