clean hands . . . All I could feel was, absurdly, devastated. I had got attached, more than I had realized, to the idea of myself as the dragon-slayer. With that gone, I was right back to useless victim.
But it was more than that. Susanna and Leon had known me since we were born. They had known me since long before we were capable of masks or concealments; since we were our first, our pristine and unaltered selves. They had seen in me, all that time ago, something that made me unfit to be the dragon-slayer, unfit even to be the squire on the sidelines holding the spare swords; fit only to bumble about in the background, to be wheeled out if a convenient distraction was needed and then steered off into the wings again.
“But,” I said. “Why not?”
“You wouldn’t have been on for it,” Leon said. “Dominic hadn’t done anything to you.”
“Well but,” I said, “but that wouldn’t have mattered. He was doing stuff to Su. If you’d told me—”
“She’d already told you once, remember? You hadn’t been a whole lot of help. Why would we bother trying again?”
“She hadn’t told me told me. Not properly. She’d just, she said, she only—”
“It wasn’t even that,” Susanna said. “Even if I hadn’t tried telling you before, I wouldn’t have brought you in at this point. I mean, we were talking about killing someone; one of your mates. That’s pretty extreme, and extreme isn’t really your style, is it? Let’s face it, there’s like a ninety-nine percent chance you would’ve been horrified. You would’ve said I was totally overreacting, I was out of my mind, I should go to my parents or go to the police, or just go somewhere else for college—”
“All the things you said just now, in fact,” Leon pointed out dryly.
“—or else you would’ve wanted to beat him up, and by that point that wouldn’t have done any good. Dominic was way past being put off by a few punches. He would’ve just blamed it on me—the jinx again—and been even more set on taking me down.” And, with a cool glance at me: “And I couldn’t take the risk that you’d decide to wreck the whole thing. Warn Dominic, or—”
“I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have done anything to get you in trouble. I’d have—” I had no idea what I would have done.
“Take it as a compliment,” Susanna told me. “I knew you were too pure of heart to make a good killer. Leon, on the other hand—”
“I didn’t even have to think about it,” Leon said. “I mean, I did, because I didn’t fancy going to prison; but as soon as I knew Su had a proper plan, I was delighted to be in on it. I just wished she’d decided to do it years earlier.”
“I should have,” Susanna said, “with the stuff he was doing to you. But it honest-to-God had never occurred to me before. I don’t know if I was just too young, or if I needed to be pushed right to the edge before I could think of it. It’s probably good, though. When I was younger I would’ve fucked it up. Not prepared enough, and got us caught.”
“We were prepared, all right,” Leon said. “We practiced. Remember those rocks Hugo had got in, for the rock garden? One night you were out with the guys and Hugo had gone to a dinner party, and we loaded a bunch of those rocks into a sack till it weighed about the right amount. Then we got a rope out of the shed and tied it around the sack and threw it over a branch of the wych elm, and then I pulled on the rope while Susanna stood on the stepladder, beside the tree, and heaved the sack up. Between the two of us, we got it hauled up to the hole in the trunk.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Susanna said, “but we got there in the end. After that I had us lifting weights every day—well, Hugo’s rocks again—to build up our upper-body strength. And we trained with the garrote, too. Everything I’d read said it was OMG sooo dangerous, you can crush someone’s trachea before you know it, so I made practice garrotes out of jacks roll, so they’d break if we pulled them too tight.”
“We did it in our bedrooms with the lights off,” Leon said, “so we’d be able to do it in the dark. And out in the garden,