The Betrayed Hero Returns

My best friend puts his sword through my back while mine is still in the Demon King.

"Sorry, Sor," Cedric says, right at my ear, like it's a secret. "It has to be at the throne."

The Demon King is sitting on his black throne with my blade in his chest to the hilt, and he's watching me over it. Smiling.

"Hold him up," Helena says behind us. My fiancée. Spring wedding. "The light has to come from me."

White fire goes past my shoulder and into the thing on the throne.

"Write it down, Anselm. Helena Ravel slew the Demon King."

Our priest, who could close the hole in me with one hand, writes it down. Rhea looks away.

Then the Demon King laughs, with blood in it.

"They told you the Hero who kills me takes his place," he says. "They weren't lying."

He presses a thumb to my left eye. Cold.

"Take my eye. See every lie they tell you. And take the ten years back."

"Go and watch them."

The last thing I see with my own two eyes is Cedric wiping his blade on my cloak.

I wake up with straw in my mouth and a horse breathing under the floorboards.

Fairweather yard. The hayloft over the greys. I slept under this ceiling from seven to twenty-one.

Bells. Three long, three short. The Choosing.

Ten years ago today, a groom's boy walked into the Great Chapel and walked out the Hero of the Dawn. Which is, apparently, today.

My hands are twenty-one. No scars.

Water bucket by the ladder. I look in it.

My right eye is mine. My left eye is red. Not bloodshot. Red the way a coal is red, under the hair.

I pull the fringe down over it. Cedric's mother always said I'd go blind from that fringe. Turns out it's the other thing.

"Sor! You up?"

Cedric's head comes through the trapdoor. Twenty-one. Blond, grinning, no scar through the eyebrow yet. He gets that at Wrenford.

"Today's the day I get a magic sword," he says.

"Everyone says that."

"Everyone isn't a Fairweather." He hauls himself up and sits on the edge of the loft, legs over the horses, like we're twelve. "Carry my cloak? Household stands at the back, but you can hold it at the rail. I made Father promise."

I watch his mouth while he says it.

Nothing. Clean.

"I'm not nervous," he says.

Red. A little curl of it, like smoke off a snuffed candle, gone before it reaches his chin.

So that's how it works.

First lie I've ever seen my best friend tell, and it's that one. Small. I used to think small ones meant something.

"If it picks me," Cedric says, "you're coming. I'm not going anywhere without you."

Clean. All of it.

He meant it last time too.

"Boots on," he says. "Hero business."

Brightwater's whole square is out for it. Banners, bells, candied plums under a Dawn sunburst. Last time I thought this was for me.

Inside, the Great Chapel swallows the noise. Stone echo. Same echo as the Black Throne. I'm trying not to think about that.

The Sword of Dawn stands in the Dawnstone under a white cloth. Eleven heirs in a line. Cedric fourth. Me at the rail with his cloak.

"The groom's boy wants a look at the sword." That's Lord Fairweather, without turning his head. "Vossler."

Bertrand Vossler, a knight's son with a knight's son's neck, takes me by the collar and puts me off the rail. Cedric's cloak goes on the floor. Somebody laughs. More than somebody.

I pick it up. I fold it.

"Thank you, Master Vossler. I'd lost my place."

"Stay in it," he says.

"Always do."

Mother Cassia lifts her hands and the chapel goes quiet.

The first heir pulls. Nothing. The second pulls, and swears, and his mother covers her face. The third puts both feet on the stone. It doesn't move a hair.

Last time I watched this from the back. When they'd all failed, Cassia told the nearest servant to cover it up again. The servant touched the hilt, and the Sword came away in his hand like a spoon out of honey. A thousand people stopped breathing.

Nobody told me the trick, because there isn't one. I wasn't trying.

"Fairweather," Cassia says.

Cedric steps up. He looks back at me. He always looked back at me.

I hand him his cloak at the rail and I say it very low.

"Don't pull it."

"What?"

"You've seen your father's hounds. Put your hand on it like you're telling it to stay."

He laughs. It's a stupid thing to say. He does it anyway, because it's me, because for ten years whatever I said very low at his shoulder, he did. His hand goes down loose, half a joke.

The Sword of Dawn comes out of the stone like a spoon out of honey.

Nobody breathes.

Then everybody does, at once, and the roof nearly goes.

"The Dawn has chosen!" Mother Cassia cries, both hands up, and the words come out of her mouth red.

Thick. Not a candle curl. A hearth of it.

The Oracle of the Dawn just lied to a thousand people. Noted.

Lord Fairweather is weeping. Actually weeping. Over Cedric's head he finds me at the rail.

"What did you say to him, boy?"

"Told him not to drop it, my lord."

I can't see my own. I checked, in the bucket. Told myself I was fine, and nothing came out. Either that was true, or the eye doesn't do mine. I know which.

They keep him till past midnight. The King, the Oracle, the Marshal. Tonight they just want to look at him.

I muck out the greys. Somebody has to. Hero business.

He comes up the ladder at one with a sword he's not allowed to put down and a jug of wine he wasn't allowed at all.

"Sor." Cedric sits. The Sword goes across his knees. "Sor. They gave me a horse."

"You have a horse," I say.

"A better horse." He puts his head back against the post. "Father cried. You saw? He cried."

"I saw."

"Ten years, they're saying. However long it takes. Right to the Demon King's door." He rolls his head and looks at me. He's never been able to hold wine. "I want you at my back. Squire. All of it. Say yes."

I watch his mouth.

Clean.

"Yes," I say.

He grabs my neck and knocks his forehead against mine, like we did at twelve. Then he's asleep against the post, the Sword across his lap.

I put his cloak over him. I sit on the edge of the loft with my legs over the horses.

Here's what Cedric doesn't know.

Ten years from now, the Hero of the Dawn kills the Demon King on his own throne. And dies on the steps with his best friend's sword in his back.

I've done it once.

This time, I'm the one standing behind him.