Chapter 136: There Is No Heroic Death

The edge of Saud’s sword was a hair from my collarbone when the light arrived.

A thin line of white-blue starlight tore across the hall from somewhere behind the rebels, so fine and so fast that I only noticed it by the way the air hummed.

It struck the hilt of his sword with a note like a tuning fork. His wrist snapped back, the blade bounced off its path, and for one breath the Captain’s guard hung open like a door left unlatched.

’Charolette.’

I did not look for her. Looking would waste what she had just given me.

I planted my feet, straightened my spine, and brought Thunder Sunlight around from the right.

Clang!

Sparks sprayed between us. Saud met the blow with the calm of a man pouring tea, and pushed. I used his push, turned my hips, and swung from the left.

Clang!

The shock rattled up my wrists and into my teeth. My knees still ached where the ice had been. Good. Pain kept me honest.

I dropped my shoulder and drove the point at his chest. He slid aside, the tip whispering past his coat by a finger’s width, and his sword came down on mine.

Clang!

Three exchanges, three clean answers. He was the better swordsman, and we both knew it. But he was also fighting me with his whole attention, and a man who gives you his attention gives you his mind.

And minds were my specialty.

’Now.’

I reached through the ringing steel and closed my hand around the thing that made him dangerous.

I nearly laughed.

Of all the things he could have carried, this was the one I had been wishing for since the birds froze my legs. Exaggeration. It was not a cheap trick. Bending reality to that degree drank spiritual power like a dry field drinks rain, which was probably why Saud used it so sparingly.

But the fragment I had left in my Spirit Temple was still feeding endless fog into my Core.

I lunged and swung overhead, and as the blade fell I exaggerated it. Not the sword. The strength behind it.

The air cracked.

Saud got his weapon up in time, I will give him that, but his arms were measuring a man’s blow and receiving a mountain’s.

His boots skidded. His elbows folded. The floor shuddered under his heels, he lost his footing, and Saud, who had floated above us like a god, went down hard on the stone.

’Two seconds.’

The count was in my head like a hand on my shoulder. I did not hesitate. I just did what needed doing.

I opened my palm and summoned Voice of Death.

A bell dropped into my hand, black as a burnt church, its surface etched with names I could not read.

I threw it. It spun end over end toward Saud’s face, and I saw his eyes narrow, saw his lips begin to shape the word he always used before the world broke.

’Disorder.’

He would scatter it. He would send it somewhere useless.

Not if I reached it first.

I pulled on the thread of my will, the one that tied the bell to my Core, and rang it. Not at a distance, but there, a palm’s width from his ear, with every last drop of Exaggeration I had.

There was no sound at first. Then there was too much.

Saud screamed. It was not the scream of a captain.

It was higher, thinner, the sound of a boy who has heard something he was never meant to hear.

His hands flew to his ears and blood leaked between his fingers. I could not hear the whispers myself, but I watched them land: a thousand voices, soft and patient, reading him the names of everyone he had ever spoken a prophecy over. His sword fell from his hand. The conjured steel dissolved into mist.

I was already in the air.

Weight of a Feather, a gift, lifted me, and I tucked, rose, and turned Thunder Sunlight until its point stared straight down at the man beneath me. Then I let go of the lightness.

I fell.

Shhhk!

The blade went through his chest and into the gate behind him.

For a heartbeat the lightning along the steel lit the whole corridor, white on the golden carvings, white on his open mouth.

The ability ended.

My strength returned to merely my own. I pulled the sword free, and Saud slid down against the throne room gates, leaving a long red smear across the silver-banded iron.

The hall had gone quiet.

Not silent, because beyond us the golden monsters still roared and the rebels still fought, but quiet in the small circle where we were.

Mary landed lightly at the edge of it. Lee, with a bullet head in his shoulder, stood a few paces behind her, breathing hard.

Neither of them spoke.

Saud sat with his back to his father’s door, one hand pressed to the wound as if he could hold the rest of himself in. His breath came wet and ragged. Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth. His black and gold uniform was darker now, heavy with it.

I stood over him, sword lowered, waiting for the hatred. The triumph. The thing everybody says when they are about to die, when they are about to show their true face.

It did not come.

Instead, Saud looked up at me and laughed.

It was short and dry, hardly more than a cough, and he shook his head slowly.There was no fear in his red-tinted eyes. There was not even surprise.

’Why are you laughing?’

And then it hit me... cold... from the base of my skull downward.

Saud could prophesy.

He had known about today, didn’t he?

He had told Rashford a prophecy that helped him catch Arthur.

He had bent the world so that everyone believed he had ridden north, while he stood at his father’s door waiting for us.

A man like that does not wait by accident. A man like that does not stand at a gate with his back to a wall unless he has already seen what it looks like when he slides down it.

He had known. Every step of this fight, he had known how it ended.

My lips parted.

Saud’s eyes moved across my face, and I watched him see the understanding arrive, watched it settle between us like a third person in the corridor.

He smiled, small and tired and almost kind.

He had seen his own death, and he had still come to stand in front of this door. For his father.

’You knew,’ I thought.

He did not answer that. His gaze drifted past me, toward the ceiling where he had floated, toward the high crimson windows, toward nothing. His fingers loosened against the wound.

"There is no heroic death."

His head tipped against the iron. The breath left him slowly.

I stood there with the lightning dying along my blade.

Behind him, through the carved dragon and the fang, I heard something shift on the other side of the door.

Culex had felt his son die.