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

by Alix E. Harrow

You hadn’t done it out of any particular affection, but you liked the way he looked at you afterward, as if you were a hero stepped out of some bard’s song, tall as an oak and twice as strong.

This one looked much more like the songs said: young and beautiful, entirely unmarred.

He wore an expression you had never seen before, an avid, scorching hunger, which you thought must be love.

“Well, she is my Devil now.”

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.

the weight of the hilt in your palm was the touch of a dear friend returned to you.

you worked harder for him so that you might become the thing he needed so badly.

your body was no longer something you wore but something you wielded, and Lord, ...

The Prince had many enemies—as the great alwa...

If they do not know you, they cannot fear you.”

It was she who whispered to you the arc of each blade, the weight of each blow, so that battle lost all immediacy for you and became something more like a memory, a set of elegant red steps you’d learned long ago.

She was an unmerciful master, your Saint.

you caught your squire’s bitter gaze and thought, with vicious pride: He loves me.

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

You didn’t always recognize yourself in their songs—you were no great beauty, and your sword was not forged in hellfire—but you recognized your enemies.

He did not flinch or scream. He simply sat beneath the arc of your sword as if God Himself bade him be still.

“I could have killed you,” you said, and he had answered, obscurely, “You never do.”

“Do you truly mean to die, just so the King can hang a new map behind his throne?” Then, more perceptively, unforgivably, “Just so he will bury you at his feet, like a loyal dog?” His voice caught and broke. “Is it worth it?”

You couldn’t name the emotion you felt, in that last second before you fell into your squire’s arms, but I can: relief.

“A lake, then. A place where time runs together, the was and will be.

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.

I notice for the first time that he is beautiful.

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

I have given him my blood, my youth, my love, my good right hand; who am I now to begrudge him my death?

I smile as I drown. They will always sing my name.

He slept fitfully at your side, changing the dressings every few hours, refusing to permit any hands on you except his.

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

You could not decide if they were prophecies or memories, or whether there was any difference between the two.

We have done this so many times, you and I.

Perhaps any tool, used hard enough and long enough, begins to fail.

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.

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, because it was beautiful and so was he.

The Saint came to you again and again, always with that terrible fury on her face. You wondered if perhaps she did not want to be the Saint of War any longer,

You were a shrike, a leopard, a plague, a thing that lived only to kill.

He said your name, even more softly. “You are not a knife.” And you said, wretchedly, “But I am his.”

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 day you fought as a mortal fights, blind and deaf and terribly alone, and even still, they could not kill you. You were a devil, a saint, a great and terrible reaping loosed upon the world. You were centuries of warfare condensed into a single body, your memories folded over themselves, beaten and quenched like fine steel in the water of the pool.

You saw yourself as a sickly child, and you understood once again who you were, and would be, and are now: a woman following her own footprints, a snake eating her own tail, forever.

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.

But only one person in all my lives has ever loved me, and he does not wear a crown.

And so this time, when God bids me to look into the pool again, I...

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

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.

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.

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

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