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

by Alix E. Harrow

you thought again, even more viciously, in a kind of terror: He loves me.

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.

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.

The water fills my mouth. I drown again.

This time, when he drowns me, I think of all the stories they will still sing of me—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.

Gwynne, you called him, because it was beautiful and so was he.

The empire grew. Your dreams darkened.

“Why do you stay with me? I am a devil. A butcher. Not even a butcher—his knife, falling over and over.” Gwynne said, softly, “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.” He said your name, even more softly. “You are not a knife.” And you said, wretchedly, “But I am his.”

Gwynne’s voice cut through yours, his brow still resting heavily on your forehead. “I would rather love a coward than mourn a legend.”

The Saint of War. I.

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.

I am no berserker; I have never fought for fury or bloodlust. But for the first time, I imagine how it would feel. To unhitch my reason, to unleash the terrible animal of my body, which has spent centuries learning nothing but violence. Even with venom in my veins, I could kill every soul in this courtyard. I would not need a saint. I would not even need a sword. But I could not do it quickly enough to save Gwynne.

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

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 is dead, and I belong to no one.

I am tempted—Lord, so tempted—to drown myself again. To return to the time when Gwynne and I were two hungry children scrabbling in that shadowed place beyond the reach of saints and devils, unloved and unknown except by one another. But they would only find me again, the Prince and his priest, and drag me back to this courtyard, to this ending.

return briefly to Gwynne, long enough to kiss his brow and whisper to him what I should have understood lifetimes ago, what I should have told him every night and every morning. “I am yours.”

They will never sing my name.