“What — what does that mean?”
“There’s a chance — however small — that he might tell me the truth about what happened. Why she had to be framed. Why she had to be killed in such a brutal way.”
There is a kind of fixation that exceeds all reason, all proportion — so misaligned with the world around it that people call it by the only name that fits: madness. And so the excessive, implacable longing in his steady voice could fairly be called madness.
With the desolate intensity of a man who had made his obsession into a companion, Sarg said:
“I need the truth.”
Sarg had long believed that if he kept digging into the attempted assassination of the queen four years ago, he might eventually uncover something real. That somewhere in the investigation lay a truth that could be brought to light.
He had paid the owner of a tavern who moonlighted as an information broker to take the case on. He had approached people connected to the investigation — the witnesses, the investigators.
The only person Sarg had never been able to reach was Chesa himself.
Chesa, who had orchestrated Hyderlin’s false conviction, surely knew every layer of the truth.
And that was why Sarg had no choice but to go. It was a fool’s hope — he knew that — but he was going to stake everything on that faint, fragile what if, the smallest possible chance that Chesa might tell him something real.
Hyderlin said, flatly:
“Stupid man.”
Sarg agreed with her assessment. He had always been a stupid fool. From the very first moment he had encountered a red-haired girl in his youth — through every moment since, without exception.
“You want the truth that badly.”
The cold voice carried something that might, if he was not mistaken, have been sorrow. He wasn’t sure.
“All right. Then I’ll give you the truth you want so desperately.”
Hyderlin folded her arms across her chest. There was an unconscious authority in even that small movement — the effortless gravity of someone raised to be noble. Arrogance she had never intended.
“Sacrilege. Four counts of arson. Fifty-nine murders. Hundreds of accounts of extortion and assault. Those were her crimes. The one who died was not an innocent victim — she was a guilty criminal. There is no innocence to prove. That is the truth.”
Silence.
“You feel guilt for something that is not your responsibility. And the worst of it is that you’ve mistaken that guilt for love.”
More silence.
“That is the truth you need to hear. You absolute fool.”
“You don’t know the truth either.”
Sarg looked at her, his expression sunken.
He spoke with the exhaustion of years spent suppressing desire, denying the heart, refusing to acknowledge what lay in the depths of him.
“I cut down and broke apart every last impulse I had — every desire I dared to feel for her, things a man of my station had no right to feel for a princess. All of it, until the day she died.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You would never—”
“What do you know of me, that you can say that so certainly? Sir Biche.”
“How many times must I deny the same thing before you’re satisfied? I’m tired of it.”
“Sir Biche.”
Hyderlin looked at him as though she would gladly tear his mouth from his face. Sarg received that look without flinching. Any kind of gaze was more than he had been permitted in the last four years. The fact of her presence was itself a grace — one he did not take for granted.
Sarg smiled slightly.
“Instead of that formal title — I wondered, afterward. Why hadn’t I simply called her by her name? Hyderlin. Just once. Why couldn’t I have done that?” He paused. “I regretted it. For a long time.”
Silence.
“I prayed for it. I prayed that if I could only see her once more — that if I could only be so bold as to speak her name — I was prepared to pay whatever price was required.”
Silence.
“That is my truth.”
The smile faded from Sarg’s face.
“So stop deceiving me. Tell me yours.”
And here is that truth.
Sarg had not forgotten a single moment of that night.
One of the deepest torments of a man mired in the past is precisely that: the inability to forget.
He crossed to her in a few strides. He took her chin in his hand and tilted her face up to meet his gaze.
Eyes gone wide with surprise. Black irises. And above them, the shadow cast by long lashes — he studied them as though he could not look away.
His voice came out trembling.
“There it is. Red lashes.”
Hyderlin wanted to sigh. She knew it was pointless — she reached for a lie out of sheer habit.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you. But this is—”
“Are you going to tell me you had red hair all along?”
“Goodness, how perceptive. The truth is, I’m actually—”
“Hyderlin’s twin sister, perhaps.”
“And prophetic on top of it. Even a blind oracle would weep with envy.”
“While you, for your part, have a remarkable talent for fabricating stories. Have you ever considered a career as a novelist?”
Sarg was being sardonic now. Every avenue of plausible denial had been systematically closed off. Hyderlin conceded defeat at last.
“As you well know, I have no gift for writing. A novelist’s life is beyond me.”
She raised her hand and, with a movement of some elegance, pushed his hand away from her chin. Sarg didn’t step back. Hyderlin said, with deliberate refinement:
“It seems Sir Sarg has forgotten the proper manner in which to conduct himself before royalty. I find that rather unfortunate.”
“…’Was’ royalty.”
“An executed criminal ranks lower than a commoner — is that what you’re suggesting? Then I shall have to invoke the etiquette owed to a lady instead. You may or may not be aware of this, but you are being extraordinarily rude right now.”
She placed her hand on his forearm. Inexplicably, Sarg seemed to be trembling slightly. The set of his mouth was rigid.
His voice, despite his expression, was cool.
“How extraordinary, to find that you can feel fear. I had taken you for a cold-blooded creature — all iron and no feeling.”
“I’m quite a warm person, actually. You’ve simply had me wrong.”
Hyderlin pushed his hand from her chin a second time. If he didn’t let go this time, she intended to break his fingers.
Sarg withdrew his hand willingly. He stepped back, putting distance between them.
“Explain.”
“What would you like to hear?”
“Anything.”
“I’m not sure what needs explaining. The Countess Biche is here, and I have agreed to kill the king on behalf of the queen.”
“You were executed four years ago.”
Sarg forced the words out as though they had to be wrested from somewhere deep.
“I saw it myself.”
On the day of the execution, in the rain, Hyderlin had not found Sarg in the crowd.
There had been too many people. And too much silence.
Sarg had apparently been hiding somewhere in that silent crowd, watching her. Hyderlin felt a bleak, hollow satisfaction at the knowledge. There was nothing to be made of it.
“Quite a rare spectacle, then.”
“Don’t deflect. How are you alive? And what happened to your voice?”
As always, she was a master of deception. She drew on her earlier lies and wove new ones around them.
“Guess. It’s a very simple trick — the kind street swindlers use all the time.”
“A substitution.”
“Correct!”
Hyderlin snapped her fingers. Something in Sarg was straining to hold itself in check. Behind the composed surface, something was boiling.
“You switched yourself with your double.”
“Of course. Remember what I looked like? By the end, I’d been beaten until I was barely recognizable. Distinguishing one face from another wouldn’t have been easy.”
Hyderlin said this lightly.
“So I put the double on the scaffold in my place — beaten to the edge of death, the way I was. No one noticed the difference. Poor Hys — her life ended that way. She had lived as a fake her whole life, but at least her death was perfectly royal. For a woman of low birth, that was no small honor.”
Ha — ha — ha—!
The false-born counterfeit princess threw back her head and laughed. None of it was actually funny. She laughed anyway.
At least that girl had died as a princess. That one thing, Hyderlin was genuinely glad of. Her most vicious and shameful secret had not been dragged into the light.
The bright sound of laughter scattered into the air and slowly died.
“Well. At least the torture gave me a completely different voice. Something to be grateful for, I suppose.”
Hyderlin smiled.
“There. Now you know everything. Satisfied?”
The silence that followed was its own kind of hell.
Sarg fixed her with a gaze that burned like a flame.
Anger? Hatred? Contempt? Revulsion? Self-loathing?
Hyderlin couldn’t read it. She watched carefully, alert.
She wanted him to be wounded. Angry, better still.
But what she needed, more than anything, was for him to produce an emotion that was understandable — the clean, predictable variety of hatred, of scorn.
She was always more comfortable with jagged things than soft ones.
The early morning sun was seeping into the bare little room. His face — not hidden by loose hair or days of stubble any longer — caught the pale light and held it. Lean cheeks, eyes shadowed with grief. He looked unutterably sad.
In the luminous silence of what resembled a radiant kind of hell, Sarg spoke, and his voice came out like a groan.
“To save yourself… you sacrificed an innocent person… and have been hiding in the shadows ever since.”
Strangely, those few short words contained multitudes — joy and revulsion, relief and contempt, all of them raging against each other simultaneously.
Sarg covered his face with both hands. The thick, blue-shadowed darkness that gathered between his fingers and his face fell across his features like a mask. A coward hid his joy in the dark.
“Thank god.”
He wept quietly.
“That it wasn’t you.”
“…”
“That the one who died was the double, and not—”
This was the kind of feeling people kept buried in the deepest part of themselves. The things that couldn’t be shown without confessing the very bottom of who you were.
Jealousy. Envy. Revulsion. Contempt. Inferiority. The gnawing need to prove oneself.
The things that, the moment they surface, are a confession of your lowest self.
Sarg let it show — the base, shameless relief.
You could split open a living man’s chest, pry apart the ribs, and hold his still-beating heart up to the light, and it would not be as raw or as repulsive as what Sarg had just laid bare.
Hyderlin felt a visceral instinct to recoil.
The weak, contemptible creature before her was not the man she had watched from the corner of her eye. Not the sacred knight who had shone, untarnished, at every hour. Not the man who had been whole and solitary as a star too distant to touch.
He was not Sarg Gloriosa.
He was just a man who had been worn down to nothing.
