Chapter 19: The Second Execution
ULF
New moon. No light in the sky, only the dirty glow off the street lanterns below, and none of it climbed to the rooftops.
Perfect.
I'd watched Cheese for three nights since Harren died in the healer's bed. Same routine every night. Stumble home near midnight. Climb to his third-floor room. Drink until he stopped being awake.
No guards. No protection. Daemon hadn't come to him, or he had and Cheese was too stupid to change a single thing about how he lived.
Harren had instincts, at least. He'd turned in that alley before I reached him. Cheese was only cruel, and cruelty isn't a skill.
Tonight I'd fix that.
The tenement leaned. Five stories of rotting timber and sagging washing lines, packed with people too poor to complain about the smell.
I lay flat on the roof across the street, chin on my forearms. Rain had come through at dusk and the tiles were still cold under my ribs. I waited.
Cheese appeared on schedule, weaving up the street with a bottle swinging from two fingers, singing off-key. A woman leaned out of a window and told him to choke. He laughed and went in through the ground floor.
I counted. Five minutes for him to climb the stairs, work the latch, collapse.
Then I moved.
Ten kilograms. The world always went strange at that weight, as if the ground had stopped wanting me.
Geppo. I stepped to the edge and kicked the air. The technique still felt wrong every time, kicking nothing and rising anyway, but it worked. One air-jump carried me across the gap. The second brought me level with his window.
I landed on the narrow sill, light as a dropped feather. Tested the shutters. Closed, not latched.
Amateur.
I eased them open and slipped inside.
The room stank. Sweat, spilled wine, piss, something rotting in a corner that had been food a week ago. Cheese lay on a filthy pallet, fully clothed, boots on, the bottle still clutched in one hand. Snoring. Loud, wet, obscene.
I stood over him and looked at his face in the dark. Ratty features. A weak chin. Eyelids twitching.
I knew exactly what he'd have done, given another year and Daemon's gold: a room in the Red Keep, a knife, a mother made to choose between her son and her daughter.
I hesitated anyway. One breath long. Then I stopped.
I shifted my weight. One thousand kilograms. The floorboards groaned and my feet sank into them a finger's depth. I reached down and put my hand over his mouth and nose.
His eyes shot open.
He saw me. Recognition and terror mixing together in that instant, and he tried to scream.
My hand, hardened with Tekkai, didn't move at all. The scream died as a vibration against my palm, no louder than a fly against glass.
He struggled. Weak, uncoordinated, drunk. He clawed at my forearm and his nails broke on skin gone hard as ship's timber. He kicked. Thrashed. The pallet creaked under him. The bottle rolled off the edge and hit the boards with a dull thunk.
I held. I watched his eyes bulge and the veins stand out along his forehead, and then I stopped watching and counted instead, because counting was easier.
Thirty. The struggles peaked. Pure animal panic.
Sixty. They weakened. His hands slid off my arm and fell open on the pallet.
Ninety. He went still.
I held another thirty past that. Making sure.
Then I checked him. Throat first, two fingers under the jaw. Nothing. Wrist. Nothing.
Dead.
I straightened and let my weight go back to what it should be. The floorboards creaked as the pressure came off them.
Stage it.
I rolled him onto his back, took up the fallen bottle, and poured the wine over his face until it soaked the front of his shirt. It would cover any mark my hand had left. Whoever came through that door would smell it before they saw him and decide he'd choked on his own vomit.
I checked the room twice. No sign of a struggle. The pallet was filthy already, so my footprints meant nothing.
I went to the window, pulled the shutters closed from the inside, and worked a thin length of wire through the gap until the latch dropped. Locked from within. No entry.
Then I dropped my weight again, stepped up onto the sill, and kicked into the air.
Geppo across the street. Roof tiles under my boots. I looked back.
His window: dark, shuttered, silent.
By morning someone on the stairs would smell it. They'd find him and call it what the city calls it. No one would come. No one would ask.
I went down off the roof and home through streets with nothing in them but rats.
My room. I stripped off every piece of what I'd worn and fed it into the brazier one item at a time. Fibers, wine, anything that put me in that room.
Then I scrubbed my hands. Harsh soap, coarse cloth, water hot enough to hurt. The skin went red, then pink, then white.
Clean. Physically clean.
I could still feel him. The kick of his heels. The exact moment the fight went out of his arms.
My stomach turned over. I made myself eat anyway, because a body needs fuel whatever the mind is doing about it. Bread. Cheese. Water. I heard the joke my own hands had made, and I ate it.
The food wanted to come straight back up. I swallowed hard and kept it down.
Two men. I'd killed two men.
Harren with poison, from across a city, on a schedule, without ever having to look at him again. Cheese with my hands, close enough to feel his jaw work under my palm.
Both would have murdered children. Both deserved death.
But I'd been their executioner without trial, without proof beyond what I remembered of a future that hadn't happened here yet.
A year ago I'd been tired in a way that had nothing to do with muscle, and I had never once put my hand over another man's face.
Stop. It's done.
I lay down and closed my eyes and sleep didn't come for hours. I caught myself counting at the ceiling. Thirty. Sixty. Ninety.
When it finally came, I dreamed of Jaehaerys laughing and Jaehaera setting pebbles in a careful line, and a world where neither of them ever had to scream.
Three days went by in work and training. Loading Corlys's ships until my shoulders burned. Running Rokushiki forms in a warehouse nobody used. Staying away from the godswood, because I didn't know what my face would do if Helaena looked at it.
On day seventy-nine, Mira found me on the dock steps.
"Cheese is dead."
I kept coiling rope. "When?"
"Found in his room three days back. They're saying he choked on his own vomit. Drunk's death." She shrugged with one shoulder. "Pauper's burial. No one came."
"Nobody asked questions?"
"Who'd ask? Healer's man stood in the doorway long enough to say he stank of wine and went back down." She scratched her elbow. "Two off the Watch's old rolls dead inside a fortnight. That's a strange run of luck for one city."
"The city's full of strange luck."
"It is." She didn't leave. "Did you know him?"
I put coin in her palm, more than the news was worth, and closed her fingers on it.
She looked at the coin, then at me, and made her own decision. "My brother says the gulls came inland early this year. He thinks it means a hard winter."
"Tell your brother to stock salt fish."
"Salt fish and a heavier door," she said. "He'll do neither. He never does."
She went.
Done. Both heads of the beast, dead. Blood and Cheese, gone before either of them ever got near Helaena's children. No one would come up through the undercroft passages. No one would make a mother choose.
The Dance would still come. But this one horror, this specific nightmare, was out of the world.
I should have felt triumph. Relief. Something.
Nothing came. Just the cold flat knowledge of a job finished.
The godswood, day eighty. Our scheduled meeting.
I got there early, sat with my back against the weirwood, and looked at my hands until the light moved.
Footsteps. Light ones. Familiar.
Helaena came alone, Septa Teora waiting at the entrance with her back turned. She gathered her skirts, sat beside me, and said nothing at all.
We stayed that way a long while. Ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Wind moved the red leaves above us and dropped one in her lap and she didn't brush it off.
Then her hand found mine.
"The beast is dead," she whispered.
I didn't move. "What?"
"The dreams changed. The beast beneath the boards. It's gone now. Rotted completely. No more two heads. Just... nothing." She turned those too-knowing eyes on me. "You killed it."
Not a question.
I didn't confirm it. Didn't deny it either.
"What's there instead?"
"Floor," she said. "Only floor. There's a place where a thing used to be and now the boards go all the way across. I keep looking for it and it isn't there."
Her thumb traced slow patterns on my palm. "You're different now. Harder. Colder. But you're not the beast. You're still you."
"How can you be sure?"
"Because the beast wanted to hurt them. You want to protect them." She leaned her head against my shoulder. "That's the difference."
"It cost something."
"Everything alive pays for what it eats." Her voice stayed soft. "The garden spider eats her own web every morning and spins it back by dark. She doesn't pretend she never did."
"And if there are more of them? If I have to do it again?"
"Then you'll come here afterward and sit under this tree and look at your hands," she said. "That's how I'll know it's still you."
We sat there while the sun crossed the yard and the weirwood's shadow swung slow across our feet. Neither of us said anything more.
And for the first time since I'd put my hand over Cheese's face, the tightness under my ribs let go a little.