darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,67
right now.”
“Siri—”
“Siri can’t be trusted. She told you so herself, and she wasn’t wrong. Not until she gets her god problem under control. I saw what the Smoldering Flame did to her when he woke up. If she were First Blade, everything might be fine, or it might result in handing the entire order over to a half-mad, half-dead god.”
“Faran’s right,” Triss agreed slipping out of my shadow. “We were only deeply bound to the buried god for a few seconds, and . . .” He shivered. “No. I love Siri and Kyrissa, but they cannot be trusted.”
“Maryam suggested Jax,” I said quickly. I felt like a caged beast.
“Jax is competent, caring and entirely inadequate to the demands of the job,” said Faran. “She is an excellent school teacher and den mother, and, from what I’ve heard, a hell of an assassin in her own right. But she is not going to be capable of making the kinds of hard decisions that a First Blade is going to have to make in the coming years. Can you imagine her sending one of us out on a mission that might kill us? It would shred her.”
“Point,” I said, in the exact same tone I used when someone snuck in an unfair hit on me in a fencing match.
“And, that leaves you,” said Faran. Before I could put up any other names, she held up a hand. “Who else is there? Really? Every other one of the Blades formally invested by Namara is a traitor to one degree or another. That lets them all out en masse.”
She touched a finger to the swords on her back. “Concede for a moment that the job doesn’t require a properly attuned pair of these, and move on to the younger generation. Kumi hasn’t the weight of personality. Neither does Xin. Roric might grow into it someday, but he’s not there yet. Maryam is too angry—she can be goaded like a bull. Javan is wonderful, but he doesn’t have the field experience and he never will now. Hell, lack of field experience is true of all the others, too.”
“And Faran Ghostwind?” I asked. “What about her?”
“Maybe, someday, if I ever manage to get enough of my humanity back.”
“You look plenty human to me.”
“Said the man who calls me young monster.”
I felt like she’d kicked me in the chest. “I’ve never meant it that way.”
She laughed. “No, you haven’t. But just as Siri is not wrong about how dangerous it would be to trust her, your joking name isn’t wrong about what I am. Oh, it’s more wrong now than it was when you rescued me from the Durkoth, and it gets a little wronger every day that I spend learning from you and Triss and the others how to be human again. But it’s not wrong. I am more of a killer than any of you except maybe Kelos. I’m good at, I like doing it, and I sleep like a baby afterward.
“I am learning in here”—she touched a finger to her forehead—“when it is and isn’t the right choice. But that’s all head and none of it heart. If I’m smart, and lucky, and I continue to spend time with people like you and Triss, I may feel it here someday, too.” She put her palm on her chest. “But until that day, the last thing in the world that anyone should do is hand me the leadership of an order of mage assassins. I want to not be a monster, Aral. I want it very badly, but I’m not there yet.”
Oh, Aral, I bleed for her.
Me, too, Triss. Me, too.
I reached out a hand and caught Faran’s shoulder. “Pause a moment, I want to look you in the eyes.”
We both stopped on the trail and Faran turned toward me. For the first time I understood in my heart that she really was a girl no longer. She was a smart, tough, badly damaged woman, and perhaps my closest friend in the world barring Triss.
“I know that you believe what you just said, Faran. And I know that there’s a good deal of truth to what you say about the girl I rescued. But I think you’re at least a little bit wrong about who you are now.” I touched a fingertip to the spot between her breasts. “I believe that you do feel these things here. I think that at least some of the stuff that you say you’ve only learned with your head