Chapter Twenty-Five

Galen the Child-killer stumbled in, wet from the rain, muddy and bloody and tired of being alive. Dropped his drenched cloak in a puddle by the door and shed his belt full of gear in a pile next to it. He made it most of the way to the room before he remembered his boots, and winced at the tracks he’d left on the wooden floor. He reached for bedroom door, only for it to open and the business end of a rapier to greet him through the opening. When Gavera saw him in the state he was in, however, the sword fell from her hands, and she rushed out to hold him, heedless of the fact that she was in little more than her smallclothes. Feeling her arms around him, he collapsed into them, whatever emotional strength he had left giving out as he fell into wretching sobs on her shoulder

“Gale, what happened? Are you alright?”

Galen couldn’t find the words to speak for a long time. It hurt. All of it hurt. Every waking day of longing for his parents to still be alive, longing to return to Mar, feeling a small bit of himself blacken and fall away with every life he took, never being able to sleep because of the nightmares, never being able to feel at peace in his own skin. Every bit of it burned and ached inside him, and he found himself questioning again why getting justice even mattered anymore. How many lives had he ended to try and make himself feel better at this point? Fifty? A hundred? Was that right? Was that just? How would the families and friends of those he’d killed felt exactly the same way he did? How many of them now laid awake at night, aching with loss and seething in hatred towards him for what he’d done? Would one of them come hunting for him the same as he hunted the man who’d wronged him? Would he even care if they killed him then, knowing what he knew now?

Gavera gently ran her fingers through his rain-soaked hair until he finally began to find some shred of composure. He stumbled out of her arms and over to the nearby table, where he pulled out a chair and flopped into it heavily. A weighty silence hung in the air between them for what felt like an eternity, until Galen finally found the words to speak.

“I killed a child tonight, Gav.” He said softly, and pursed his lips as the words threatened to drag him into another fit of sobs.

Gavera’s eyes swelled, and a hand went to her mouth when she saw his face.

“I was trying to do the right thing….” Galen said. “I was trying to hurt no one but the man I was seeking. I left the guards alone. I told his wife that if she stayed out of things, I would leave her alone. Hell, I even let him have a weapon to defend himself with. But the kid…”

He trailed off, his body shaking as he tried to keep himself together.

“I’m listening.” Gavera said, taking a seat at the table beside him and resting a hand on his shoulder.

“The kid… the kid ran into the fight. I tried to stop the attack, but…” he buried his face into his hands, which elicited searing pain in his cheek and forehead where the bullet had grazed him. “Then when that caused the father to freeze, I killed him while his guard was down like a coward.”

He sat there weeping quietly, tears and fresh blood from the re-opened wound on his face dropping and mixing on the wooden tabletop. After a long moment of quiet, he said “What have I become?”

“You have become nothing, Galen. Nothing about you has changed.” Gavera said. She took his chin between her fingers and turned his head so that she could look him in the eyes. “Did you mean to kill him?”

Galen shook his head.

“Of course not!”

“Did you ask him to run into the middle of the fight? Or reposition the fight around him?”

“No!”

“How about trying to time your strikes so that you...”

“For swive’s sake, Gavera! No!”

She looked him dead in the eye, her expression empathetic but firm.

“Then it’s not your fault.”

“How is it not my…”

“It’s not your fault.” She repeated.

“But, if I hadn’t have been fighting his father, I wouldn’t have killed him.” Galen protested.

“And if I had been born with a few inches of flesh hanging between my legs, I’d be inheriting our family’s title and lands rather than my brother, and wouldn’t have to separate heads from bodies to make a living. Is it my fault I was born a girl?”

Galen frowned at her.

“That is not at all the same thing.”

“It is exactly the same thing.” She said. “You cannot have controlled that boy’s behaviour than I could have controlled when my father got drunk and forced himself on mother to make me.”

He went to turn his eyes from hers but she held him firm.

“Listen to me, Gale.” She said. “You are not blameless. A child is dead tonight, and your sword is what killed him. I cannot tell you not to feel guilt over that. But don’t make yourself responsible for his part of that happening. He chose to run into the fight after you had swung. That choice is the ultimate cause of his death. Nothing else.”

Galen held her gaze for several seconds more before finally turning out of her grip. She was probably right, but some part of him refused to accept it. Of course he could have done something about it. Had he done almost anything differently, the circumstances that led to that boy bleeding out on the carpet would have never occurred. But, wasn’t that true of anything, no matter how far back he went? Had he not encouraged his parents house Prince Vast and his entourage, then they would still be alive, and he’d be home with them rather than here bleeding all over a fellow murderer’s kitchen table. It all seemed so arbitrary and pointless, in that light. He had no real control over anything, except for where he put his blade. If he put it in something living, it would stop living. Everything else, every other possible decision led to outcomes outside of his control.

Gavera’s eyes flicked over the wound on his face.

“You need to let me stitch that.”

“Leave it.” Galen said, rising to his feet.

“It’ll leave a nasty scar if I don't,” She said.

“So let it.” He replied, crossing the kitchen to her bedroom door.

He turned back towards her.

“Are you coming?” He asked.

She appraised him with a cryptic expression, before nodding and walking in.

She was probably right, in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t his blame to carry. But she was wrong about something. She was wrong that he wasn’t something different now. He could feel it in his chest. There was this icy hollowness there that had never been there before. Something in him had broken tonight, and he was not sure it could ever be fixed. He was going to carry tonight with him for the rest of whatever life he had left.

Galen followed after, locking the door behind him.

If that was the case, then so be it.