The Rebel Assassin

Chapter 17: Morning's Light

No one spoke during that long night's hike through the pass. I can remember, faintly, the stricken look on Gal's face; he'd never thought leaving the Protectorate as he'd dreamed of doing for years would mean walking into a massacre. I think Nick must have spent that night in a daze, after going from royal guard to hostage to runaway within hours. But during that night was I focused only on myself.

My hands that had held the bow, strung the arrows and let loose.

My body that wouldn't stop trembling, my mind lingering on those deaths.

I had made the decision. That more than anything weighed on my chest, made the thin mountain air even thinner. My lungs couldn't seem the fill.

I had looked over the situation and decided to the only way out for us was to kill as many of them as possible. I was the one responsible. I was the one who had failed to find some other way.

Over and over I saw it. The narrow pass. The guards in pursuit. The inevitability of them catching us. What had I missed? Had there been a way for us to escape them without me putting arrows through them all?

Here was the truth: I had killed before. In a scuffle in the lower city, in self defense and accidentally, I'd killed a man who tried to hurt Kemp. And in the Assassin's Court, I'd killed Xalva on Roman's orders in order to earn my place. But neither of those deaths had been my responsibility, and though they shook me, the guilt had quietly buried itself in the back of my mind.

But this was different. If we'd given ourselves up to the princess's company, those guards would still be alive.

Vain would still be alive.

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In the morning we staggered out into a new country and a new day. From the mouth of the pass, a road sloped gently down into Emorial. There was a town in the distance, and the capital city two days' journey past it.

"We'll stop and sleep," Cyrus mumbled, as we left the road for the shelter of thick forest. "I think we all need a rest. Someone should—"

"I'll keep watch," I said, and left the loose huddle of the group. I couldn't find it in me to look at any of them, to see if they looked at me differently after what I'd done. I needed to be on my own.

Joshua, as usual, messed up my plans.

The others had settled down into exhausted sleep nearly as soon as we stopped walking, but he dropped down next to me several yards away. His half-lidded eyes made it clear that he too was tired, but there was no resentment as he settled down, back against a tree trunk.

"You're not needed," I told him flatly.

He didn't respond, only asked after a few moments, "Are they dead? Hard to see what happened from where we were."

I clenched my jaw, the answers tallying up against my will. I'd counted and recounted throughout the night, as if it might at some point turn out different. "Two or three got out of range fast enough to escape. Must not have been many, since they didn't pursue us. Three definitely dead. Two I hit but might still be alive." That was a gentle summary. It was unlikely that both of them survived, if either.

"I think I killed one while getting out. I saw another body too, from either Dell or Galahad. That would account for ten guards, all but three unable to come after us. I don't think we'll have trouble from them again."

"Vain was..." I stopped. When Joshua didn't fill the silence, I turned to glare at him. "You trained him. You should care that he's dead."

"Whether I keep my sense of morality intact is none of your business. If you're looking for me to get angry at you so you can defend yourself, you can start defending yourself without my part. I don't have the energy."

I bit my cheek and faced away from him, arms crossed. I wanted to snap at him, but maybe he was right. If he would yell at me I would yell back, and being angry with him would push these other emotions into their own corner. But provoking him after the night we'd had wasn't fair, and probably not productive.

"Just tell me if you saw some other way," I finally said.

He shook his head slowly. "If there had been another way out, you would have seen it. You're creative, Morane. I'll give you that, even when I'd rather not give you anything. It was take them down or let them take us."

"They couldn't take us," I said, more to myself than to him.

I almost thought he'd fallen asleep, and I started when he spoke several minutes later.

"I do care that Vain's dead." The slight unsteadiness in his voice said far more than his words did. "But don't you dare apologize to me over it. Next time you see Magali, tell her. And let her know it's her fault that he's dead."

In the silence as the morning brightened into gold, I rested my head on my knees and let myself find the edge between awake and asleep.

What was it like for Joshua to have trained so many royal guards, knowing that one day he would return to Roman and his Assassin's Court, on the opposite side? Had he cared about them, been invested in them? Was every aspect of Captain Joshua Blaisze a fake?

Seeing a guard he trained killed in a battle, a massacre really, should have sent the captain he pretended to be into mourning. Looking over at how he leaned into the tree, eyes closed against the light, I couldn't tell if the hollowness of his face was from grief or exhaustion.

It was easier to ask myself what went on in his head than to examine what went on in mine.

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An hour later, I woke Joshua, Cyrus, Wes, Galahad, and Dell. Nick had curled up apart from them, his bow — the bow I'd used to save us and maybe ruin myself — lay on the ground next to him. I had to step over it, shuddering, to kneel next to him and touch his shoulder.

He jolted awake, flinching inwards into a tighter bundle of long limbs.

"Nick. Do you know where we are?"

He pressed his face against the ground, not looking at me. "Emorial. That's where the pass led. Did we make it?"

"Yes. We're here. Do you know who —"

"Rebels," he said, voice dull. "That's who we were tracking. Rebels who were going to kidnap the Black Knight."

I didn't know how to do this, how to tell him how sorry I was and what his choices were now. "Yes. That's... that's it for you and the royal guard."

"Never liked it much anyway."

I snorted and pushed his hair back from his face. "We'll get you back to Solangia, somehow. Just because you can't go back to the guard, doesn't mean you have to—"

"Don't tell me I'm not part of this now." He sat up. "This is the Phoenix. You're part of it. Nemia's part of it."

"I won't drag you into this."

"Too late for that." He hunched over, looking at his hands. "This isn't what I wanted to happen, but then, I also didn't want to be used as a hostage, so I don't think any of that matters anymore. So if I've ended up here, I'm going to make the best of it." He curled one hand into a fist.

"You know what that means. With Sam." Nick and Sam had never said, in so many words, that they were together. Sam's status as a bastard prince had always made what he could and could not do an unclear line, and being involved with a common guardsman seemed dangerously outside his boundaries.

"I'm not against Sam. I'm for him." He said this quietly, and I understood that he didn't want the other rebels hearing. "I don't know what the Phoenix plans to do if they can pull this off, but someone has to be looking out for Sam. They can't hurt him."

That stung, but I couldn't find the words to insist that I was already looking out for Sam. I could only nod.

"Good. So why are we in Emorial?"

"Oh," I said, finding my voice suddenly rusty. "You know, the usual. Forging alliances with foreign powers in preparation for a civil war or something like that."

"Oh," he said. "Figures."