Free Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged by Kelly McCullough Page B

whether I’m glad about that or disappointed,” said Maylien.
    “Devin’s not all that great a Blade either, so it’s probably even.”
    “You misunderstand me. I’m disappointed that I won’t get the chance to kill him myself,
     but glad that you won’t have to.” Now she laughed. “Don’t give me that look. I’ve
     seen the two of you talking, and I’ve heard you talk about him. I know how hard it
     would be for you to have to kill him, and since I care about you, I’m glad you won’t
     have to make that choice.”
    I didn’t want to talk about Devin, so I asked, “What will you do now that the document
     ploy has fallen apart?”
    Maylien took a deep breath. “The slaughter at the Council of Jade will have turned
     many against my uncle, and it can’t go unanswered. I will go to war against the Crown.
     What other choice do I have?”

5

    L ife is identity. When you kill someone, you rob what remains of the body of any true
     relationship with the person that once inhabited it. That was never clearer than when
     you saw someone’s head on a stake. No matter how perfectly preserved the features,
     the
person
was simply gone.
    The Duchess of Tien’s head went up first, a lump of dead flesh impaled on a stake
     and nailed over the traitor’s gate. I watched from the edge of the square as it was
     followed by more than two dozen more heads, including two earls, five counts, eight
     barons, and a dozen mixed clan chiefs and other lesser nobles. The other thirty or
     so casualties of what was being called the Jade massacre were being hailed as martyrs
     for the Crown and given a mass state funeral paid for by the king’s personal house
     purse. At least, that was the word on the street.
    The rumors said that Thauvik was claiming that funding the memorials out of his own
     pocket was the least he could do to honor the fallen patriots who had given their
     lives to save his own. They were also saying that more arrests andexecutions were expected at any moment, which sounded to me like a not so subtle signal
     to any nobles who might want to dispute the official version of events.
    The Lord Justicer himself supervised the display of the heads, an operation that took
     well over an hour. The thick oak beam where they nailed up the stakes didn’t have
     the room for even a dozen traitors, so while one crew was putting up heads and branding
     their cheeks with the inverted crown of the traitor, another was mounting two more
     beams. A huge crowd gathered in the square during the process, and not the typical
     bunch of local knockabouts and urban poor for whom the displaying of traitors provided
     a cheap morning’s entertainment.
    Oh, they were there as well, and pleased as always to see their overlords suffering
     some of the same rough justice that usually fell most heavily on those who could least
     afford it. But there were as many or more in the crowd that had calluses built with
     dueling swords, or the more utilitarian weapons of personal guards, as there were
     those whose rough hands came from the tools of laborers. That spoke volumes about
     the way the ruling class felt about the deaths of the previous day.
    What said even more was that not a single one of the many nobles and their guards
     wore the crests and colors that their respective stations would normally have required.
     Cowls and hoods were much in evidence as well, far more than the slight chill would
     reasonably have justified. The nobility did not want to be seen to be in attendance.
     That suited me just fine, as it made my own cowl and loose poncho that much less visible.
    Once the last head was nailed in place, the Lord Justicer mounted the scaffolding
     the soldiers had used for the work and, with a face the color of yesterday’s rice,
     unrolled a huge scroll. This was the proclamation of outlawry for the dead, and its
     first reading here at the traitor’s gate was the main reason for the noble presence.
    The Lord Justicer took