48. Gavriel
Gavriel
For the first time since Valerian cut me loose from the death-link, I understand what I’ve been given, and I hate it, because what I’ve been given is the chance to watch her die and go on living.
The King comes across the field and everything stops.
Both armies, ours and theirs, pull back from the space between him and my Queen, because even the mindless low ones feel it, that this is the fight the whole war folds down into.
And I’m on the wrong side of it. I’m a hundred yards off, arm hanging dead from where his cold cracked my shield, wading through the last of the enemy to reach her, and I’m not going to make it.
A day ago, if she died, I’d have died with her, and there was a horrible mercy in that. I never had to watch. Now I have to watch.
“Gavriel.” Valerian’s beside me, grey, swaying, spent past anything I’ve ever seen from him. “Don’t. If you throw yourself at that thing you die for nothing and she has to see it. The best thing we can do for her now is stay alive so she has something to come back to.”
“I can’t just stand here.”
“You can. It’s the hardest thing a Guardian ever does.” His hand grips my good shoulder. “You guard her by being here when she turns round. That’s the job now. Not dying with her. Living for her. It’s worse, and it’s the job.”
He’s right. He’s always right, and I’ve never hated it more.
So I do the hardest thing I’ve ever done, which is nothing.
I stand in the ash of my Queen’s kingdom with a dead arm and a cracked shield and I watch the cold king back her towards the last of her fire, and I don’t throw my life away, because she asked me not to, because she gave me my own death back and the least I can do is not spend it uselessly in front of her.
Luka drags himself up beside us, smoking, half-broken from being thrown a hundred feet.
Azaan drops out of a failing storm, grey-faced.
The four of us, all that’s left of the tip of the spear, and none of us can reach her.
All of us would die in a heartbeat if it would help, and it won’t, so we don’t.
“She’s going to do something mad,” Luka rasps. “I can feel it through the bond. She’s stopped being frightened. That’s when she’s most dangerous.”
“Or most about to get herself killed,” Azaan whispers.
“Both,” I say, and I find I believe it. “With her it’s always both.”
We watch our Queen square her small shoulders in front of the thing that folded a world into a book, and I pray to gods that have no power in this realm, pray for the first time in my long life, that whatever mad, brave, impossible thing she’s about to do, it’s enough, and that I get to keep the life she gave back to me by putting it at her side instead of in her grave.
Hold on, my Queen, I send down the bond, the way I did in Mordecai’s fortress, for her, only for her. We’re here. We’re all still here. Do the mad thing. We’ve got you.
And across the ruined field, so far away, I see her lift her chin.