darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,6

spend the rest of her life preventing a new one from growing in its place at a blood cost I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

I didn’t know what I believed, but I knew damned well that killing the Son of Heaven would result in a bloodbath of epic proportion. For every one of the risen that died with him, tens or even hundreds of innocents would fall in the chaos left behind. If the weight of my dead was already crushing me when they numbered in the hundreds . . .

“I don’t know what to do, Faran. It was so much easier when the goddess told me where to go and who to kill. The responsibility was hers. I hate being the one who has to make the decisions.”

“Would you go back to living that way . . . ? If you could?” Faran’s tone was gentle, her expression sympathetic, but the question was as sharp as any knife, and it cut straight through to the pain that knotted my gut.

I desperately wanted to say yes. But . . . “No. I have seen too much of life’s grays to ever go back to that kind of certainty. Even knowing, as I now do, that Namara herself was uncertain . . . No. I lie to myself when I say the responsibility was hers. My actions were and always have been my own, and somewhere down deep I’ve always known that. If the responsibility for what I do belongs to me, so do the choices. I couldn’t go back to being a tool in another’s hand if my soul depended on it.”

“Then, stop letting Kelos manipulate you.”

Her mind is as sharp as her blades, sent Triss. She’s grown so much since we first found her.

I laughed a grim little laugh. “That would be much easier to do if I knew what he was trying to bend me into doing, and whether or not what he wants of me is the wrong thing to do. Because the flip side of the risen problem is that allowing the Son of Heaven to live is a decision with heavy consequences of its own. How much of the evil done by and for him am I responsible for if I refuse to end his life?”

That was the question that made me feel as though I was carrying shards of broken glass around in my chest.

Triss rose up and wrapped his wings around my shoulders. “Sometimes you come to a place where there are no right decisions and all paths lead to fell ends.”

“And then?” I whispered.

“You still must choose your way,” said Triss.

“But I don’t know how. . . .”

Faran stepped closer then, taking my hands in her own. “You do, you know.”

“If so, I can’t see it.”

“That’s because you’re looking at it the wrong way. The question is not, what should you do? It’s: who do you want to be?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You can’t control everything that will result from your actions, you can only control the actions themselves. If you died tomorrow, how would you want to be remembered?” She put one palm on my chest where the goddess had touched me. “Who are you, in here?”

I thought back to the decisions I had made over the last few years as I crawled my way back out of the gutter, what I had done that had made me proud, where I had failed. . . .

I took a deep breath. “I fear that I must face the Son of Heaven.”

Faran nodded, but she also asked, “Why?”

“I am a hunter of monsters in human guise. It’s what I was born to do. It’s what I trained to do. It’s who I am. Who knows? That might even make me into something of a monster myself. But, if so, I am a monster whose job is taking greater monsters out of the world. I may not be able to stop new ones from rising up where I have brought down the old, but I can’t let that stop me from doing the job I was made for, and the Son is a very great monster indeed.”

Going after the Son of Heaven was a scary decision, but it felt like the right one in that moment and in my heart, where it beat under Faran’s hand. I covered it with my own. “How did you get to be so wise, my young monst—apprentice?” I clumsily switched words there as I realized that my usual nickname for