This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2022 by Alix Heintzman

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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  ISBN-13: 9781662509575 (digital)

  Cover design by Will Staehle

  Cover image: © Everett Collection / Shutterstock

  You were a child the first time the Saint of War came to you.

  You had fallen ill again, in the tiresome and inevitable way of the underfed, and the steward had sent you out to the barn so the Lord and Lady might not be disturbed by your fevered moaning. You weren’t missed; you were one of a dozen fatherless, half-feral children that squabbled and starved in the shadows of the keep. Only the stable boy came to visit you: a waifish, bowlegged creature who had trailed after you like a stray dog ever since you’d taken a beating from the cook in his place.

  You hadn’t done it out of any particular affection, but you liked the way he looked at you afterward, as if you were a hero stepped out of some bard’s song, tall as an oak and twice as strong. Now he crouched at your side, sometimes holding a cup to your chapped lips or pressing the fragile bones of his hand to your brow. You thought you would probably die soon.

  And then the Saint came.

  You were staring up at the rotten thatch of the roof, wondering if anyone would remember your name long enough to mark your grave, and then you were looking at a woman’s face.

  She didn’t seem much like the saints in the songs. Her lips were sunken where teeth were missing, and her skin was puckered with old scars. There was a fresh wound above her jaw, livid and weeping, and the armor that lapped her shoulders was dented and scored with battle. Her eyes were rather fine, you thought—the lavish blue of the Virgin’s own robe, just like yours—but she carried no cross and wore a rusted mail hood instead of a halo.

  But she said, in a voice like a dull blade dragged across a stone, “I am the Saint of War,” and you lost a great deal of faith in the bards’ songs. “Rise,” she said, “your kingdom needs you.”

  You rose. Your joints grated, and your vision spun in sickening lurches, but you rose, because she was a saint and you were nothing, because no one had ever needed you before.

  “Go,” the Saint said, “he waits for you.”

  You stumbled out of the dimness of the stables and into the hard light of day. You could only open your eyes for a few stinging seconds at a time, so that the yard emerged in a series of flashes. Strange men on horseback. Winter light on steel. The sleek, foreign shine of well-bred horses.

  You kept walking until you couldn’t, until the pale stalks of your legs simply folded up on themselves.

  Someone high above you said, “Is this the girl?” and someone else answered, in a voice like a well-greased hinge, “Yes, sire.”

  Then there were boots beside your face. You rolled onto your back and saw, for the second time that day, the face of a saint. This one looked much more like the songs said: young and beautiful, entirely unmarred. There was a shine to him, a subtle emanation of health and prosperity. He even wore a halo, you thought; you had never seen a crown before.

  He asked your name, but before you could answer, you heard your Lady’s voice, breathless and mean, “Forgive us, my Prince, she is no one! A devil, sent to plague us.”

  The Lady had often called you a devil, as had the cook, the steward, the master of hounds, all the laundresses, and the woodcutter, but it had not previously concerned you. Now you found yourself ashamed, filled with a freshly hatched fear that you would be banished from the golden presence of the Prince, unwanted, unneeded.

  But he only smiled down at you. He wore an expression you had never seen before, an avid, scorching hunger, which you thought must be love.

  He lifted you in his arms—you were hideously aware of every scabbed sore, every flea scuttling through the reddish mat of your hair—and said to the Lady, “Well, she is my Devil now.”

  And you found you did not mind being a devil, so long as you were his.

  The Prince slid you atop the fine leather of his saddle and mounted behind you. He made a small, disgusted noise, and muttered, “You had better be sure, Father.”

  The soft, well-greased voice came again, emerging from a little priest so drab and ragged that you thought at first he was a stray shadow thrown by the Prince’s radiance. “I am sure, sire.”

  The Prince flicked his reins in answer.

  You rode through the gates half-convinced it was another fever dream, that you would wake soon and be no one again: a sickly scrap of a girl born in the darkness and destined to die there, forgotten by everyone except a bowlegged stable boy.

  But it was no dream. When you die, little Devil, a kingdom will fall to its knees and crawl to your bier. In a thousand years and a thousand after that, they will still sing of the Prince and his Devil.

  So long as you do as I say.

  You looked behind you only once as you rode away from that place, and were surprised to see the little stable boy limping after the Prince’s procession. He was so persistent and pathetic that, on the third or fourth day, the Prince relented, and the stable boy became your squire.

  You were a young woman the second time the Saint of War came to you, and you were about to die again.

  It would not be a quick death. For seven years the Prince and all his knights had trained you with sword and spear and shield, and you had taken to them with a skill that verged on the unnatural. It was as if your body already knew what was required of it, as if your teachers were only reminding you of lessons you’d learned in the cradle. The footwork was a childhood game you’d half forgotten, and the weight of the hilt in your palm was the touch of a dear friend returned to you. The Prince visited the yard often, watching you with that wolfish hunger, and you worked harder for him so that you might become the thing he needed so badly.

  You grew strong over those years, and fast, until your body was no longer something you wore but something you wielded, and Lord, what a weapon it became.

  And still: you were about to die. The Prince had many enemies—as the great always did, he said—and there were hundreds of them waiting on the field below you and so many fewer fighting alongside you.

  You were not overly concerned by your own death, but you didn’t want to die yet, before you had served your Prince, before the bards knew your name.

  The horns blew. The drums sounded. You drew your sword with a shaking hand.

  And the Saint returned to you.

  She was unchanged. The lush blue eyes, the mail hood, even the livid mess of her jaw, still unhealed.

  She said, in a more practical voice than you remembered, “The pikeman with the leather doublet has a knife in his boot.” And: “Ware the archers to the south when they unhorse you.” And: “Pull your hair loose from your helm. If they do not know you, they cannot fear you.”

  The Saint left.

  You pulled your hair loose from beneath your helm. Your squire had braided it neatly that morning, lingering and fussing, but now you shook it loose down your back. When you rode into battle it streamed behind you like a bright-red banner, and when, at the end, you knelt before your Prince and presented him with the head of his enemy—the face so much younger than you’d expected, just a boy, really, his eyes milky and afraid—your hair hung in clotted curtains on either side of your face.

  The Prince did not seem to mind—he kissed you twice on each cheek and called you his savior, his beautiful Devil—but it took your squire hours and hours to rinse it clean, and even then the faint metal smell of blood lingered.

  By the time you were twenty, the Saint of War had come to you seven more times.

  It was she who showed you the loose hinge on the Black Baron’s chest plate, where the tip of your sword might slip beneath his clavicle. It was she who bade you lie as if dead on the battlefield and rise from beneath the piled corpses to strike down the False King. It was she who whispered to you the arc of each blade, the weight of each blow, so that battle lost all immediacy for you and became something more like a memory, a set of elegant red steps you’d learned long ago.

  She was an unmerciful master, your Saint. Under her eye you took no prisoners and spared no innocent, no matter how young or old. You fought and you killed and you fought again, until the bards began to sing of the redheaded Devil, until the merest glimpse of your hair sent your enemies running before you.

  The Holly Knight did not run. She rode out to meet you with a mad, wild grin. You were forced to take her spearpoint deep into the meat of your thigh, the head burrowing right down to the femur, so that you might pull her close and slide your blade across her throat.

  You were weeks abed after that, and all you recalled was a pair of thin, graceful hands digging into the hot muscle of your leg, stitching the flesh, holding cool water to your

lips.

  The Prince granted you a sumptuous room in the keep for your convalescence and came to visit as soon as you could walk again. He watched your limping, pulled-short steps and smiled his golden smile. “Well done, my Devil. Tomorrow, we ride north.”

  Your squire watched him leave with a strange, sullen resentment. You scolded him, and he bowed his head. “The Prince takes much from you, my lady.”

  “He made me, boy.” You had never asked your squire’s name, because it did not matter. You tilted your chin high. “He loves me.”

  Your squire met your gaze then, and you thought you saw a flash of mockery beneath the long lashes.

  You sent him away from you, too furious even to strike him.

  That evening, when you feasted at the right hand of your Prince and he raised his cup to toast his Devil; when he presented you with a shield the color of hell itself and the whole hall cheered; you caught your squire’s bitter gaze and thought, with vicious pride: He loves me.

  And days after that, when you lay again on the hard earth of the war camp, your squire’s arms wrapped chastely around you to keep the frosting night at bay; when your leg screamed white agony and you could not sleep because every time you closed your eyes you remembered the wicked shine of the Holly Knight’s eyes, going dim; you thought again, even more viciously, in a kind of terror: He loves me.

  You were not old when the Saint came to you that final time, but you felt old.

  So much had changed, so quickly. Your kingdom, once small and unremarkable, had grown fat, spilling over its borders like flesh around a tourniquet. Your Prince, once a younger son with a slim band around his brow, had become a King, with a great thorned crown of gold so heavy it made the tendons strain in the back of his neck. Even his ragged little priest wore fine-woven linen now.

  Your name, once nothing, known by no one, was praised in every hall and toasted at every table. The same bards you once followed through your Lord’s halls now trailed after you like flies after the grave wagon.

  You didn’t always recognize yourself in their songs—you were no great beauty, and your sword was not forged in hellfire—but you recognized your enemies.

  Although sometimes it seemed to you that you remembered them wrongly. Events became unsteady in your mind, the details blurred. Had you slit the Holly Knight’s throat or beheaded her? Had the False King died instantly, your knifepoint in his brain, or had he spoken to you? Had his lips been foamy pink as he asked: Is it worth it?

  And other times—at night, mostly, in dreams—you remembered them too well, too clearly. You woke panting and sweating, your body fighting battles you’d already won or hadn’t yet fought.

  Once you dreamed you were killing a boy in some distant city, and you woke to find your sword in your hand, the blade cutting down toward your squire’s upturned face, his eyes like grave dirt. He did not flinch or scream. He simply sat beneath the arc of your sword as if God Himself bade him be still. You wrenched the sword aside so belatedly that a soft lock of his hair fell to the dirt. You called him a fool and a child and many worse names. “I could have killed you,” you said, and he had answered, obscurely, “You never do.”

  You spurned sleep after that. You kept more watches than you should and rode into battle with your joints screaming and your eyes glittering. It made you clumsy and stupid on the field so that you returned to your squire bruised and bleeding.

  By the time you arrived at the Gray City, you felt older and more scarred than the face of the moon. You made camp so close to the walls that you could hear the soft human sounds of the city: the crackle of cook fires, the barking of dogs, the overbright laughter of men who knew they would die in the morning.

  Your squire knelt behind you, his fingers combing dutifully through the knots of your hair. “Lady,” he said, “the Gray City has never fallen.”

  You said nothing.

  Your squire’s hands went still. “Do you truly mean to die, just so the King can hang a new map behind his throne?” Then, more perceptively, unforgivably, “Just so he will bury you at his feet, like a loyal dog?” His voice caught and broke. “Is it worth it?”

  You jerked away from him, rising and turning so that he knelt at your feet, head tilted back, throat bared. You pitied him, almost hated him, for the way he looked: weak and vulnerable, just another poor bastard whose name the bards would never sing. Everything you’d once been and now despised.

  “Yes,” you told him, and meant it.

  The Saint came to you at dawn, and you took the Gray City before dusk.

  It was not easy. The people fought with a reckless desperation that made you feel strangely ill. A stone smashed your right knee. A bone knife pierced your cheek, the tip scraping obscenely along your molars. By the time you slew the last of them, the sun was setting redly at your back.

  You were wiping your sword clean when the Saint said, “Look to your left.”

  You turned to find a child holding his father’s axe. You were not afraid. You knew—from the tremble of his chin and the wavering edge of the axe—that he would die in a single clean stroke delivered with a butcher’s mercy. He would be forgotten before his body cooled.

  You lifted your sword. And you—you who had slaughtered a thousand boys just like him, who had committed every sin and murder in the name of your King—hesitated.

  The boy did not.

  A clumsy downward chop. The clang of your sword falling to the earth. Someone shouting your name over and over.

  You killed the boy in a single reflexive motion and stood swaying and blinking, dizzied. You remained conscious up until the moment you looked down and saw your own hand lying on the steps and understood that you would never again hold a sword.

  You couldn’t name the emotion you felt, in that last second before you fell into your squire’s arms, but I can: relief.

  You woke in a courtyard you’d never seen, without recalling how you’d arrived.

  You remembered the sick jostle of horseback, your body held upright only by someone else’s. You remembered the castle gates opening, a thousand voices raised in victory, thrown flower petals adhering to the ruin of your cheek, the stump of your wrist. You remembered familiar hands peeling the petals gently away.

  But your squire was not here now. There was only your beautiful King, seated at the edge of a low stone pool, and his priest, watching you with colorless eyes.

  The King said, “Rise.”

  It was difficult. Your skin was hot and feverish, your limbs pinned to the earth by the weight of your mail. You wished, petulantly, silently, for your squire.

  But you rose, before stumbling back down to one knee. “My King,” you said.

  He rested his hand lightly on the crown of your head, rings clinking on the iron of your hood. “My Devil,” he said, and there was nothing you would not do for him when he spoke in this voice: fond, fatherly, full of love. “The time has come. Look into the pool, and tell me what you see.”

  The water was a deep, viscous black, like burned fat, which seemed to swallow the light rather than reflect it. You stared into it, and eventually you said, “I see a girl. Ill, I think, maybe dying. There is dirty straw around her, and her hair is . . .”

  “Who is she?” the King asked, patiently.

  You opened your mouth to say I don’t know, but then you closed it because you could not lie to your King. Had you not lain in that same sullied straw, your lips cracked, your skin scratched and weeping? Were you not always afraid that you would wake to find yourself back in that stable, waiting for a death as unremarkable as your birth?

  You said, hoarsely, “She is I,” and the King said, “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand, sire.”

  The King dipped his hand idly into the water. “This pool was here long before the castle. My priest tells me it was once a spring of some kind, or a pond.”

  His priest said, “A lake, sire.”

  “A lake, then. A place where time runs together, the was and will be. My forefathers used it as a mirror. A way to see their own histories and futures. But then Ambrosius came to me—what a filthy, low creature he was then!—and told me I could do more than look.”

  The King faced you now. He was just as handsome as he had been that first day in the yard, a little older but still unmarred, his flesh whole and smooth. “Do you remember the first time your Saint came to you? The words she spoke?”

 

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