Chapter 270 - 261 — The Night the King Died II

Chapter 270: Chapter 261 — The Night the King Died II

The word went into the room and changed it entirely.

Alaric stood very still for perhaps three seconds. When he spoke again his voice had a different weight in it, and it was not the voice of a father.

"You will go out of this room and reverse every readiness order you have signed in the last nine days. You will surrender any authority you have taken beyond your station. Tonight."

"No."

"I am ordering you as your king."

"I know."

Alaric went to the door and pulled it open and called for the guard, in the parade-ground voice of a man who had commanded armies before Baldwin was born.

The corridor stayed silent.

He called again.

Baldwin looked at the floor for one beat, because the sound of that unanswered order was worse than anything his father had said to him — it was the exact noise of a thing becoming irreversible, and he had built it himself, on paper, over nine days, with everyone’s approval.

When he looked up his father was staring at him.

---

Alaric did not beg. Baldwin had known he would not, and had still somehow braced for it.

He got angry instead — the real kind, quiet and enormous.

"You’ve killed men over this," he said. "Not tonight. Over months. You made a list, and you decided which of my people could be lost, and now you have decided that I am on it."

"You are not on any list."

"I am standing between you and what you want, which is the only thing your list has ever measured." Alaric stepped toward the door. "Stand aside."

Baldwin did not move.

"*Stand aside.*"

"I can’t."

"You have confused being willing to sacrifice people with being strong." His father was two paces away now. "Every man I have ever known who thought that was the same thing believed, absolutely, that he alone could see clearly. You are not the first. You are simply the first one I raised."

"And you have confused refusing to decide with mercy," Baldwin said, and his voice finally came apart at the edges. "They are still dead. The four hundred and six are still dead. Every month you keep the right to choose, and every month the choosing gets worse, and you will hand me a kingdom that cannot be saved and I will have to save it anyway."

"Then you will have to save it as king," Alaric said. "After I am dead. Of something else."

He put his hand out for the door.

"Stand aside, or I will have you arrested by men who still answer to me, and there are more of those in this city than you think."

And then he waited.

That was the thing. He waited — a full second, two, three — and Baldwin had every one of them, and he could have moved out of the doorway at any point in any of them.

He did not move.

Alaric came forward to pass him.

---

It was short, and it was ugly, and there was nothing about it that looked like a duel.

Baldwin put a hand out to stop his father and Alaric knocked it aside — hard, expertly, with a wrist-turn Baldwin had learned from this man in a yard twenty years ago — and got a fist into his son’s ribs that folded him sideways into the doorframe.

The old man was sixty-three and he had been a soldier before he had been a king, and for four or five seconds he was simply better.

He got a hand on Baldwin’s collar and hauled him out of the doorway and Baldwin’s own sword came half out of the scabbard between them, and Alaric got a grip on the guard and the wrist above it and started turning it out of his hand, exactly the way he had taught him to do it.

Baldwin was losing.

He felt it happening — his father’s weight coming over him, his own arm being taken away, the door two feet from Alaric’s free hand — and there was one entire second where he could have let it happen and been disarmed and arrested and every terrible thing after this would not have occurred.

And instead he reached down into himself for the thing he had accepted under this building.

It came up as easily as breathing.

The wrist Alaric was turning simply stopped turning. Baldwin’s arm did not fight his father’s grip so much as ignore it, and the old man’s eyes changed as the leverage he had spent forty years trusting failed against nothing he could see.

Baldwin threw him off, and Alaric went across the room and into the table and did not fall.

Then Baldwin took the sword the rest of the way out.

He crossed the floor faster than he had ever crossed a floor. Alaric got his own blade off the wall and got it up, and it was a good parry, and Baldwin’s cut went through the guard and the blade both, and the sword came out of the king’s hands and rang off the stone somewhere behind him.

Alaric went back into the wall and stopped.

And Baldwin put the point of his sword against his father’s chest, and everything stopped.

---

For one heartbeat neither of them moved.

Alaric looked down at the blade and then up at his son, and he understood exactly what was about to happen. There was no confusion in his face at all.

Baldwin understood it too.

That was the part. He was not carried away, and he was not somewhere else, and there was no voice anywhere in that room. He stood in his father’s chamber with his father at the end of his sword and he knew, with the total clarity he had been so proud of his entire life, exactly what he was choosing.

His hand shook once.

He made it stop.

Then he pushed.

---

It was over quickly, and afterward the room was extremely ordinary.

Baldwin let go of the thing inside him and it went out of his arms and left them his own again, and everything came back at the usual scale — the desk, the shutters, the brazier, the weight of a sword, all of it exactly the size it had been an hour ago.

His father was on the floor.

Baldwin did not move for some time. Twelve seconds. Twenty. He stood with the blade in his hand and looked at the shape on the flagstones and could not make it be anything other than what it was.

At some point he crouched down and put his hand out toward Alaric’s shoulder.

He stopped it eight inches away and drew it back, because there was nothing that hand could do. There was no version of the next second where he fixed this.

He stayed like that a while longer.

Then he stood, and looked at the sword in his hand, and set it down on the desk.

He was four steps from the door. Beyond it were two men from a company he had assigned there himself, and either of them would have taken that sword off the desk and put him in a cell if he had gone out and said one true sentence.

Baldwin stood in the middle of the room with his hands empty and worked out how long it would take.

He’d killed him.