Celia Friedman - Crown of Shadows

Not twenty-two, he reassessed suddenly. Something in the youth’s gaze made him shiver inside, but he was careful not to let it show. Not that young by a long shot.

“They say you were there,” the youth said quietly.

“So what? You want my autograph?” He turned back to face the fire, wishing the man would go away. “I have better things to do with my time." And I don’t need new mysteries.

“They say you saw him burn.”

That did it. He needed this scene like he needed another trip to Hell. “They say a lot-” he began angrily.

And then he stopped. Because it was wrong, the whole conversation was wrong. Who the hell was this guy? No one up here knew what Damien had done; he had kept it a secret precisely because he didn’t want to go through this kind of interrogation. He hadn’t even given out his proper name, lest someone figure out where that name had been recently and what it had done. The result was that no one here knew who he was, or what he had done. No one.

“Who the vulk are you?”

A faint glimmer of a smile ghosted across the youth’s face. “One who has an interest in legends.” He nodded toward the fire. “Come to see the heart of all legends burn.”

“Yeah, well, the view’s free.” He turned back toward it himself, and wondered just what it would take to make this intruder go away. Maybe if he ignored him.

“They say you saw him die.”

He sighed, and shut his eyes. What the hell. “I saw.”

“They burned his head.”

The memory was surprisingly vivid. “I saw that.”

“And you’re certain it was his?”

Andrys Tarrant holds the grisly trophy aloft, fingers clasped about its golden hair, and holds it still for all to see. For all to identify. “Whose else would it be?”

“Any man’s, if the illusion were right.”

He snorted derisively. “There is no more illusion.”

“There are the Iezu.”

He shook his head. “I asked them. Or rather, I asked one of them who I think would have given me an honest answer. They wouldn’t interfere, he said. Their Mother forbade it.”

“There is always sorcery,” the youth said quietly.

“No.” His hand fisted tightly about the rail. Damn it, did he have to go through all this again, as if he had never done so the first time? The Hunter was dead. He had seen him die. He had felt him die, as the channel between Vryce and the Hunter was severed by Andrys Tarrant’s bloody sword. Wasn’t that enough? “There’s no more sorcery—”

“No more easy sorcery,” the youth agreed. “But for a man willing to give up enough, there’s still a Pattern to follow.”

“He’d have to give up his life then, in order to fake his death. What the hell kind of sense does that make?”

“Perhaps not his life,” the youth suggested. “Perhaps only part of it.”

A shaft of Corelight breached the great mushroom cloud and reached the platform where they stood. Damien heard tourists murmur in delight as the brilliant light, stained crimson by the cloud, edged the rough wooden walkway in fire.

“What are you suggesting?” he demanded.

“What if the Hunter wanted to stage his own death? What if his would-be killer agreed that that was the best course? What if it was enough for both of them that the Hunter died—the legend-but something of the man at its core survived? That would be death of a kind, wouldn’t it? Surely the sacrifice of one’s identity could be seen as a kind of suicide. Perhaps enough to wield some power even in this altered forum. Think about it,” the youth urged. “It would have to be a sacrifice that came from the soul itself, not just a surface gesture. A true death, from which there could be no resurrection. The body that walked away from that night might never lay claim to its true name again, or connect itself to its previous life in word or deed.” He paused. “It couldn’t even discuss its own fate in any manner except the most impersonal. To do otherwise would be to join itself to the part that had died, and thus consummate the destruction of the whole.”

It took Damien a minute to find his voice. The thought was so incredible—— But no, he thought, not incredible at all. Not if you knew Gerald Tarrant, and what he was capable of.

He asked it quietly: “Do you believe that’s what happened?”

The youth shrugged. “I merely suggest a course the Hunter might have followed. Who can say what the truth is? Think of it as an exercise for the imagination, if you like. I thought that as a fellow sorcerer-” he smiled faintly, "-or rather, as a fellow ex-sorcerer, you might find it ... amusing.”

A gust of wind blew toward them from the Forest, carrying on it a dusting of ash. As it blew across them it dusted featherweight fragments across the youth’s shoulder and hair. Slim gloved fingers rose up and brushed at the soft bits as soon as they landed, in a gesture as reflexive as that of a cat licking its soiled fur. A minimal gesture, chillingly familiar, that should have trailed fae in its wake. It would have, once.

He looked into those eyes-dark, so dark, and not a young man’s at all, not by a long shot—and managed, “Your name.” Finding his voice somewhere, managing to shape it into words. “You never did tell me what it was.”

For a long, silent time the youth looked at him. Just looked at him. As if the look was a kind of dare, Damien thought. As if he wanted to give him time to try to see another man in his eyes, to superimpose another man’s life over his own.

“No,” he said at last. Glancing once more toward the burning Forest, as if the answer were there. “I didn’t, did I?” Once more a faint smile touched the corner of his lips; the fleeting minimalism of the expression was so familiar that Damien didn’t know how to respond. Did one celebrate such a resemblance, or mourn what it implied? “Does it matter?”

“No,” he whispered. “Not really.”

An expression that Damien couldn’t begin to read flickered across the youth’s face. Something strange, intensely human, an emotion that would have been ill-suited to the Hunter’s former mien. Affection? Regret? “Good-bye, Damien Vryce.” The youth bowed ever so slightly, his eyes never leaving Vryce’s own. “Good luck.”

And then he turned with easy grace and began to walk back toward the pass, silken sleeves fluttering in the wind. Damien almost ran after him. There were things he needed to say, farewells and gratitudes and hopes for the future that he’d never had a chance to express in the Hunter’s lifetime. But he didn’t go after him. Nor did he call out the name that was on his lips, though it took all his self control not to. Because if what the youth said was true, then such words could prove fatal. Instead he watched the young man walk away in silence as if he were truly a stranger, feeling something inside himself twist into a knot as the distance between them grew. Not until a little girl brushed against the stranger, leaving a smear of dirt on that crimson sleeve-not until a gloved hand rose up to brush off the offending stain, and once more came short of succeeding-did a new thought, a startling thought, take shape within Damien’s brain.

If the Hunter had made a bid for life (he reasoned), and if he had talked Andrys Tarrant into going along with it ... if he had sacrificed himself in the way this youth suggested, and done so successfully, so that he now walked the earth as another man, no longer a sorcerer because the Patriarch’s sacrifice had stripped them all of power ... then that man, if he happened to get dirty now, would have to take a bath to get himself clean. Just like everybody else.