Chapter Nine

A Fight For a Soul

We flew together, Nicolo's power overwhelming me, bearing down on me until I was forced to duck and roll away, feeling his blade slice the air a bare half inch above my cheek.

Keeping my distance was the better option. When we were apart, my superior speed and agility allowed me to deal with the strength of his attack. It also gave me the chance to keep talking.

"Don't you want to know about your people?"

"My people live in the Great Castle," Nicolo growled back between blows. "They raised me, they looked after me when I had no one. Balduin was my only friend and the queen treated me like a son. Until you killed her!"

"I never hurt the queen!" I shouted back. "That was your friend."

"I will kill you just to keep the lies from emptying from your mouth."

"You can't fight the truth, Nicolo." He didn't say anything more so I continued. "And you say your people live in the castle? What about in Simnel?"

The doubt on his face was momentary, but it was there. "I'm glad I found them and I'm glad to know they're alright but they don't know me, they didn't raise me. This is where I belong."

"You are bound here," I went on, narrowing my eyes at him. "Bound to Balduin, and in more ways than one."

"Of course I'm bound to him!"

He didn't understand. "Haven't you ever wondered why your presence keeps him healthy, yet you can't heal anyone else?"

"Shut up and fight!"

He took a couple of big swings at me. I jumped the first and blocked the second, but it was hard enough to knock me off my feet and I went tumbling across the ground, scrabbling back up at the end of it, still talking.

"The bond that exists between you and Balduin was formed that first day you met and it's unique to you two. That's why you can't heal anyone else, Nicolo. The healing bond happens when people of your race make a meaningful spiritual connection. It saved Balduin, but it also changed you."

"What the bloody hell are you going on about?"

"The connection is two-way. You're a different person when you're around him, Nicolo. Think back to…" I ducked, rolled, parried, and scurried back out of his sword range. "… Simnel. Think back to how you felt there, how you were there. Don't you see how different you acted?"

"Maybe that was because of you!" The words were out of his mouth before he could think about them, and he now paused mid-fight, sword raised, as if astounded by the words that had come from his lips. "It was… your pitiless seduction that made me act differently by making me think that… that…" He apparently couldn't find the words to finish the sentence so retreated to the lies he'd told himself. "I'm always different when I take a new girl to my bed."

I shook my head. "I'd love to take the credit, but you became more different the further we got from the Gath. Being away from Balduin allowed you to be more of the man you really are. Tell me that hasn't happened before? Back when the queen sent you away to test the limits of your effect on Balduin… Tell me you didn't feel different then, just as you did in Simnel?"

"Stop talking!" I'd touched a nerve again. "I've had enough." He punctuated the sentence with clashes of his sword against mine, forcing me back into a corner.

It was a stupid thing to do, and if he'd been thinking more clearly, he would've known it; you never give an assassin the advantage of the terrain.

The window ledge at my back gave me a pivot point and as I parried his blade, I leant back on it, driving my foot up in a high kick that caught him under the chin. Nicolo stumbled back and I followed up with a windmill kick that took him to the ground. Launching myself forward, so I was standing over him, I placed the point of my sword at his throat, looking down at his dazed face.

"A few days ago, I didn't know any of this; the history of your people," I continued, noticing there was an absence of fear in his eyes which I didn't know what to make of—either he was prepared to die or he didn't believe I'd do it. "I'd sworn to kill you, not because I wanted to, but for the sake of the Gath, and for the sake of the man I'd known in Simnel, the good man who was lost under the hate-filled man who's taken his place again. I'd come to accept that I couldn't save that man and I took my share of the blame, knowing it was my lies, and the fact that I never told you the truth when I had the chance to do so, that had killed that man. But then I learned more about this bond between you and Balduin and now I know it isn't your fault, Nicolo. It's not your fault that you now are the way you are. More importantly, I know you can be saved; the good Nicolo is still in there if only you can get away from Balduin. A few days out of the Gath are all it would take for you to understand, to see reason, and to realize your mind has been polluted all this time. And as long as I know all that, I can't hurt you."

I lowered my sword and waited to see what he'd do. I hadn't even disarmed him. It was a risk, but I prayed it might be one that would pay off.

This proved to be an error.

"I don't know what your game is." Nicolo was back on his feet in a moment, driving his sword towards me. "If you think that you can seduce me again with pretty words, win back my trust, and then use me as a pawn to kill the king, you are badly mistaken. My loyalty to him is absolute and can't be shaken by the memory of a country dalliance with a cheap whore!"

I wondered if I should point out just how much it cost to hire an assassin of my quality, but that was probably a moot point.

Again, our blades clashed, his strength bearing in on my deftness. I'd always have put deftness above strength because deftness doesn't wear you out, but Nicolo had deep reserves of strength—he could keep this up a while.

"If you've forgotten, or if you choose to ignore, what we meant to each other," I tried a different tack, "then think of your mother. What would she think of a son who burns innocent people in their homes?"

"I'm sure she would be proud of a son who protects his friends," Nicolo countered. "Of a son who defends order and law from the forces of chaos and revolution. It's not pretty, I'll grant you, but it's necessary and my mother would see that."

"I don't think she or any mother would want to see her son imprisoning women and children."

"Order comes at a price."

"Tyranny?"

Nicolo scoffed. "Tyranny is what the criminal calls the law. ‘ I'm not free to do as I please, to rob who I choose, to kill those I don't like '."

"Yes, only the king should be allowed to do that," I snapped back, glaring at him because this whole conversation was becoming frustrating. I would have thought he'd see at least some of the reason in my argument but it seemed I was getting nowhere. "The Nicolo I saw in Simnel valued the common people."

"Of course, I value them," Nicolo replied with a smugness that seemed so alien to the man I'd gotten to know so well. "But we have plenty of them. We can afford to lose a few bad apples."

"Funny how you find bad apples wherever you look. And then again, not funny at all."

"The people are safe from traitors!"

"The people are too terrified to speak. And they may be safe from ‘traitors' but who's going to protect them from you?"

"If they are loyal citizens," replied Nicolo, "then they do not need to be protected from me."

"That's your definition of ‘loyal'," I scoffed. "Loyal to the King but not to the Gath."

"The two are the same."

"Do you remember how young Peri looked at you?" I tried again to connect to that emotional core I hoped still existed.

"What does Peri have to do—"

"He looked at you like you were his hero. How pleased he was to be your brother. That child would do anything to be like you, Nicolo. And now… seeing what's become of you… I can't think of anything worse."

"I would be proud if Peri grew up to be like me."

"His poor mother," I shook my head. "You saved his life. Risked your own to save his. That's the hero I loved. That's what a hero is. Now you're killing others to save Balduin from hurtful words. I don't think Peri would think you a hero now. I know that Cady's smart enough not to fall for it either. For a brief moment, they had a brother and Maria had back her long-lost son. Now he's gone again, and a monster stands in his place. I hope they never find out what you've become."

It was hard to say if any of my words, my taunts, we getting through. Certainly, they weren't stopping him from fighting, if anything the blows rained down harder and faster than before. But maybe in that angry frustration were the seeds of doubt. Maybe he was going harder at me now because on some level he recognized the truth in what I was saying. He knew he was letting his mother and the new family he'd found in Simnel down, and no matter how much the influence of Balduin buried the heart that had been touched by that family, that heart still beat, still wanted to be the son and brother his family could be proud of. Nicolo of Simnel was still in there, I knew he was, if only I could find the right words to reach him.

"What would Willow think of you now?"

The name caught him off-guard for a moment but he rallied and my shoulder ached from blocking the powerful blows that continued to come at me.

"Getting desperate now, are you? Pulling that name out of your ass. You never knew her, you never knew what she was like; what I meant to her and she to me."

"And she'd have approved of you and her brother terrorizing anyone who speaks ill of him? I suppose she never said a word against him?"

I'd banked on that statement getting a pause and I was right. Nicolo was correct in that I'd never known Willow, the youngest of Balduin's sisters, the only one who hadn't mistreated Nicolo as a child and the girl who'd been the first love of Nicolo's life—the only love before I'd come along. But though I hadn't known her, my read on her was that she was the one who was different from her siblings, and it was hard to believe she hadn't at some point said something negative about what her younger brother was becoming; that he'd been a sweet child who was now spoiled by wealth, privilege and bad genetics.

"Siblings say all kinds of things about each other," Nicolo deflected. "That's different."

"How nice to know you wouldn't burn her alive. And I'm sure she be completely on board with you burning others."

"No one is being burnt alive!" I saw the heat rise in his cheeks as he imagined what Willow might say of the way he'd come to so closely resemble the brother she'd disliked and, perhaps, feared. "Their houses are burned but the traitors themselves are imprisoned."

I scoffed. "Firstly, do you imagine that a long and happy life awaits them in your prisons?"

"They brought it on themselves!"

"Secondly; maybe you should watch your Purgers at work. They don't discriminate between building and person, adult or child. They just burn."

"I have seen no reports…"

"Then go see for yourself, Nicolo! You've heard the gossip. Surely it can't all be lies?"

"The Castle Complex is filled with lies about the king and the good work he's doing!"

"Maybe you're afraid to check for yourself," I suggested. "Because you don't want to see that it might all be true. What would Willow think of that? Or your mother?"

"Willow is dead and my mother is gone!"

"Willow is dead but your mother's still there."

"‘There' is a long way away."

I was running out of words that might help; mother, Peri, Cady, Willow. Words didn't seem to do the trick. The influence of Balduin, decades-long, still held sway. Balduin was the only one who had never left Nicolo. His mother and the Old Queen (a surrogate mother) had both gone, through no fault of their own.

Willow too had left him, parceled off to marry another, and dying before she could even say goodbye. And then the second love of his life had been me, and I'd left him through my ‘treachery'. Nicolo had been hurt so much, and only Balduin remained, the one rock that he could cling to. Even if it hadn't been for the unconscious influence the king had over him, Nicolo would have had good cause to rely on that one thing that had never changed. Even now, I imagined that part of him knew things were wrong, that Balduin was wrong, that the purges were wrong, that it was all wrong. But he couldn't bring himself to admit as much because then he really would be left with nothing.

All very well, but how did I break down that wall? If words wouldn't bring him around then what was left?

Of all those who had left him, only one could come back. Me. And I now stood in opposition to him, sword in hand, an adversary. Though my betrayal wasn't as complete as Balduin had told him, there was no doubt that I had lied to him both actually and through some pretty major omissions. I had broken his trust. Apologizing wasn't enough. Telling him the truth wasn't enough. Sometimes the only way to save someone is to be willing to make a sacrifice.

He came at me again, and this time, as our blades clashed, I allowed him to knock mine aside. He drove in at me, forcing me back, that lethal sword heading for my throat as I loosed my fingers to let my own blade clatter to the ground. I lunged for him, but this time it wasn't in attack.

My lips found his and as I pressed myself against him and kissed him with everything I had—all the hope, anger, and sorrow. And as I did so, it felt as if the world around us was simply melting away. If I died now, if he killed me—ran me threw with his blade—then at least I would die happy, because there was nowhere I'd rather be and no one else I'd ever wish to be with.

I felt Nicolo's sword pressed to my stomach, angled to go up beneath my ribcage and through my heart. All he had to do was press.

But my heart beat on, stronger it seemed to me than it had ever beat before for the joy of being beside him once more. I could have lived in that moment forever, with no fear of the next because this was enough. This moment was enough for a whole lifetime.

As if from another, more distant world, I heard the sound of Nicolo's sword dropping to the street with a clatter. I felt his arms moving around me, encircling me, drawing me closer still, and his lips parted to kiss me, with a desperation that spoke of a man who'd been thrown a life raft.

"Charlotte…"

Whispered between kisses.

I'd found an antidote to the bond between Nicolo and Balduin, and fortunately enough it was me.