Chapter 5

The animal had understood the order before the Youngest Executioner did.

It had fought the tether behind the refuse wall until the cord opened its leg. Now its blood travelled inside a stoppered skin concealed in the covered vessel. At the western record gate, when the Senior bound Ekaladerhan’s hands, the skin struck the woven side. The wet blow travelled through the Youngest Executioner’s forearm.

He changed hands.

The vessel struck his thigh instead.

“What is in it?” Ekaladerhan asked.

No one answered.

The prince had not raised his voice when the gate closed behind him. That was worse. A shout would have brought guards and lamps and Ometo running from her quarters. A shout would have made the choice public before the three men carrying it had decided what the choice was.

Instead Ekaladerhan had asked to see the order.

The Senior showed him the marked cord and authority token. Removed before the next light. Must not return. No destination. No manner. No body required.

“He left you room,” Ekaladerhan said.

The Youngest had looked down at the vessel.

The skin inside struck it again.

They took the prince from his father’s house by the road used for refuse and sick animals. The Old Guard at the service gate recognized him. For one hopeful moment, the Youngest thought another man might stop them and make refusal unnecessary.

“My prince?” the guard said.

The Senior raised the token.

Ekaladerhan looked at the guard’s sleeping son beside the wall. “Open it.”

The Youngest hated him a little for that mercy. It returned the decision to the three of them.

Beyond the gate, the forest took the walls away. Rain thickened the dark. Roots caught their feet where palace paths would have been swept. The Youngest carried the vessel close to his body, trying to quiet the liquid without touching it. Every movement inside reminded him that they had brought blood before they had brought death.

The idea had belonged to the Third.

That was what the Third had said when he arrived behind the executioners’ shelter with a young goat tethered under his wrapper.

The Senior had stared at him. “Take it back.”

“Then take the prince’s blood instead.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“The king kept his down. See what it gave us.”

The Youngest had laughed once, from panic rather than amusement. Neither older man joined him.

The goat had trusted the Youngest.

That part had not belonged to anybody’s plan. He found it pulling against the tether and brought a fistful of cassava leaves to quiet it. The animal smelled his hand, took the first leaf carefully and then all the others with growing confidence. Its tongue rasped his palm. When he scratched between its horns, it leaned into him hard enough to make him adjust his feet.

“Do not make friends with evidence,” the Third said.

“It does not know what it is.”

The Senior looked toward the palace wall. “Neither do we.”

They slaughtered the animal behind the refuse wall. The Third held its legs. The Senior cut. The Youngest caught what came out in a skin and learned how quickly warmth could leave a body while remaining in its blood.

The goat searched for him during the first part of dying.

Its eye found his face. One foreleg struck his wrist, not strongly enough to escape, only strongly enough to ask the body nearest it for help.

He kept the skin open.

They had not agreed to spare Ekaladerhan. Not in words. They had only prepared for a possibility none of them wanted to be the first to name.

Now that possibility kicked against his hand.

The path flooded. Ekaladerhan warned them before the water reached their ankles.

“The eastern rise stays dry,” he said.

“You are not leading us,” the Senior told him.

Minutes later the Senior turned them east.

The prince walked first with his hands bound.

Under a leaning tree, while rain hammered the leaves hard enough to hide small sounds, the Third opened the vessel. The stoppered skin rolled against the weave, dark and swollen.

Ekaladerhan looked at it, then at the stoppered skin beneath the Third’s wrapper.

“You brought proof before you brought death.”

The Third’s face tightened. “The court requires evidence.”

“The court required me.”

The Youngest remembered feeding the animal leaves behind the refuse wall to stop it crying. It had smelled of rain, dung and the iron already waiting for it.

“We could take him farther,” the Youngest said.

The Senior did not look at him. “Farther becomes a route back.”

“Then take him where no route returns.”

“That is what we are doing.”

Ekaladerhan studied the three of them. The Youngest wished he would look like a prince—proud, cruel, already half a king. It would have helped. Instead his formal cloth was soaked through and mud climbed one leg. He looked like a man whose father had sent him out in the rain.

“Which one of you was chosen to kill me?” he asked.

No one spoke.

“That is why there are three.”

The Youngest tightened the cover over the blood.

They moved on.

By the time they reached the clearing, the rain had softened. That made every sound distinct: drops collecting and falling from the high leaves, liquid shifting in the skin, the scrape of the Third’s thumb against his weapon. Somewhere beyond the trees a night bird called twice and stopped.

The Senior positioned Ekaladerhan on his knees.

“Who?” the Third asked.

The Senior looked at the Youngest.

Of course.

The youngest hand could be blamed for trembling. The youngest mind could be told the order left no room. If he failed, the older men could finish. If he obeyed, they would carry the memory as something done by a boy.

The Youngest drew the blade.

Ekaladerhan turned his head as far as the binding allowed. Rain ran from his hair along his jaw.

“Hold it properly,” the Third said.

The Youngest shifted his grip.

“If you miss, they will make you do it again.”

He wished the Third had not said they. There was no they in the clearing except the three of them, and the father who had made himself absent.

The Youngest raised the blade.

He had watched Ekaladerhan settle disputes in the public court. Once, years before, two boys had been brought in for stealing smoked fish. The younger one could not stop crying. Ekaladerhan had asked who was hungry before he asked who was guilty. The Youngest had remembered the question because nobody in authority had ever put hunger first.

Now the prince lowered his face.

The Youngest tried to see an obstruction. He tried to see a threat to the land, a named answer, a royal danger with a neck.

He saw the soaked seam on Ekaladerhan’s shoulder. One side sat slightly higher than the other, repaired by a hand that knew him well enough to leave its own habit in the cloth.

The blade came down.

The Senior struck the Youngest’s wrists aside.

Steel tore through cloth and opened flesh below the shoulder. At the same instant, the Third drove the wooden base of his weapon behind Ekaladerhan’s ear.

The prince fell forward.

The Youngest lost the blade. It landed in mud, bright for an instant, then red where rain reached the cut.

The Third was already moving. He pulled out the stoppered skin.

“You brought that here,” the Youngest said.

“So did you.”

Animal blood spread beneath Ekaladerhan’s head. It ran too freely. There was too much of it, warmer than the rain, smelling of the refuse wall and the small body they had held down together. The Third drew the blade through it. The Senior cut away the strip of formal garment bearing the royal fastening.

The Youngest stared at the prince.

Nothing moved.

For one second he understood that mercy could kill as carelessly as obedience.

A gate signal sounded through the trees.

One call. Returning watch.

“They are early,” he said.

“Then stop shaking.”

The Senior’s own hand was shaking.

The Youngest crouched. He put two fingers beneath Ekaladerhan’s nose. Rain touched the back of his hand. He could not separate it from breath.

“Nothing.”

“Again,” the Third said.

He pressed closer.

“I cannot—”

“His chest.”

They watched the soaked cloth. It lifted, perhaps. Or rain shifted what the blade had torn.

“We struck too deep.”

The Third looked toward the approaching signal. “Then finish it.”

The Senior picked up the blade.

That frightened the Youngest more than if he had taken it himself. The Senior had devised no animal, spoken no promise, asked no one to trust him. He had simply struck the killing stroke aside. Now he pressed the bloodied edge against Ekaladerhan’s throat.

The clearing held all four breaths except the prince’s.

The Senior did not draw the blade.

“Cut his hands.”

The Youngest stared at him.

“The rope.”

He cut the binding.

Ekaladerhan gasped as if the forest had thrown him back.

The Senior covered his mouth. Ekaladerhan’s eyes opened without understanding, then widened at the blade beside his throat.

Torchlight moved between the trunks.

The Youngest dropped flat. The Third did not. He lifted the bloodied weapon where a passing guard could glimpse it through the rain.

The patrol slowed.

One torch separated from the others.

The guard came near enough that the Youngest saw water running from the end of his spear. Near enough to hear the stopper knock against the covered vessel behind them.

The Youngest reached back and pressed his palm over the opening. The vessel was still warm from his body. He remembered the animal’s final breath against the centre of that hand.

The guard smelled the blood. His face changed—not with grief, but relief. The order had been completed. The danger belonged to somebody else now.

He rejoined the patrol.

The last torch disappeared.

The Youngest removed his hand from the vessel. The stopper had held. Nothing had escaped except the sound.

The Senior released Ekaladerhan.

“Why?” the prince asked.

His voice was weak but his gaze moved from one man to the next, forcing the decision to keep all three faces.

“Run west,” the Senior said.

“Why?”

“Because we are weaker than your father—and not weak enough to do this.”

The sentence seemed too clean for what lay in the mud. The Youngest wanted to say they had brought the animal. They had caught its blood. They had placed the blade in his hand because the older men wanted innocence available if courage failed. He wanted to say mercy had not found them in the clearing. They had dragged it there frightened, covered and kicking.

He said nothing.

The prince’s gaze dropped to the blood covering his chest.

“Whose?”

The Youngest thought of the animal leaning against his hand.

“Not yours.”

It was the first true answer he had given since leaving the palace.

The Third pulled Ekaladerhan upright. “If he returns, all three of us die.”

Ekaladerhan pressed one hand above the wound. “If I return, your lives are the smallest thing that changes.”

“Never return,” the Senior said.

He tore away the remaining formal cloth and left the prince in his simpler wrapper.

“The wound is below the shoulder. Press above it. Do not drink from still water.”

It sounded like advice given to a son leaving home. That made the Youngest look away.

They gathered the bloodied blade, the cut cord, the fastening and the torn cloth. Evidence reduced a man efficiently. The Youngest took the vessel because he had carried it out.

Ekaladerhan stood alone with animal blood down one side of his face and his own blood darkening the shoulder beneath it.

He stepped west.

His knees failed. He caught himself, rose and tried again.

From the direction of the compound came the first ceremonial signal announcing the prince’s death.

Ekaladerhan turned toward it.

For a moment the Youngest thought he would run home and destroy all of them with the truth.

Then Ekaladerhan walked west.

The three executioners went east.

The blood shifted against the Youngest’s hip with each step, borrowing the rhythm of something still alive.

At the record court they arranged the returned objects on the floor.

Blade. Blood. Cloth. Fastening. Cut cord.

The Record Keeper asked where the body was.

“The western forest,” the Senior said.

“Did you see him die?”

“Yes.”

The Record Keeper looked at the Youngest.

The young man could still feel the animal’s breath in his palm. He could see Ekaladerhan falling, rising, turning toward the signal that pronounced him dead before his body had learned how to remain standing.

“Did you?” the Record Keeper asked.

“He stopped moving.”

The Commander watched from the edge of the court. He named each object and then looked at the empty floor beyond them.

“No weight.”

The words did not accuse them. Accusation would have allowed denial.

The Commander crossed to the blade and lifted it by the grip. Blood had entered the small join between metal and handle. He smelled it, then looked at the Youngest.

“How far west?”

The Senior answered.

The Commander kept looking at the Youngest.

“How heavy was he when you carried him?”

“We did not carry him.”

“Then who confirmed what the forest received?”

The Youngest felt the stoppered skin against his thigh though he had already set the vessel down.

“We saw him stop moving.”

The Commander returned the blade to its place with care.

“That is an account of movement.”

He looked once more at the empty floor.

“Not a body.”

No one opened the covered vessel.

Beyond the walls, Ekaladerhan walked west while the blood that returned entered the record before him.