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My name is Falcio val Mond, one of the last of the King’s Greatcoats, and if you listen very carefully you might still be able to hear me screaming.
The problem with Brasti is that he’s an idiot. He’s handsome and charming, he can outshoot any man or woman with a bow, and he’s an idiot. Oh, you wouldn’t think so at first; he’s a fine conversationalist and uses many words that sound like the sort of words smart people use. He just doesn’t use them in the right context. Or even the right order.
‘Because that’s what he does,’ Brasti interrupted. ‘He asks himself what the dumbest possible thing to do would be in any given situation and then he does it.’
‘What value is your decree, Duke Isault, if it can so simply be overridden by another, and what value is your word if you can change it so easily?’
An eight-year-old boy shakes his fist at the sky and earth and vows, My name is Falcio val Mond and I am going to be a Greatcoat. The boy has nothing, though. His father is gone and his mother is slowly withering away from solitude. He doesn’t know how to fight, or how to swing a sword. And yet.
It will to me, I reply. Words matter. Without words you can’t have stories and without stories we would never have heard of the Greatcoats.
There are things stronger than hate and more deadly than fear, and this is one of them. The world demands a response to corruption and decay.
Happiness is a series of grains of sand spread out in a desert of violence and anguish.
Disappointingly – and I really hated to admit it, but this kept happening to me – life failed to live up to my expectations.
‘Tell them the Greatcoats are coming.’
