The next day, Margarite’s fever grew worse. She was not only delirious from the heat — she seemed to be seeing things that weren’t there.
It was late in the evening.
The overcast sky bled into the color of an old bruise as the last of the daylight seeped into the clouds. Hyderlin had her forehead rested against the milky windowpane, looking out at the street, when she raised her brows.
Armed soldiers were moving through the streets. The surcoats they wore were embroidered with the eagle insignia of the royal family.
Being cautious couldn’t hurt. Hyderlin carefully woke Margarite.
“Wake up.”
“Mm… what is it?”
“The king’s soldiers are here.”
The color drained from Margarite’s face.
“…They’ve come to kill my child.”
Margarite clutched the baby to her chest and tried to stand, but she staggered and nearly fell. The illness she had caught in the rain had not fully run its course. Hyderlin steadied her. Margarite was in no condition to run.
Hyderlin considered her options quickly.
“Do you believe the king would kill you, Your Majesty?”
“…Worse than that. He’d kill the baby in front of my eyes and then keep me alive and chained to a bed so I couldn’t do anything about it.”
That might have been devastating news for Margarite, but for Hyderlin, it was almost a relief to hear.
“Then Your Majesty is safe.”
“What? Safe?”
“Your Majesty — please go back to the palace.”
“What on earth are you saying?”
Margarite’s expression sharpened in an instant. Hyderlin spoke calmly.
“Please don’t worry. If the king is the danger, it is Her Royal Highness the princess who needs protecting — not Your Majesty. Return to the palace and focus on recovering your health. I will hide the princess somewhere safe and come to you. You have my word.”
The old inn had poor soundproofing, and the soldiers’ murmuring outside was audible from within the room. It sounded as though the unit’s commander was speaking to the innkeeper.
“We are searching for someone. A young woman, not yet thirty — brown eyes, about so tall. She is likely carrying a newborn child.”
They would be forcing their way in very soon. Margarite looked at Hyderlin, her breathing unsteady.
“…Can I trust you?”
“I have broken many a law in my time. But I have never broken a promise.”
Hyderlin said it with conviction. Margarite let out a short, worn breath and placed the baby into Hyderlin’s arms. She handed over her travel pack as well.
“All right. I trust you. I trust Sir Biche. Please take care of Beronis.”
“Then I will see you at the palace. Please stay well.”
Margarite nodded.
Hyderlin resettled the baby more securely in her arms. Beronis was still fast asleep, blissfully unaware. Hyderlin wrapped the child snugly in cloth and tied her firmly against her body.
She opened the window and looked out. The soldiers had all gone inside the inn — only street vendors remained out in the lane below.
Hyderlin gripped the window frame and swung herself over the sill. She dangled one-handed from the frame, found a foothold in a groove in the building’s exterior wall, and reached down with her free hand for another hold lower down.
Slowly, she walked herself down the wall. The ground came closer. She dropped the last small distance and landed without a sound.
Hyderlin unwound the child from her body and tucked her inside her cloak, holding her close against her chest. She pulled her hood down low and walked out into the street at a relaxed pace.
She found an alley at a suitable distance from the inn — close enough to keep the entrance in sight. Hyderlin folded herself down against the wall in what she hoped looked like a person who had drunk too much and fallen asleep on the street.
Some time passed. The soldiers came out with Margarite between them. The man who appeared to be the commander helped her onto a horse and took the reins himself.
Hyderlin watched until they had disappeared over the horizon. Then she looked down at the small life bundled against her chest.
“Your Highness. What do we do now?”
Margarite and Chesa’s daughter. Hyderlin’s niece. Beronis slept on, entirely ignorant of the world around her.
“Your Highness. Do you have any suggestions?”
Hyderlin had implied to Margarite that she had a plan — but the truth was she had nothing. She had spent the whole night turning the problem over and had come up with nothing workable.
The reason she had once been able to handle any situation as the king’s knight was that she’d had the power and connections that came with being the Captain of the Royal Guard.
A quasi-corpse Hyderlin with nothing but a sword at her hip had precious few options.
If I could get to the assets I had stashed under a false name, this would be considerably easier.
Hyderlin exhaled. The path ahead looked bleak, but she couldn’t stand still. The soldiers might return.
She started walking.
A dead woman’s body neither tired nor ached. She could walk for hours with a pack on her back and a baby in her arms and feel nothing. That, at least, was genuinely useful.
Walking without a destination, she thought she might as well stop by the place where she’d spent the last four years sleeping. It was, in a manner of speaking, like a second home — and it seemed only courteous to pay it a visit. She was also a little curious what the place looked like.
Hyderlin followed her memory back toward the abandoned chapel on the outskirts of the city. One turn brought her to a street that looked like ruins — it had nearly burned to the ground some time ago and had never been properly rebuilt.
The chapel stood at the end of that street.
The stained glass windows were shattered. The altar had been smashed to pieces. Where the pews should have been, there was nothing but empty space.
In the middle of it all stood a single old coffin, alone.
Hyderlin looked inside.
The interior was coated in dirt and the husks of dead insects. The boards were rough-hewn and uneven, pocked all over with nail marks. It looked like it had been a thoroughly dismal object even before it had been buried underground.
“There’s no need for a dead person’s bed to be luxurious, but this really is a bit much. You could have at least put me in a decent coffin.”
Hyderlin sat down on the edge of her own coffin. There was an ominous creaking sound from the boards beneath her thighs. She addressed the baby idly.
“Your Highness. Why is your father so stingy with his blood relatives, do you think? Did he give your brothers and sisters coffins this miserable too?”
The baby gurgled as though in response. Hyderlin listened to the babbling for a moment, then smiled.
“Here I am talking to an infant.”
She held the baby and whistled. She was quite good at it — one of the few respectable hobbies she had.
A clear, bright whistle echoed and drifted around the abandoned chapel’s high ceiling.
“Come to see the Countess Biche’s grave, have you?”
An old man’s voice wove itself between the notes of her whistling. Hyderlin turned her head. A caretaker with a broom in hand walked into the chapel.
“Someone already beat you to it. A woman with a serious grudge against the Countess — took every last one of her bones.”
He was talking about Margarite.
“Nothing left now but the coffin. The one you’re sitting on, as it happens. Take some of the wood for kindling if you like.”
Hyderlin gave a thin, rueful smile.
“Thank you.”
“Heh. A wicked woman, that one. She’ll be in hell where she belongs, no question.”
Well. Having been dead, Hyderlin could report that neither heaven nor hell had materialized. She murmured:
“Indeed. As it should be.”
The caretaker swept around the coffin and kept talking, with the garrulousness of a person who rarely had anyone to talk to.
He told Hyderlin mostly about the visitors who had come to the Countess Biche’s grave.
People who spat on it. People who left curses and ill-omened objects at the foot of it. People who had even urinated on it.
Their reasons were usually some variation of the same.
How dare she try to kill our saint!
But that had all died down with time. After a few years, the rude visitors grew fewer and fewer, until eventually they stopped coming altogether.
“Still one fellow who comes, though. A man — must have had a deep grudge against the woman. He was just here yesterday.”
“Do you happen to know his name or his address?”
Hyderlin was curious about this man. Anyone who came to visit the grave often enough to do it almost daily had a serious grievance — at minimum, she wanted to know his face and name.
And it was possible, she thought, that she might be able to give him some measure of closure. After she had kept her promise to Margarite, of course.
“Couldn’t say. But he visits every day without fail, so if you wait here long enough, you’ll run into him. Oh, speak of the devil — here he comes now.”
The caretaker pointed through the chapel window. A tall man was making his way toward the chapel at a leisurely pace. Hyderlin watched until he drew closer.
Broad shoulders — a head taller than most people. A face half-hidden by unkempt hair and unshaved ashen stubble. A gait that swayed and staggered as though drunk.
It was him.
The man made his way unsteadily across the wet ground.
His step was uncertain, but he never put a foot in a puddle and never caught a foot on a stone. He passed headstone after headstone until he stopped in front of a small, unremarkable marker.
The grave looked freshly dug — the soil beneath the surface still visible, barely settled. It had been disturbed more than a few times, actually. People who bore the woman a grudge had made a habit of digging it up and spitting into it. It had happened with some regularity.
The man had watched it from a distance, more than once. He had never once moved to stop it.
He had watched the caretaker close the coffin lid and scatter fresh earth over it from a distance, too. He had never helped with that, either.
It was not because he was indifferent.
The man crouched before the grave, where the soil was too disturbed for weeds to take root. He carefully wiped the grime from the surface of the headstone. There, carved unevenly into the stone, were the words: Hyderlin Biche.
He stared at the name for a long while. A shadow fell across the man’s head. He glanced to the side. A woman in a low-pulled hood was looking down at him, holding something bundled against her chest.
“Oh — Sak. We meet again.”
The voice scraped like sandpaper. The man recognized it.
“You’re that woman from before.”
“I’m glad you remembered.”
“Why do you keep following me?”
The man’s blunt question was answered with a shrug.
“I only came to see the Countess Biche’s grave. I haven’t been following you at all.” She paused. “Though I doubt you’ll believe that.”
“Would you, in my place?”
“No.”
The woman said it with an almost disarming candor. She shifted the bundle in her arms and turned to look at the headstone.
“I heard it from the caretaker — that you come here almost every day. You must have had a serious grudge against the Countess.”
“If you have something to say, say it.”
The man crouching before the headstone looked up at the woman. Thanks to the angle, the shadow of her hood shifted just enough to give him a brief glimpse of her face. A set of lips, somehow familiar, curved into a faint smile. Sak found himself clenching his fist without meaning to.
“I can help you settle that grudge.”
“Grudge?”
“Sir Sarg Gloriosa.”
The man who had once been called the Knight of Radiance — Sarg Gloriosa — stared hard at the woman.
The smile had left those pale lips. She spoke in a voice as rough and acrid as rusted iron.
“I know you hate the Countess Biche.”
“……”
“The debt she owes you — let me repay it in her place.”
“How would you manage that?”
“Like this.”
The woman raised one hand and pushed back her hood.
The day was nearing its end. A cold wind came through, lifting the black curling hair until it scattered like flames. The shaded eyes had a bird of prey’s sharpness to them, and her cheeks were hollowed and gaunt.
A completely colorless face. A face entirely unlike the one he remembered — in temperature, in hue — and yet the features themselves were startlingly close.
Sarg whispered, as though someone had their hands around his throat.
“Sir Biche?”
