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“I lack the wisdom.” He meant he lacked the courage, but lacked the courage to admit it.
trapped where he so often found himself, on the barren ground between shame and fury.
“You’re doing well,” Yarvi’s uncle whispered in his ear. “I am walking.” “You are walking like a king.” “I am a king and I am walking. How could it be otherwise?” Odem smiled at that. “Well said, my king.”
“My king,” frothed Keimdal, “I must object!” “Object if you please. Then do as I tell you.”
“You prayed for help, didn’t you?” said the southerner, without looking around. “Here is help.” “I prayed for help with two hands.” “Be thankful for half of what you prayed for,” said Yarvi. “Believe me, I prayed for none of this.”
“The gods love to laugh at a happy man.”
The fool strikes, she had said. The wise man smiles, and watches, and learns. Then strikes.
He might have read that the Shends were peaceable enough but these ones did not look as if they had read the same books he had.
“You see that I am merciful,” said Shadikshirram brightly, with merciful gestures of the blood-spotted hand which still loosely held her knife.
But enemies, as his mother used to say, are the price of success.
The first guard still stood, fumbling at his pierced chest, trying to speak but saying only red froth.
She snapped her fingers at Yarvi. “Get your clothes off.” “Romance yet survives!” said Rulf, fluttering his lashes at the sky. Sumael ignored him. “Wet clothes will kill you in the night sure as any enemy.”
“Then you are remarkably close to your way, but I find your way a very strange one.” Yarvi could only agree with that. “If we had known the hardship of it, we might have chosen another.” “So it is with many choices.” “All we can do now is see it through.” “So it is with many choices.”
“I used to think I was a good man.” Yarvi put a hand on his shoulder. “I used to think you were a bastard. Now I’m starting to have some doubts.”
“We six?” asked Ankran. “Against their twenty?” muttered Jaud. “With a one-handed boy, a woman and a storekeeper among us?” said Rulf. “Exactly!” Nothing smiled wider. “You think just as I do!” Rulf propped himself on his elbows. “There is no one, ever, who’s thought as you do.”
“He’s a damn devil,” murmured Sumael, jaw muscles clenching and unclenching as she weighed her hatchet in her hand. “When you’re in hell,” murmured Yarvi, “only a devil can point the way out.”
“What is the world coming to when an honest man cannot burn corpses without suspicion?”
“What if she doesn’t believe me?” Yarvi pictured his mother’s face, then, as she used to frown down at him, and thought it very likely she would doubt. “Then we must think of something else.” “And if she doesn’t believe me, and orders me dead for the insult?” Yarvi paused. “Then I must think of something else.”
“I don’t pretend to understand your loyalty, but I’m grateful for it.”
And Yarvi realized then that Death does not bow to each person who passes her, does not sweep out her arm respectfully to show the way, speaks no profound words, unlocks no bolts. The key upon her chest is never needed, for the Last Door stands always open. She herds the dead through impatiently, heedless of rank or fame or quality. She has an ever-lengthening queue to get through. A blind procession, inexhaustible.
He might not have been the sharpest pupil in the training square, but he knew how to stab a man.
Strange, how you never see how much you want a thing until you know you cannot have it.
