Saint's Blood: The Greatcoats Book 3 (6 page)

As gently as I could, I placed my hand upon her cheek. ‘Not Shiula,’ I whispered, ‘Birgid. Birgid-who-weeps-rivers.’

At the sound of her name, her eyelids fluttered opened and she reached a trembling hand to cover my own. ‘We are met once again, man of valour,’ she said, her voice incongruously beautiful, musical. Then she coughed, and a trickle of blood escaped her lips. ‘I have failed, Falcio.’

‘Failed at what? Who did this to you?’

But her wounds overcame her and her eyes closed. I felt my own injuries begin to steal the last shreds of consciousness from me, but a single question pulled at my thoughts: who had the power – and the
will
– to do this to the Saint of Mercy?

I retrieved my rapiers from the floor and rose to my feet. My vision swam.

‘Falcio,’ Kest said, reaching out to me, ‘you need to rest. Your wounds . . .’

I didn’t hear the rest of what he said. I was too focused on the people rushing frantically about the room and in the halls outside: guards, nobles, merchants. It’s odd the way human beings move together, almost like ants. Even in the midst of chaos, there’s a kind of flow to the motion of their bodies through space. That’s why I noticed one figure, near the far door, who
wasn’t
moving like the others. ‘Protect Birgid,’ I ordered Kest and Brasti as I took off in pursuit of the man who may have killed a Saint.

*

As I stumbled through the halls of the Ducal Palace of Baern chasing after my nebulous opponent, I found myself thinking about the style of duellist called a
perseguere
: a fencer who has mastered the art of keeping his blade in contact with his opponent’s, so he never feints or retreats, just continually pursues his enemy across the court.

Only it works better if you actually get near him.

I bashed my injured shoulder into the wall as I tried to turn the corner too quickly, then slipped on something wet and sticky. I wasn’t terribly familiar with this place and my opponent was moving faster.

As I got closer to the centre of the palace, the halls became crowded with people rushing to and fro, either to find out what had happened or to get away from danger. I pressed forward, ignoring them where I could, pushing them out of my way where I had to, but when anyone actually looked at me, I began to notice their expressions quickly changed from irritated to aghast.

I suppose I’m not looking my best right now
, I thought, as I reached the main doors, and realised that I’d completely lost my prey. Worse, I was so out of breath and dizzy that it was all I could do to stay standing.

A man stepped in front of me and put a steadying hand on my shoulder. ‘You don’t look well.’

I tried to push him aside. ‘Out of the way. I have to keep looking.’

‘You won’t get far in your condition,’ he said.

I looked down at my shirt and saw red roses blooming across a white field.
Of course. That’s why I’m moving so slowly, why everything is so blurry.

This also explained what Kest and Brasti had been shouting at me a few minutes earlier: ‘
Falcio, you’re bleeding!
’

The flaw in the perseguere’s fighting style is that you can become so perfectly focused on one thing that you miss everything else that’s going on around you. For example, I had forgotten just how badly I’d been wounded in the duel with Undriel, just as I had forgotten that I still hadn’t fully recovered from the Greatcoat’s Lament, or, for that matter, from the neatha poisoning that had nearly taken my life.

Most importantly, as I looked up into the smiling face of the man who’d spoken to me – the man who, unlike everyone else around me, was just standing there, unmoving – I realised that I had forgotten how easy it is to sneak back into a building this size in the middle of a crisis.

‘Good,’ Undriel said, his eyes on mine. ‘It wouldn’t suit me for you to not know.’

I almost laughed out loud at the sheer absurdity of the situation. I’d assumed the figure I’d spotted lurking in the shadows must be the man who’d tried to kill a Saint. Instead, this was nothing more than a case of petty revenge over the loss of a duel neither of us ever should have fought.

Undriel drew a thin, straight blade, no more than six inches long, from behind his back.

‘You call that a blade?’ I said. ‘Let me show you a proper one.’ I reached for my rapier, only to realise I’d dropped it on the floor several feet back.

‘There!’ Kest cried from somewhere behind me.

‘Get those damned people out of the way, Kest!’ Brasti shouted. ‘I haven’t got a clear shot!’

My eyes locked with Undriel’s; we both knew they wouldn’t make it. His hand shot forward, the short blade darting out at me.

Cuffs
, I thought;
time to parry with the bone plates in the cuffs of my coat.
But of course I’d taken my coat off too, so it was only by some minor miracle that when I slapped Undriel’s blade aside it didn’t slice right through the back of my hand. I say ‘minor miracle’ because a proper one would have sent the knife spinning away.

I grabbed Undriel’s collar with my left hand and yanked it forward, smashing his cheek against the corner of the wall, and he stumbled back away from me.

Two guardsmen finally took some notice and began running towards us. Undriel immediately stepped back and put his hands up in the air.

‘You seem to have lost your knife,’ I said, noting his empty hands.

Undriel smiled, and a thought occurred to me then.

I looked down to see the handle of the short knife extending out of my belly. What had been left of the lovely white field of my shirt was now subsumed by the red.

‘Ha,’ I said, foolishly. ‘Hardly hurts at all.’

Undriel didn’t reply, and when I looked at him to see the reason for his silence, I noticed that he too had red roses blossoming on his shirt, where three arrows had buried themselves deep into his chest.

The two of us stood there for hours, although it can’t have been more than half a dozen seconds, both determined not to be the first to fall. I thought I was doing a fairly good job of it until my legs went out from underneath me.

‘I win,’ Undriel said, blood spouting from his open mouth.

I guess what people say about me is true
, I thought, as I watched the floor rush up to meet me.
I really do make too many enemies.

The world slid beneath me, smooth and sharp, like a tablecloth being yanked from under the dishes, sending us all clanging and crashing to the floor. Even before I hit bottom, the floor softened into a beautiful red river whose currents were pulling me along and under, like a boat taking in too much water. As I drifted along, I gradually left the cacophony of noises behind me until at last only two voices accompanied me on my journey.

‘In the name of every Saint who ever lived, Falcio, are you congenitally incapable of actually
winning
a fight any more?’ The voice was male, thin, almost reedy, but it had a mischievous quality that I found oddly charming. ‘I wonder perhaps, is this some new form of gallantry you’ve invented? “Oh, do forgive me, sirrah, for having failed to let you kill me with your blade. Please allow me to stand here and re-open my wounds until I bleed to death”?’

I looked up, or rather, I imagined I looked up to see a man of about thirty years, average height with a bit of a stoop in his posture, keeping pace alongside me as my body listed in the currents. The blood all around me had flowed up from the floor to envelop him in an elegant silk robe too big for his skinny frame. He hadn’t bothered to do it up properly, and to my profound horror, I saw that he wasn’t wearing any underclothes.

‘Haven’t I suffered enough of your majesty already?’ I groaned.

Paelis, once King of all Tristia, now a corpse these past six years, winked at me. ‘You speak of the magnificent royal sceptre with such disdain? No wonder people keep stabbing you.’

‘The reason people keep stabbing Falcio is because he insists on pursuing your foolish dream,’ said a second voice. This one was feminine, and yet its strength blew me further down the river. I looked over to my right and saw my wife, Aline, walking beside me, her simple white gown constructed from the white marble adorning the palace walls.

‘This is new,’ I said conversationally.

A disturbance in the river around me became a family of alligators who swam alongside me and clamped their jaws around my arms and legs before dragging me out of the water and dropping me unceremoniously on a hard, flat rock beneath the hot sun.

A table. I’ve been moved onto a table of some kind. And the light . . . it’s a lantern overhead.

‘Good,’ Aline said. ‘At least you haven’t lost all sense.’

I coughed, and felt something wet come out from between my lips. That’s never a good sign. Of course, hallucinating two dead people who’d never met in life having an argument over your body probably wasn’t a good sign either.

King Paelis took mock offence at my thoughts. ‘How dare you imply that the royal personage is less than substantial?’ He placed his fists on his hips and struck a pose, causing his robe to open further.

‘Please don’t do that,’ I begged.

He ignored my complaint. ‘Have you considered that my presence here might be due to some profound spiritual and supernatural event? Perhaps the Gods themselves, concerned for the state of the world, have returned their finest servant – that’s me, by the way – to save it from—’

That next word was something I really wanted to hear, but Aline interrupted. ‘He’s a hallucination,’ she said, then looked archly at the King. ‘And not a particularly impressive one, I must say.’

‘Dear Lady, if, as you claim, I am nothing more than the product of Falcio’s fevered brain, then what does that make you?’

Aline turned to me and reached down her hand to touch my cheek. I could almost make myself believe that I could feel the touch of her fingers against my skin.
Almost.

‘I’m his reason, of course. I’m the part of him that realises he’s lost consciousness, along with far too much blood, and that he was dragged along the floor by Kest and Brasti, the only way they could get him to the infirmary.’

She paused while four eagles gripped their talons around my wrists and ankles and flew me high up into the air before depositing me into their nest. It was a rather uncomfortable nest.

Aline chuckled then. ‘You’re on a horse-cart, you silly man. It’s been several days since you fell. Such an inventive imagination, though. You should have joined the Bardatti instead of the Greatcoats.’ She turned to the King. ‘I’m the part of him that figures things out when others can’t.’

I missed that about her – the unshakable confidence in those things she knew to be true.

‘You’re what makes me believe there’s still good in this wretched world,’ I said.

‘No, my darling, that’s his job.’ She pointed at Paelis.

‘Ah!’ said the King, as if he’d just scored the winning point. ‘I’m his idealism! His fearless determination to right the world! His keen intellect and—’

‘No, that’s Aline, too,’ I said, letting myself feel the warmth of her breath and smelling the haleweed that she used to rub on her face and neck to keep from burning on sunny days. I wanted to live inside that sweet scent for ever.

‘These are false memories you’re making for yourself,’ Aline warned. ‘Haleweed stinks of seven different hells, Falcio, remember? We were
farmers
.’ She held out the fingertips of one perfect hand. ‘What farmer ever had hands like these?’ Her fingers took hold of a lock of soft hair, a gleaming pale brown, almost blonde, and held it up for me to see. ‘In my entire life my hair never once looked this way.’

‘Enough!’ Paelis bellowed. ‘Is a man not allowed to love his wife? Is he not allowed to see the beauty that others’ – and here he began wagging his finger at her – ‘even she herself, fail to see?’

That was a mistake. One thing that was absolutely true about Aline was that she never took well to being yelled at. ‘And what good will he be to the world like this? Clinging to a past painted bright colours by sorrow and need?’ She turned back to me. ‘The enemy’s way is deception, Falcio. Yours must be truth, no matter how ugly it might look.’

She leaned in closer to me and I could count the freckles on her cheeks now, six on one side, nine on the other. That felt significant somehow.

‘Better,’ she said. ‘But there’s more. You can’t beat him unless you learn to see what isn’t there.’

‘How am I supposed to see what isn’t—?’

Aline placed her hands in front of her face. Her hair changed colour to the pale white-blonde of Saint Birgid and her hands darkened and melted together, forming an iron mask with neither eyes nor mouth.

‘Stop,’ I said, reaching out to try and pull the mask away.

‘She can’t hear you any more,’ Paelis said. ‘She can’t speak. Truth is being buried under deception, faith drowned by fear.’ Gently, the King lifted Aline by the shoulders and began guiding her backwards, away from me.

‘Step by step, Falcio, it’s all being taken away from us.’

A fog the colour of ivory began to envelop them, swallowing them whole. ‘Soon there will be only one step left.’

I knew that what I saw and heard was illusion, my mind jumbling memories together as my body struggled against my injuries – and yet I knew there had to be some fact, some essential
truth
to all of this. ‘What will they do?’ I asked. ‘What is the last step?’

The King was gone now, and I could barely see Aline in the fog. A pair of heavy gloved hands reached out, encircling her masked face. With a vicious jerk they twisted, and the sound of her neck snapping became my entire world.

I didn’t recognise the voice that I heard next, but the words were spoken with perfect clarity. ‘The last step is the same as the first,’ he said. ‘I will kill Mercy.’

I awoke in darkness. This was neither surprising nor particularly unsettling to me until I realised that the air was heavy, almost stifling, the way it gets at the peak of an unseasonably hot summer.