Rebellion

CHAPTER 113

The dreadful hour had come. Before Rix led his army out to an impossible battle, he had to do his tragic duty to a friend.

Tali and Rix slipped out of the chaos of the war tent and went up the hill, then down the other side to the outbuilding where Tobry was chained. Rix dismissed the guards, who were glad to go — even to bloody war.

Tali took hold of the left-hand set of chains, and Rix the right, and they led the hopelessly mad shifter that had once been Tobry Lagger out for a last look at the land he had loved.

They took him further down the hill, heading away from the battle plain to a chuckling, pebbly-bottomed stream. Despite the season there was a scattering of wildflowers across the meadow by the water and, in the distance, a view of snowy mountains. By the big trees and the sweet water, they stopped and chained Tobry to the trunk of the largest tree.

“He was a dreadful cynic,” said Rix. “He mocked every convention, and everything I ever believed in. But it was just an expression of his pain at losing the house and the family that had been everything to him. I know that now.”

“He took me to the Honouring Ball,” said Tali, “and though I couldn’t dance a step, in his arms I was the queen of the ball.”

They bowed to their ruined friend. Momentarily, the shifter’s eyes — Tobry’s eyes — shone with love and regret. For a few seconds he was a noble man again, not a rabid beast.

Tali’s own eyes burned, but she could not weep, and the moment passed. He was a beast again, snarling and slavering. And she was just meat that he could not reach.

She opened Tobry’s shirt down the front, baring his chest and belly. Rix prepared the brazier and laid the packet of powdered lead beside it. Burning the twin livers on a fire fuelled with powdered lead was the one sure way to kill a caitsthe.

“Now?” said Rix.

“Now,” said Tali.

He embraced her. She clung desperately to him, as old friends do. In her right hand she held the disembowelling knife. Her eyes drifted to the brazier. Burning Tobry’s livers would rob her of her life’s greatest joy and worst pain in the same moment.

Rix shook his head in grief, then raised his sword and prepared to strike. Only now did he realise the truth of the mural he had painted in the vault below Palace Ricinus, eleven weeks and a full lifetime ago.