The King's Might: A Legend of Averdan

Part Three, Chapter Three

Author's Note:

This part, my dears, is somewhat short. My apologies for that. It does, however, include a lovingly groomed footnote, for your historical pleasure. I might have missed another footnote in here somewhere--if anyone spots it (Allking ____ing a ____ is the usual format), would you be kind enough to let me know?

EFR

CHAPTER THREE

In Which There is Some Confusion, and Several People Narrowly Escape Vigilante Justice

Morning dawned.

For Alair, Seventeenth Prince of the Souchladil empire, it was a very heavy morning. He did not look forward to what he had to do. He was not a killer by nature, and he did not take pleasure in the pain of others.

But he took even less pleasure in Jalith's pain. And what the woman had done had been a crime--one of such magnitude and unthinking evil that it deserved to be punished.

When he had threatened to have her killed he had merely been angry. Hammering, unstoppable rage--he would never truly have Jalith near him again. All the memories, the good and the bad. All changed forever. How dare she?

But lying in bed that night--for he certainly had not slept--he began to think of the thing itself. Treason it certainly was, of the worst and most innocuous kind. Treason disguised as help, disguised as patriotism even. Many in the land would probably have thanked her, if they had known what she had done.

It was the thought of what kind of people would have thanked her that made him decide to go through with it. He remembered the processions of the Day of All Children, which all the young Heirs had been forced to go through--the hot march down steaming city streets, tunics damp and boots wet through with sweat before the desert sun had quite dried out the air from the rains weeks before. He remembered the drone of the chanters, the cheers of the townspeople all around them.

But those cheers had changed, as the boys grew older. As Jalith was placed more and more prominently in the front of the procession, as it became more and more obvious what Lanon planned to do, the cheers turned to boos, the boos to jeering. The people no longer threw flowers and sweets to them--now they threw pieces of cactus, bits of midden, muck. Jalith had once been struck on the temple by an errant stone, and it had taken him three days to recover his memory fully. That was the year he was named First Prince, and the processions stopped. Alair sometimes wondered if Lanon had timed it that way deliberately. 

It was those people, he thought, who would be thankful to Karloi. People who claimed to be great patriots, but threw stones at their future king. And he, for one, refused to give those people anything. If it had to be like this--if there was no way what she had done could be undone--she needed to die for it.

Everyone needed to know it was wrong.

He took longer than he needed to bathing, selected a tunic with more than usual care. He tried not to think about the fact that he was eating the food and using the bath houses of the woman he was about to kill in cold blood. He sharpened his saber until the blade was so fine he could not tell where it ended and the air began. In the hallway outside someone was playing a rustic wooden flute. His hands shook as they fastened a warm grey cloak around his shoulders.

You are about to kill someone, he told himself. And:

She deserves it.

His good felt boots tapped a rhythm of it out on the stairwell: she deserves it, she deserves it. The servants, passing him with baskets of good food and pitchers of wine, seemed to murmur it to one another. He imagined, briefly, that he would say it someday to the deathgod himself.