Hyderlin gasped sharply.
“Hh—!”
She heaved and panted like a person who had nearly drowned and only just broken the surface. Her sternum rose and fell in wild, frantic lurches. The wherewithal to take in her surroundings returned to her only gradually.
Her body was wedged tightly inside a narrow box. Hyderlin grabbed the sides of it with both hands and hauled herself upright in a single motion.
Shhhhh…
The crack-and-slash of rain against the earth was thunderous.
Boom — crash!
The sky howled like a beast that had gone without food for half a day.
Everything around her was dark. The only light came from a lantern placed at her feet. She waited until her eyes adjusted to the darkness.
On the wall across from her, a stained glass window depicted a saint performing a miracle. Absurdly, the portion where the saint’s head and halo should have been was shattered, and through that broken gap, rain and wind came gusting in.
This place appeared to be an abandoned chapel.
“Oh… oh… I actually did it… I really did it… I thought it had failed…”
A voice broke through the rain and thunder, startling her. Hyderlin turned her head.
“God above. You have not abandoned me after all. Thank you. Thank you…”
A woman stood trembling, her entire body soaked in rain and caked with mud. She spoke with a voice trembling with exhilaration.
“Sir Hyderlin Biche. Do you recognize me?”
The darkness of the night swallowed most of her face, but Hyderlin not only recognized the woman — she knew her name.
“Margarite… Your Majesty.”
Hyderlin was startled by the sound of her own voice. Where her usual tone should have been, a husky rasp came out instead. She swallowed and cleared her throat, but her original voice did not return.
To ease the strange sensation lodged in her throat, she instinctively reached up and ran her fingers along her neck. Around the circumference of it, she felt a jagged line of stitches — uneven and rough, like someone had sewn together two pieces of mismatched fabric.
As though someone had taken a needle and reattached it.
Margarite smiled gently.
“Sewing your neck back together was quite a challenge, I’ll have you know. I’ve never had much of a talent for needlework.”
“You… sewed my neck…?”
To sew something back together implied that it had, at some point, been separated. Only then did Hyderlin recall her most recent memory.
The drizzling rain. The silent crowd. The faint gleam of the axe’s blade.
And death.
She had died.
Definitively. Undeniably. She had died.
Hyderlin pressed her fingers to the stitched seam on her neck, then to her chest, where her heart was thumping, and denied what she was experiencing.
“This is — yes, this must be a vision. That’s what this is.”
It had to be a final dream, a hallucination — the last image conjured by a mind as it bled out from a severed neck.
She pinched the inside of her arm. It hurt.
“I’m sorry to say it’s quite real. You’ve just come back to life.”
“Pardon?”
“I congratulate you on setting foot upon the earth again — for the first time in four years.”
“Four years?”
Margarite spoke to the dazed and hollow-looking Hyderlin.
“I’m sorry about the execution. I know now that you were falsely accused.”
Still wearing that emptied expression, Hyderlin murmured.
“But I died.”
“……”
“My neck was cut. I clearly died that way.”
“……”
“Yes! I quite clearly died, I tell you!”
Watching Hyderlin repeat the same thing over and over, Margarite sank briefly into thought.
Could the act of resurrection have caused some kind of brain damage? That would be terribly inconvenient.
Fortunately for Margarite, Hyderlin’s mind was intact. Once she had finally absorbed the situation, she asked a proper question.
“Why… am I alive?”
“Because I brought you back to life.”
It was the kind of answer one might give a child who asked Why was I born? — the reply being simply, Because your mother gave birth to you. A response that entirely ignored the intent behind the question.
Hyderlin pressed further.
“How did you bring me back to life? Am I undead? No — no, creating the undead is the work of witches. You’re not a witch; you’re a saint. Or — wait — more importantly, why? Why did you not simply leave a dead person dead?”
The questions came in a torrent. Margarite fell briefly silent, then chose to answer the very last question first.
“Because of all the people in the world — living or dead — you were the only one who could help me.”
Hyderlin blinked in disbelief.
“Only me? What about Sir Sarg?”
If Hyderlin had been the king’s knight, then Sarg had been the saint’s.
He had been more devoted to Margarite than anyone alive. He had always kept faithfully to her side, and she had trusted him deeply, from the bottom of her heart.
If Margarite gave the order, Sarg would not only produce five fully formed plans on the spot — he would have a fifty-page report ready to accompany them.
There was no good reason to resurrect Hyderlin when she had a knight like that at her disposal.
“…There is something you are better suited to handle than Sir Sarg.”
“If it’s a matter of capability, couldn’t you simply ask Sir Sarg to do it?”
“He won’t do.”
Margarite gave an evasive answer. Hyderlin did not find it convincing.
“Your Majesty. The notion that you would go to the trouble of resurrecting a dead person simply because they are marginally more capable is entirely unreasonable—”
She had been about to press Margarite further, but the will to do so drained out of her abruptly.
After all, Hyderlin was dead.
What business did she have interfering in the affairs of the living?
“Please, just ask Sir Sarg. He may surprise you with hidden talent.”
Hyderlin lay back down in the narrow box she had been sitting in — a coffin, she now recognized. It was not possible to call it cozy even with the most generous stretch of the imagination, but Hyderlin was hardly in a position to complain about the quality of her sleeping arrangements.
“However capable a knight I may once have been, I am presently a dead person. And a dead person ought not meddle in the business of the living. I shall simply remain dead.”
Hyderlin folded her hands across her chest in a diagonal cross and closed her eyes.
“If you would be so kind — please close the lid.”
“You—”
“I beg you. The light is in my eyes.”
“You insufferable—! Get up this instant!”
Margarite’s shout cut through the chapel. She seized Hyderlin by the collar and hauled her bodily out of the coffin.
A corpse’s body is absurdly light — it came up with ease at the tug of one slender pair of wrists.
“Get up, I said!”
“……”
“Up!”
“……”
“Get up!”
Hyderlin hung in the air by the scruff of her collar, swaying, and kept her eyes firmly shut throughout.
It was her natural disposition to play things off with nonchalance, but the truth was that Hyderlin did not welcome this situation at all.
Her life had been a road of thorns from beginning to end. It had been long and agonizing, and its conclusion had been all the more wretched for it.
And so she had found death rather welcome.
Those who argued that even a life spent rolling through thorns was preferable to the alternative might have considered Hyderlin’s thinking foolish.
But Hyderlin was the sort of person who could tell such people to shut their mouths, loudly, and without shame — and she had been quite satisfied with the chief benefit afforded to the dead, which was, in essence, an indefinitely guaranteed and deeply restful sleep.
She had wanted to sleep the eternal sleep, from which she would never again wake.
She had wanted to sleep and sleep and sleep until the world itself came to an end.
She had wanted to forget the world, and be forgotten by it.
That had been her intention — right up until Margarite cried out with a voice wrung raw with desperation.
“Hyderlin Biche! You told me you would grant me one wish!”
Hyderlin’s pale eyelids twitched.
She owed Margarite a debt — a wrong she had committed against her — and as an act of atonement, she had promised to grant her one wish. Anything at all.
“…Now that you mention it. I did make that promise.”
The knight who had recalled an old vow opened her eyes slowly. Those irises — dark as a moonless night — fixed themselves on the queen.
“Then. What is your wish?”
It was a reluctant question, but her gaze was unflinching.
The tense muscles of Margarite’s face shifted and rearranged themselves. Margarite slowly began to smile.
“My wish, you ask.”
The sound of rain hammering the roof of the abandoned chapel was deafening. Lightning flashed outside, flooding the interior with a momentary, blinding whiteness. Margarite’s pale face was exposed in that instant of illumination.
Her cheeks were gaunt and sharp, and in her eyes — like the dried-out heartwood of a dead tree — a fierce, lucid madness had taken root.
The beautiful girl with her lush hair and pearl-pale skin had become a woman draped in a veil of sorrow, woven by years of wind and hardship.
Where had the saintly Margarite gone — the one who had worked miracles under God’s grace — and who had left behind only this wild-eyed, disheveled woman in her place?
“Sir Hyderlin Biche.”
The queen — those mad, burning eyes fixed upon Hyderlin — spoke in a voice seething with desperate feeling.
“Kill the king for me.”
Crack — BOOM.
A clap of thunder, chasing hard on the heels of a lightning strike, shook the world to its foundation.
