I was smiling, but there was no way to fake hate, or at least, I did not know how to yet.
I looked at Commander Rel. At her face, the cold mask, the eyes that had watched Bari and Dara die in a previous loop, and my eyes traced to her hand, the same hands that had crushed them.
Perhaps in the loops I had been running away from the camp, Bari and Dara may have survived the small eruption of Khaaz for a while, and they may have fallen into her hands.
Guilt, shame, rage, hate... so many negative emotions passed through my heart at the moment, and I could only whisper, even as the air began to reverberate with the power that she was building up above her staff.
"You killed them," I said. "You kill because you are told to kill... You always do, and that makes you even more pathetic."
Rel’s expression did not change. "I do not know what you are talking about."
"You will." I took a step forward. "I made a promise. When you killed them, I made a promise. I told you I would rip out your heart and make you look at it."
Orath’s eyes flickered. "Commander, kill him now."
Rel’s spell launched, but it was too late. I had noticed that Commander Rel, for all her coldness, seemed to be someone who overprepared when she faced unexpected crises.
What she released was a compression bolt, similar to what she had used against Bari, but far denser as she had used more Anima in this spell. If it hits me, even with my upgrades, I would be reduced to a fine mist.
The bolt crossed the ten metres between us in less time than it takes to blink.
My eyes that were blue began to glow, and the world slowed down.
I could fight her and possibly win. The Khaazim I had been killing were Adepts in their own right, but I had never killed anyone before, and there was a slight hesitation in my heart to do this.
My parents may not be the best people, but they had raised me to respect and treat my fellow man as people and not statistics, and even now, with everything she had done to me... I still hesitated.
It was then that I realized what this hesitation meant... it was the last of my innocence that I was clutching onto with a white death grip.
From the moment my friends were killed in front of me, and the knowledge that my family and everything I knew was about to suffer a fate worse than death, I knew that I would need to kill people, a lot of people.
And I did not want to do that, please... I don’t want to watch the light leave the eyes of anyone, to see them choke in their own blood.
I had never truly known hate until I woke up in my tent a moment ago, and the world went mad. I had every excuse to follow this part, but that small part of me refuses to let go.
At this moment, I did not know whether to laugh or cry. After all I had gone through, it seemed that I needed an excuse to kill someone, and I blamed Lightning Incarnate for giving me the time to think through this problem instead of reacting.
With the incredible crises inside my head, a memory from the past slipped into my mind. I had forgotten about this memory, but my reshaped soul was a depth filled with myriad experiences, and I was able to touch it.
I was eleven when they beheaded the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and I have spent a long time since trying to unlearn the lesson old Tomas taught me about it, and at the moment, that lesson was the truth that I needed.
∞
They brought her into the central square on a market morning. She was perhaps twenty-five. I did not have the vocabulary then for what made her beautiful; I only knew that the whole square went quiet when they walked her in.
She did not weep. She looked out over the crowd with grey eyes, calm, almost gentle, and when those eyes passed over me, I felt singled out and warmed and chosen, an eleven-year-old boy certain in that instant that if everyone would just look at her properly, they would see they had made a terrible mistake.
"You’re doing it too," old Tomas said, beside me.
I had not heard him come up. He was leaning on his stick with his dog sitting against his boot, and he was not looking at the woman. He was looking at me with an expression I could not read.
"Doing what?"
"What every one of them did," he said. "Every man they pulled out of the ditches on the north road. Forty of them, last count, over three years. You’re doing the exact thing they did, right up until the moment the knives came out of the trees."
I did not understand.
"She didn’t kill anyone, boy. Not with her hands. She didn’t have to." He nodded at the square, the quiet, the held breath of two hundred people who could not look away from a pretty face. "She’d sit by the north road looking like that, with a turned wheel or a sad story, and a traveller would stop, because who wouldn’t stop, who wouldn’t want to help, who could look at a face like that and think danger, and her husband and his men would come out of the trees behind him while he was still being kind. Forty graves. She dug every one of them with that face. It was the only shovel she ever needed."
The hot indignant thing in my chest curdled into something I had no name for.
"But she’s—" I started, and stopped, because I heard it as I said it, and it was the stupidest sentence in the world.
"She’s beautiful," Tomas finished for me, not unkindly. "Yes. That’s what I’m telling you. That’s the whole of what I’m telling you, and I want you to keep it your whole life."
He shifted his weight on the stick. "A face doesn’t know a thing about what its owner has done. It’s just a face. The soft feeling you’ve got in your chest right now, the one saying not her, surely not her, that feeling is good, mostly, it’ll keep you human. But it is also the feeling that filled forty graves, because forty men felt it too, and trusted it, and died of it. The beautiful ones aren’t innocent more often than the ugly ones. They just get away with it longer, because of boys like you, and men like the ones in the ditch."
The dog leaned harder against his boot. Somewhere, a drum had started. That drum was a signal that the blade was about to fall.
"Some people have to die, Elric," he said, and his voice was very tired, "Not many. Fewer than the angry sort would tell you. But some. And the way you tell which is the graves. You count the graves, and you ask who dug them, and you don’t let a pair of grey eyes do your counting for you."
He turned me by the shoulder, gently, away from the square, and walked me up the lane with his dog trotting after, and he kept his hand on my shoulder the whole way so I would not turn around, and behind us the drum stopped, and the square made a single low sound, and then it was over.
He bought me something warm from the baker’s and did not make me talk.
∞
I think about old Tomas, and I knew he died not long after, soon his dog died as it stopped eating, and I had forgotten this moment in some parts.
Commander Rel has grey eyes, as it happens. She is not beautiful, not the way the woman in the square was, but she has the other thing, the thing that does my counting for me if I let it, she is competent, she is reasonable, she sounds like someone you could talk sense to, she organised every retreat in every loop before she started organising the opposite.
The soft feeling wants to rise. Not her, surely, she’s only a soldier, she’s only following orders, her husband is dying out there on the line.
So I count the graves.
I count the eastern reach. I count two hundred Adepts in a handful of minutes. I count a continent sold and a camp full of people who were always meant to be ash and a hole in Bari’s chest.
I do not let her grey eyes do my counting for me.
"I want your heart in my hand," I tell her, and I mean it, and old Tomas would understand.
I could not kill another person because I hated them, but I could count the graves they left behind, and the more they would make if I left them alive.