The Six Deaths of the Saint (Into Shadow, #3)

by Alix E. Harrow

You grew strong over those years, and fast, until your body was no longer something you wore but something you wielded, and Lord, what a weapon it became.

you knelt before your Prince and presented him with the head of his enemy—the face so much younger than you’d expected, just a boy, really, his eyes milky and afraid—

You fought and you killed and you fought again, until the bards began to sing of the redheaded Devil, until the merest glimpse of your hair sent your enemies running before you.

Had his lips been foamy pink as he asked: Is it worth it?

You remained conscious up until the moment you looked down and saw your own hand lying on the steps and understood that you would never again hold a sword. You couldn’t name the emotion you felt, in that last second before you fell into your squire’s arms, but I can: relief.

And you understood, finally, that there had never truly been a she or a you but only a terrible, lonely I.

But in the end, there was no saint, just a lonely girl telling secrets to herself in a dark mirror.

(I was always crying when I came to you. You learned to ignore it.)

Bc she’s done it before

“He—he loves me.” Your squire watched you carefully. His eyes landed on every pink scar, every old injury that still ached. “Is this love?” he asked softly.

She can’t be too powerful

(Your squire said that night, “I suppose I should not look upon you any longer.” You laughed. He did not.)

Enemies who didn’t look like enemies, but like men and women, or like children, dying beneath your blade for no reason you could name. You could not decide if they were prophecies or memories, or whether there was any difference between the two.

They carried you off the field with an arrow in your left eye. The last thing you saw was your squire’s face, full of grief.

You were a child the first time the Saint of War came to you.

the hero of the empire, the scourge of the Gray City, the knight with the hellfire hair—and then I think: It is not worth it.

Your squire had been nothing once, just like you—a sniveling shadow, too insignificant even to merit a name. But over the years he had become so vital to you, so dear, that you gave him one. Gwynne, you called him,

Slowly changing what matters

“Before all this, before the Saint and the Prince, you were the girl who still shared her meat with the begging dogs, no matter how hungry she was. Who took a beating for a boy who deserved it, for no reason except that she could bear it better than him. Who shone, even in the shadows.”

Gwynne touched you until you shuddered and went still in his arms. Then he whispered, so gently you barely heard it—but I did, oh, I did—“You are not his.”

Each time I came to you, I hoped you would hate me. I hoped you would turn your face from me and leave your sword to rust in the mud of some distant, desolate battlefield.

“I would rather love a coward than mourn a legend.”

That I have lived and killed and lived again in the name of a man who does not deserve it because I wanted so badly to be beloved. But only one person in all my lives has ever loved me, and he does not wear a crown.

God stares and stares at me. I wonder how I could ever have mistaken that expression for love.

I know him, and in knowing him I love him, and in loving him I cannot do as he wishes.

I say, and then I tell her what she has wanted to hear all her life: that someone, somewhere, needs her. That she is not nothing.

He says my name, my old name, the one I had before I was a devil or a saint. Then he says, “You are not his.” Then he smiles. Then he leans his weight into the knife and twists his neck sharply, drawing the blade across his own throat.

I wonder what the songs will say about the Devil now that she is covered in the blood of her own God. I find that I no longer care at all.

But they would only find me again, the Prince and his priest, and drag me back to this courtyard, to this ending.

In my mind I see, quite clearly, a great golden scale. On one side there is a vast pile of corpses. Some of them I know well—the False King, the Holly Knight, the boy in the Gray City, my own beloved Gwynne—but most of them are men whose names I never knew. And on the other side of the scale, there is a pair of silk slippers.

No one will even know your name—” I lean close and whisper, “One person will.”

This time, when I push my face into the pool, when the water fills my mouth and floods my lungs, I am smiling. They will never sing my name.