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

by Alix E. Harrow

“Well, she is my Devil now.” And you found you did not mind being a devil, so long as you were his.

When you die, little Devil, a kingdom will fall to its knees and crawl to your bier. In a thousand years and a thousand after that, they will still sing of the Prince and his Devil.

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 saw yourself as an unholy triptych, three into one, one into three: she the girl, you the Devil, and I the Saint. And you understood, finally, that there had never truly been a she or a you but only a terrible, lonely I.

You were a shrike, a leopard, a plague, a thing that lived only to kill. You belonged not to yourself but to your Prince—your King, your Emperor.

I understand that this has all happened before, more than once and more than twice. I understand that I have made my life a work of bloody alchemy, transforming a child into a devil into a saint, a kingdom into an empire, a prince into a god. 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.

“Rise,” 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. I lead her out of the shadows. I make her into a devil, a legend, a butcher’s knife. I watch as she ages and hardens. I watch as her squire heals her again and again, with the same tenderness he had shown the flea-ridden girl in the straw.