Hyderlin pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose and said:
“Outside, I’m Hys. Inside, I’m Sir Biche. Are we clear? Whatever the circumstances, I remain a princess — however the world has chosen to treat me. I’ll permit plain speech, but my name is not something I will grant. Not to you.”
“And yet — hadn’t you offered it to me once?”
“And who was it that refused the offer?”
Sarg was silent.
Hyderlin held the razor out to him, blade-first. This subject made her genuinely uncomfortable, but it needed to be dealt with cleanly.
“The things you’re saying sound to me like a particularly cruel joke. You were the one who refused my overtures — more than once. You were the one who declared the severance of any relationship between us. Wasn’t that you?”
In truth, it had been she who had demolished whatever tentative connection had existed between them, and Sarg who had only swept up the wreckage. By any honest accounting, the wrongdoer here was her. She was the one who should have been bowing her head and asking forgiveness.
But she played her part shamelessly.
“A love that wept over a grave for years — after a lifetime of cold indifference — is a pitiable, ugly thing.”
Cruelty had always been half of her. She was well-practiced in it.
Having said what she said, Hyderlin forced herself to smile. She knew exactly how people read that particular expression on her face.
Boundless arrogance.
“What you did — trying to clear my name for four years, keeping my grave — I acknowledge it. It wasn’t nothing. But I never asked you to. And I owe no reward for work I didn’t commission.”
Hyderlin waited for Sarg to be hurt. Anger would have been even better.
But Sarg only nodded, undisturbed.
“Then it was all a fool’s errand on my part.”
With his beard shaved and his hair trimmed, he was precisely the same person who had once come to her with curses on his lips. Slightly leaner in the cheek, so that his severity was sharpened. A grief that had settled permanently around his eyes made him seem limitlessly sorrowful. But the line of his jaw, delicate as carved stone, and his lips, honest in the way only truly unguarded mouths can be, and the silver hair that fell across his forehead — all of it was unchanged.
Only the shell was similar. The inside was entirely different.
She had witnessed the baseness he carried. She had seen it.
He too had been worn down by the rusted blade of the world, had festered and soured and been warped out of shape — until he was like fruit that gleams on the outside and rots at the core.
Fruit going soft emits a sweetness that is almost nauseating. She worked to keep herself from being drawn in.
Sarg closed his eyes briefly, then opened them.
“I don’t ask for a reward. What I was doing — trying to prove the truth, tending the grave — it was all self-indulgence. Just wanting… to be near you.”
He offered the raw truth of himself without ceremony, as if it required no particular courage.
Witnessing someone’s unguarded truth provoked that same visceral flinch in her again.
It was like being a passerby in a public square, forced to look at a body that should have been removed. You didn’t want to look at the ugliness, the horror of it. And yet — something in the depths of one’s curiosity stirred and had to be suppressed.
Hyderlin retreated a half-step, inwardly. Sarg said, without affect:
“What I had been holding onto was your double, not you — but even so, I have no regrets. It brought me back to you.”
“I’m not interested in your feelings. Don’t say things that put pressure on me.”
“…I’m sorry if I did. That wasn’t my intention.”
Even met with such deliberate rudeness, Sarg answered quietly.
“About the marriage — I take that back. I apologize for overstepping. I’ll maintain the pretense only until Mak’s birthday banquet. After that, it ends.”
Hyderlin felt a hollow satisfaction.
“Good. We play the part until then, and no further.”
Sarg nodded.
“Until then.”
Half of Hyderlin’s fortune had been seized with her sentencing, but the other half remained scattered across Lotsa in various hiding places. She had stashed it like a squirrel burying acorns — a little here, a little there, never all in one place.
She had never once used an agent. She had gone herself, under various false identities, to acquire valuables, and rather than bringing them to the palace, she had arranged for them to be held on-site at the shops, or stored in leased properties under assumed names.
The result was that her assets were dotted across the city in a constellation of small caches.
To recover even a portion of them, Hyderlin had gone to a city beyond the capital’s borders.
The plan required money. But the physical assets Margarite had provided were nearly exhausted. And Sarg — judging by all visible evidence — was not a man from whom money would be forthcoming.
He had mentioned what was owed to him from Gloriosa — but Hyderlin had no desire to put her hand out to that family. Large households had long memories, and money moving through a powerful family’s accounts had a way of reaching other people’s ears.
She had attempted to access a warehouse she’d once leased — sealed with magical locks that required a specific key. The key, almost certainly, was inside the king’s palace.
The jewelers where she’d arranged for long-term storage of her gemstones were no more accommodating. Without the signet ring she had used to seal the terms of agreement, they refused to release the jewels to anyone.
The signet ring, of course, was also in the palace.
I do wish my past self had been a little more careless.
She was on her way back to the slum where Sarg’s house stood, entertaining this useless thought, when she paused in front of a market stall as if browsing its wares.
She had been followed since she left — every step of the way to the city and back. She had been pretending not to notice, but the person trailing her was more persistent than she’d anticipated.
Hyderlin turned into a narrow alley with few passersby. She walked at a leisurely pace, and the presence behind her drew closer.
The pursuer came within range — and grabbed the hood pulled low over her head. Hyderlin turned with a look of manufactured surprise.
“Who are you?!”
“Look at her. What did I tell you? She’s the absolute image of the Countess Biche. God, Sarg really has lost his mind…”
Four men stood before her. The one who’d spoken had a face purpled and swollen with bruising.
She was curious about who could have beaten someone that large into such a state.
“Hey, she really looks almost exactly like her. It’s uncanny. You — are you related to the Countess Biche? A cousin?”
“Perhaps you might introduce yourself first.”
Hyderlin’s tone was flat. The large man laughed.
“Prickly, aren’t we. Your husband’s a former colleague of mine.”
“A sacred knight?”
“Used to be.”
He might then be someone Hyderlin recognized.
She studied the swollen, split face and turned her memory. On closer examination, she thought she might place him — someone who had been expelled from the order for conduct unbecoming, notoriously dissolute even by lax standards.
“What business do you have with me?”
“Just a chat, that’s all. You may or may not know this, but your husband made my face look like this.”
The man’s face was a landscape of bruises. One eye was swollen shut. His forehead had been stitched. His nose was caved in, clearly broken.
This must have been the man Sarg had struck with a bronze cup a few days ago.
“The medical costs have been rather significant, and I thought I might collect some compensation from your husband. But he’s got terrible manners, and he doesn’t listen even when you speak to him reasonably.”
He looked Hyderlin over with a glittering, unpleasant gaze.
“But if his wife is standing right in front of him, he might at least have the decency to pretend to listen. Otherwise, she’s going to have trouble making it home. Wouldn’t you agree?”
The large man looked back at his companions and laughed. The others responded with their own ugly sounds of amusement.
Truly the most tedious kind of threat imaginable, Hyderlin thought.
The large man grabbed her forearm and dragged her forward roughly.
“Come along then, Lady Gloriosa.”
The gang brought the woman to a warehouse. They bound her hands behind her back and hacked off a fistful of her black hair. One of them left with the hair to go and find Sarg.
Pin sat watching the woman in the corner.
Pin was a creature of the gutters, but even he had liked the Saint.
The truth was that almost everyone had liked the Saint. In those years when basic survival was the only thing anyone could afford to think about, the Saint had reached out her hand. When your immediate next meal was the whole of your concern, the Saint who put bread in your hands meant more than any faceless king in his distant palace.
And so when the Saint had become queen, Pin had nodded and thought: Yes. Right and proper. No one deserves it more.
That was why he had torn into the Countess Biche when she had attempted the queen’s life. Torn into her like a mongrel into meat.
Countess Biche’s reputation had preceded her. The story of the deranged countess who had set the slum districts on fire on the pretext of purging the remnants of Leone Colozzo’s gang was well known.
They said she plastered herself in gold from head to toe and feasted on luxury. Some whispered that she must have been a cannibal — that she’d set fire to everything in order to cook and eat the people. Parents told their children that if they stayed out too late at night, the Countess Biche would take them.
When she was imprisoned for the attempted assassination, people said we always knew it would come to this and felt a satisfaction as refreshing as cold water.
The only thing they’d been denied was the sight of her execution. It had taken place inside the palace walls, and no one got to see. If Sarg Gloriosa hadn’t claimed the body, Pin would have liked to spit on her corpse.
At the time, many had admired the sacred knight for showing that dignity to a condemned criminal. But as Sarg began to speak in defense of the dead Countess Biche, public opinion had slowly shifted.
Sarg had openly criticized the king and queen. He had taken the Countess Biche’s side. When threatened with excommunication, he had resigned his post and left — only to settle near the grave of the Countess Biche.
Sarg was a traitor.
Nobody likes a traitor.
Pin did not like Sarg. He despised him, actually. It was repulsive enough to defend a woman who had committed unforgivable crimes — but to go and take a wife who looked just like her was disgusting.
The woman — the one with the face of the Countess Biche — had for some time now been staring at Pin without blinking. Not frightened in the least. Just watching him with a blank expression. Pin found her attitude profoundly irritating.
The woman said, abruptly:
“You were one of Leone Colozzo’s men.”
“What?”
“Pen, wasn’t it — something like that? You’re still alive, then. I thought all of Colozzo’s people had been strung up.”
The woman squirmed upright and glanced at Pin’s left hand, which was missing three fingers.
“Managed to get off with just the fingers, by sheer luck.”
Pin’s face began cycling rapidly through shades of red and purple. The woman continued, entirely unmoved:
“Good. I have a question for you. Do you happen to know where Colozzo is bur—”
Pin backhanded her across the face. The woman’s head snapped to the side and she let out a short, sharp sound. Pin snarled:
“Shut your mouth! Save your yapping for your husband! “
“Low-born louts really are—”
“What?”
Pin decided the woman needed to be taught some manners. She gave him a peculiar smile.
At that moment, the warehouse door groaned open with a creak of rusty hinges. Light spilled into the dim interior.
A very tall man entered first, followed by a shorter one who pulled the door shut behind him.
Sarg. And the one who had gone to fetch him.
The large man bared his teeth in a savage grin.
“The knight arrives at last! Your face has never been more welcome!”
