darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,47

for putting the order back together for the future. I want you back in one piece.” She sighed. “You know, this all could have been avoided if you’d just killed the Son of Heaven when you went after him the first time.”

“Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me. Of course, if I’d done that, Kelos would have become the next Son of Heaven right in the middle of the greatest upheaval in the history of the eleven kingdoms. He’d have ended up ruling the world.”

“And that’s not an acceptable answer, either,” said Jax. “I know. It’s just so frustrating to be playing a game where no matter what you do, Kelos the Traitor wins.”

“It’s hard to beat a man at a game of strategy when he started planning his moves out five years before you were even born.”

“Do you really think it reaches back so far?” she asked.

“Some of it probably goes back farther, but if Kelos is telling the truth, thirty-one eighty-five is when the Kitsune told him about the Son of Heaven’s risen curse and how she wanted to use it to bring down the entire ruling structure of the eleven kingdoms.” I closed my eyes. “So much blood, and it will all be on my hands.”

“You take too much on yourself,” snapped Triss. “What blood is spilled with the Son’s fall will be on his own head. Well, his and the Kitsune’s and Kelos’s.”

I didn’t agree with Triss, but neither did I want to argue with him, so I turned to Jax. “Are you going to be all right?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not. But that’s not really what you’re asking. You want to know if I’ll hold it together and get through this.” She smiled the bitterest smile I’d ever seen. “And the answer to that is yes. I have no other choice. Not if I want to keep my students alive. We had the same training, Aral. I can put my pain in a box as well as you.”

“I hope you can do a better job than that,” I replied. “Mine broke me, if you’ll remember. If it hadn’t been for Maylien Dan Marchon, my lady of the red dress, I’d very likely be dead by now.”

Maylien had figured out who I was and more or less pressed me into helping her remove her sister, Sumey, from the baronial seat that rightly belonged to Maylien. In the process we had discovered that Sumey was a hidden risen, and I had used one of Devin’s swords to end her. That had been the start of me recovering my soul and climbing out of the gutter.

I continued. “She showed me that I could still do some good in the world and helped me find a new purpose.” It was a bittersweet memory, as our relationship had broken hard a few years later, after I helped her to the throne of Zhan. “I wish that we had parted friends.”

“How will she fare when the Son dies?” asked Jax.

“Well enough, I think. Her magery has kept her safe from becoming one of his slaves. She’s going to lose a lot of nobles when this goes down, but she’s tough and she’s smart. Once she rides out the chaos, she may well be able to build a better kingdom.”

“That’s something,” said Jax. “I’d like to believe that there are those who will come through the next few months unscarred. That some kingdoms will remain standing . . .” She paused for a long moment, looked away—out the window. “I was four when the temple took me. Four. My brother was six. He barely knew me as a person, and yet he gave me sanctuary without even a moment’s hesitation. I was a fugitive with half the world against me and he handed me the keys to his kingdom. Do you know why?”

I shook my head.

“I asked him, you know. More than once, because I couldn’t believe his answer. Not the first time anyway.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Simply that I was his sister . . . and that he loved me. No worries over all the years I had been gone, or the fact that I had trained to kill men like him. None of that mattered to him. What mattered was that a six-year-old boy had loved his sister, and that he had missed her, and that he was glad that she had finally returned to him. He was a fool. A glorious, glorious fool, and I will