The Execution of Feather Blue

I. >

When infamous thief and revolutionary Feather Blue was arrested in Alida, she should have been given the choice between a life sentence in the mines of Manou, or else the end of her life entirely.

The histories might never know what fate the Feather would have chosen. Her arrest had been made in a small town in the mountains of Anselm, but even there her name was well-known. They knew she'd incited the five-hour riots in the capital. They knew she'd once stolen the king's crown, the queen's necklace, and the prince's favorite toy, all in one afternoon.

Most importantly, they knew this:

Feather Blue was hard to kill.

After very little deliberation, the mayor decided that he could not have their gallows tied up indefinitely. The mines always needed workers, after all, and they paid handsomely for them. You never could rely on the Crown doing the same.

Feather Blue was tied and bound and escorted into a prisoner transport. Five guards were set to watch her, each equipped with both rifles and swords.

<< < XVII. > >>

Jannik of Anselm stepped around Feather Blue’s unmoving body, aimed carefully, and put a bullet straight through an assassin’s head.

"It’s over," he said, with a voice like shattered glass. "She’s gone."

If there had been anyone left to watch him, they might have been startled by the change in his demeanor. Gone was the casual way he held himself: Gone was the smirking self-assurance. All that remained was hollow-eyed resignation.

“She’ll be back,” Suzeanne said.

She, too, was changed. All her carefully cultivated coolness had evaporated. Blood and dirt stuck to the hems of her skirts, and she hardly seemed to notice: she just fired and spun, and fired again.

The townspeople had fled. The guards were dead. The six remaining attackers were the only ones close by, and one way or the other, what they had seen would soon cease to matter.

Jannik shook his head.

“It’s been three minutes, Suzy. She’s gone.”

“Don’t you dare.” Suzeanne fired her last round and ducked behind Jannik to reload. “You do not get to give up on her so easily.”

Jannik was watching the shadows between buildings. There were five assailants left, staying just out of sight. It was only a matter of time until he and Suzeanne ran out of bullets, and then it was going to be over.

“It’s her choice,” Jannik said, sounding strangely gentle for a man facing down his own death. “You have to let her go. We owe her that much, at least.”

“I know that!” Suzeanne whirled around to face her fiancé, all naked fury and desperation. “After everything we’ve done she should leave us here to die.” She raised her weapon and fired. Behind Jannik, another assassin collapsed.

“She should do that,” Suzeanne said. Her pistol was tossed to the ground, empty and useless. “She won't.”

“You can’t know that.”

Suzeanne laughed. It was a bitter, ugly sound.

“Have you not been paying attention?” she asked.

There was a backup pistol in the pocket of Jannik’s jacket. Suzeanne had to bend down to retrieve it, heedful of the drying blood.

“She let you arrest her, Jannik. She could have escaped a million times over. She decided to stay.”

“I know!”

Jannik’s gun was empty. He didn’t care. “Suzy," he said, "she let us kill her.”

There was a moment of perfect silence as the two stared at each other.

Neither of them saw the assassin slink out of the shadows, picking up a rifle from one of the fallen guards.

—

They’d let themselves get distracted. Months of planning, and it could all have been for nothing: just two more corpses in a square already filled with them.

By all rights, the bullet should have hit them.

<< < XVI. > >>

Dying, Feather Blue knew, was red.

She was well acquainted with it. She had been alive for twenty-four years, and sometimes it felt as if she'd spent half of that time dying.

Dying meant blood. Dying meant pain. It meant lines of fire running down her arms and throat. It was loud, and bright, and full of emotions so tangled up that she had no hope of unwinding them.

And yet, Feather Blue had never truly died before.

—

Death, it turned out, was blue.

There was a lot of blood, out there. Her legs had given out under her, and when the guards had let go, she had fallen to her knees on the slick ground. The force of it was enough to drive the sword deeper into her ribcage, hitting her back with a sharp, nauseating scrape.

She could feel the Liquid Death rushing through her. Her failing heart was still beating, pushing it into every last limb as if it wanted to replace the blood she'd lost with poison. It burned in her chest. It burned in her arms. It burned all the way down to her fingertips.

Dying was red.

Death was blue.

—

Death was blue, and blue meant freedom. It meant all of the choices she'd never gotten to make, back when she was just Cerise.

It wasn't a choice between death by the sword or death by poison. It wasn't a choice between the gallows and the mines, or arsenic and cyanide, or a cut on her left arm and a cut on her right.

Here, on the other side of death, Feather Blue was free.

She could have chosen to become her name in truth: To grow feathers and wings and fly off into the sky. She could have disappeared more fully than any change of clothes could have ever let her.

But blue also meant clarity, and on the other side of death, Feather Blue could see the whole town.

She could see the assassins lurking on the roofs. She could watch as they slipped closer; as they drew their knives.

Ten lines of red cut through the serenity of blue. Ten guards crumpled to the ground: a flash of red, then blue, then nothing at all.

She could see the way Suzeanne and Jannik held on to each other, like children waking from a nightmare. She could watch as they turned to stand back to back, each drawing a pistol.

She saw them standing over her own bleeding body, both frightened and determined, and she thought,

<< < XV. > >>

They made her stand in the middle of the square, guards on either side of her, and they read out her sentence.

"Feather Blue, formerly known as Cerise Young. For the theft of the crown jewels of Anselm, and for conspiracy against the Kingdom of Maregol…"

Suzeanne and Jannik stood a little to the side, shoulders brushing as if to chase away the cold.

"…as well as for the crime of inciting revolution…"

Suzeanne had personally brought the phial of poison. She'd refused to let anyone else touch it, and she used a handkerchief to make sure her skin wouldn't come in contact with the glass.

Jannik had carried the sword, tucked casually under one arm.

"… you are sentenced to death by impalement on a poisoned blade."

The two of them were angled towards each other, creating a little world of their own. Here, in the center of the crowd, they didn't need words to communicate. Jannik held out the sword; Suzeanne coated it in a thin layer of the Tears. They looked at each other. They nodded.

Jannik of Anselm stepped forward and placed the tip of the sword on the Feather's chest. Tendrils of smoke rose where it touched the fabric of her dress, dissipating in the morning air.

Blue met his eyes without fear. The guards' fingers were digging into her shoulders, as if they expected her to charge at the prince at any given moment.

She did not. She just watched him, and she waited.

Jannik straightened his shoulders.

"Any last words, Feather Blue?" he asked. His voice was clear and cool, ringing out across the square.

Feather Blue tilted her head. There was something unreadable in her eyes; a crack in her facade of calm.

Quietly, she asked: "How many times am I going to have to die for you?"

The prince's face twisted.

"Once," he said.

He pushed. The sword slid into the hollow between the Feather's ribs, and settled right beside her heart.

Feather Blue died with poison coursing through her veins. She died with her heart's blood running wild, turning the stamped earth of the square into mud.

—

<< < XIV. > >>

They marched her to her execution before the sun had fully risen.

It got cold at night, this far into the mountains. If it hadn't been for Jannik's jacket, the Feather might have shivered, the frost succeeding where fear had not.

Her hands were shackled behind her back. Guards flanked her on all sides, rifles at the ready. Still, Feather Blue walked with her head held high. She'd spent enough time hiding in the shadows.

—

Even this early, the spectacle garnered no little attention. In the short walk from the tavern to the central square, half the town had joined the little procession, eager to get a glimpse of their famous visitors.

When the engagement had been announced, it had come with a pretty little portrait of the lovers. They were easily recognized, now: Suzeanne with her hair down, glinting in the first light of dawn. Jannik in a perfectly pressed waistcoat, so much like the one he'd worn on the engraving.

And with them—

<< < XIII. > >>

Kneeling on the floor of the royal suite, Feather Blue measured out liquids and powders with unerring precision. Three drops of this, a granule of that. She only hesitated on the final ingredient: the elegant phial that Lady Suzeanne had retrieved from her own baggage.

“Go on,” Suzeanne said. “You know what to do.”

Feather Blue nodded jerkily, and poured the whole phial into her mixture.

—

It was dead silent as Feather Blue set the bottle down. The liquid inside was deceptively clear, and no more viscous than water. If it had been served in a cup, you might have had no qualms about drinking it.

“The Sea’s Own Tears, my grandmother called it in her notes,” Suzeanne said quietly. “But anyone who’s every seen its results just called it liquid death… And not, I fear, because of the mixture’s appearance.”

One of the guards, who’d been about to reach for the bottle, froze mid-movement.

“Indeed.” Suzeanne agreed. “Not a pretty sight. Father burned every copy of the recipe. And yet…” She nudged the glass with her foot and sighed. “You always make things so difficult, darling.”

She was not addressing her fiancé. If Jannik minded, he did not show it. He simply took the sword off his lap and placed it on the floor.

Feather Blue stared at it for a very long moment. It made for an odd, disjointed triangle, the three of them: Sword, phial, Feather. Go on, they seemed to say, echoing their lady’s words. You know what to do.

For the first time since her arrest, the Feather spoke without being prompted.

“Is this to be my choice, then?” she asked. “Death by the sword, or death by poison?”

“Heavens, no!”

Suzeanne picked up the bottle. Very carefully, she removed the stopper. “I told you, dear,” she said. “No more choices.”

Suzeanne of Maregol poured a single drop of the Sea’s Own Tears onto the Feather’s scabbing cuts.

Feather Blue squeezed her eyes shut. A hiss escaped her as the wounds reopened.

Suzeanne leaned forwards with some interest, watching as blood and poison streaked down the Feather’s skin. Where the liquid fell to the woolen carpet, it left only faintly smoking holes behind.

“What do you think?” Suzeanne asked. Her voice was low, almost purring. “Will the sword of Saint Anselm and the Sea’s Own Tears be able to kill Feather Blue?”

The entire room held its breath as Feather Blue met Suzeanne’s eyes.

<< < XII. > >>

“No?” Jannik asked, his eyebrow quirked in amusement.

“No,” said Suzeanne.

The Lady had not looked away from the Feather at any point throughout their little performance. She’d seen every minute tick of expression: Every flinch and every smile, and every feeling Blue had swallowed, too. She’d filed them and she’d processed them, and what she’d concluded failed to please her.

“She’s hiding something,” Suzeanne said.

On the carpet, the Feather’s hands tightened.

Suzeanne nodded. “Yes. That’s what I thought.” When she turned to the guards, her voice was firm. It was a voice that had only ever been disobeyed once.

“Find it. Check the roof. Check the stables. Tear up the floorboards, if you must.” Her eyes had taken on a dangerous glint. “There is more.”

—

There was more. Tucked securely behind a drain pipe the guards found a case full of small, filled phials.

They were unlabeled. At Suzeanne's impatient gesture they handed the entire case to her, too well-trained to disagree.

The Lady studied each vial in turn, and took a brief whiff of each of them. When she was done, she settled her hands daintily into her lap and fixed Blue with a cool stare.

Softly, she said: "Bard, thief, revolutionary. Now you add poisonmonger to the list?"

Every single guard in the room stiffened in alarm. They had not known to recognize the substances in the case. They certainly wouldn’t have known the ways in which they could be combined.

"You must have been collecting these for months," Suzeanne spat, an uncharacteristic venom to her voice. "Even before your little detour in Alida."

The sword of Saint Anselm had found rest across Jannik's lap, the prince tracing one careful finger along its edge over and over again. At Suzeanne's words his hand stilled.

"Is that true?" he asked.

Feather Blue lifted her head very slowly. She met the Prince's furious gaze for three long seconds.

"Yes."

Jannik breathed in sharply. He was transfixed by those impossibly blue eyes. He didn't see Suzeanne get up and stalk towards her dresser. He didn't see her reach into a drawer, or return the settee. Only once she tossed a phial to the floor he could breathe again, as Feather Blue broke the contact to watch the phial roll across the floor.

"You missed one," Lady Suzeanne said simply.

<< < XI. > >>

A single drop of blood slipped off the Feather’s arm, soaking into the faded patterns of the rug. A second joined it, then a third.

Jannik sat back, satisfied. "Well, well, well," he purred. "It seems that even the Feather can bleed. Beloved?"

This was all the prompting Suzeanne needed. From the folds of her skirts, the Lady drew a plain little dagger, slipping it into her betrothed’s beckoning hand.

At the movement, Feather Blue’s gaze snapped up. The veil of indifference had drawn back over her features, but now all her attention was on Suzeanne, just as all of the Lady’s was on her. Jannik paid it no mind. With the air of a painter adding the final brush-stroke to his masterpiece, he drew another red line across the Feather's wrist.

Then, a pocket-watch in hand, he began to count.

—

“Twenty-four,” said Prince Jannik of Anselm, the watch disappearing back into his waistcoat. “You’re getting faster, little bird.”

He ran a curious finger along his handiwork. Dried blood flaked off the cut he'd made with Suzeanne’s dagger. It had already knitted itself together, the scab barely raised against the skin.

The cut beside it was given no such grace. Where the sword had bitten her, the wound was still oozing thickly. It stuck to Jannik’s fingers, red and undeniable.

“Feather Blue is hard to kill,” the prince muttered. Nobody knew that better than Jannik of Anselm. Yet here he was, with the Feather at his feet and her blood on his hands. “But not, I think, impossible.”

He rose, the holy sword at his side.

“Ready the square,” he told his soldiers. “Tell everyone. Feather Blue will die tonight.”

Behind him, a voice rang out. It was as solid as steel. It was a gauntlet cast to the ground.

<< < X. > >>

In all the changes in appearance that Feather Blue had affected throughout the years, there was one thing that had always remained the same. Whether she was busking at a tavern or leading a crowd to the palace gates - or indeed even before she had been Feather Blue at all - she had always, always, worn her sleeves long.

Nobody had ever remarked upon it. Now, it had suddenly become very obvious.

Under those plain sleeves, the Feather's skin was a map of scars.

Thin silver tallies ran up her arm like soldiers lined up for battle. Deeper gouges crossed them, raised and ragged. Above it all - or perhaps below? - ran a clumsy, winding pattern that looked like it had been drawn by a child who had been handed a pencil for the very first time.

Prince Jannik looked at them as if he was greeting an old friend. His hand on her wrist was warm and solid. It did not shake, not even once.

Neither, indeed, did hers. Jannik turned her arm over in his grasp, and she did not pull away. He picked a patch of unmarred skin, and she did not struggle.

<< < IX. > >>

While talking of the Feather's accomplishments, the Prince of Anselm had sounded almost fond. Now, with the sword at her fingertips, all traces of that disappeared.

"Give me your hand," he ordered, holding out his own imperiously.

Feather Blue made no move to comply.

Jannik's tones sharpened. "Your hand, Feather Blue."

For the first time since he'd ambushed her in her quarters, Feather Blue met his eyes.

Around the room, the royal guards shifted into alert.

They’d forgotten, it seemed, who it was they were facing. This was the woman who had taken the prince hostage during the five hour riots. This was the thief who’d walked into the palace and left with the crown jewels in her hands. She might have been strangely docile throughout this entire arrest, but she was still Feather Blue.

Her posture hid it well. Her eyes did not.

Feather Blue burned.

She was a wildfire in a cage. She was an ocean boiling over. She was simmering, ice-cold fury.

And yet -

With scissor-sharp movements, Feather Blue rolled up her sleeves. She held out her hand to the Prince of Anselm, and she did not look away.

Jannik just huffed fondly and settled down across from her.

<< < VIII. > >>

"There you are," Jannik breathed as he lifted the jeweled longsword into the air. The metal of it gleamed. On its hilt, the corundum glittered like a promise.

"Do you have any idea," Jannik asked, breaking the stunned silence as easily as he had broken the lute, "just how much trouble you gave us with this little stunt?"

Every eye in the room was fixed to the blade, now. Every eye except those damned blue ones, set above the faintest of all possible smiles.

If Jannik saw the Feather's changed expression, he gave no hint of it. He swung the sword through empty air, listening to the hiss and swish of it.

"They still think that the necklace you stole had no more than sentimental value," he said ruefully. With uncommon reverence, the prince ran his fingers over the stones set into the pommel: one red, one blue. "You just had to grab both of our crown jewels, didn't you? After we put so much work into convincing the public that the sword of Saint Anselm was nothing but a myth. But of course -"

Here he brought the sword down, the tip hitting the floor just a hair's breadth away from Feather Blue's white knuckles.

<< < VII. > >>

The fading light reflected dully off the scuffed wood as Jannik turned the instrument over in his hands.

"Mighty fine for a twopenny bard such as you," he mused, running his finger along the curved body.

Behind him, the guards exchanged amused glances. The lute looked like it had seen better days. Thin scratches ran down its back, and some of the pegs had been reinforced with twine. Only those who'd been fortunate enough to catch the tail end of the Feather's recital earlier knew not to be fooled by appearances.

Jannik, of course, would not have cared either way. He grasped the lute by it's neck, and with a casual flick of his wrist, he smashed it on the floorboards.

That, finally, made Feather Blue flinch.

Whatever sound she might have made was tuned out by the twang of broken strings and the splinter of wood. Her fingers flexed once in the plush of the carpet; her jaw twitched. That was all.

By the time Jannik looked back at her, she was composed again.

She did not look up.

Why would she have? Blue already knew the glint in Jannik’s eyes when he found something he’d been hunting for. She knew what strings looked like when they snapped, and the way that wood could splinter like a hollow, gaping ribcage.

Feather Blue didn't watch as the crown prince of Anselm reached into the carcass of her lute. She didn't watch as he drew out the impossible length of steel she'd hidden inside.

If she had -

<< < VI. > >>

Guard after guard filed out of the room while Jannik paced and Suzeanne sat as still as a statue.

Even now, with only four pairs of eyes pointed at her, Feather Blue did not move an inch. It was as if she'd decided that she was no longer truly there: just part of the furniture, perhaps. Just a mouse, frozen under a predator's gaze, and Suzeanne the falcon in the dive. When the soldiers returned, it was only Jannik who greeted them. "Nothing but some clothes and her instrument, sir" they reported. Jannik just impatiently reached for the bundle.

"Heavens, Blue," he scoffed as he tossed the clothes aside one by one. "I didn't know this many shades of nothing existed."

Suzeanne cocked her head to the side, eyes never leaving her prey. "Our Feather really has come down in the world," she mused. "And she was such a pretty bird. Don't you agree, beloved?"

Not even the endearment held any trace of warmth. Still, Jannik straightened. "All plucked and pruned," he agreed, lips quirking up. "Shall I help her out, then?"

When Suzeanne inclined her head, he slipped out of his coat. "Call it charity, my sweet," the prince purred. "It's not quite your color, but it'll have to do."

Even as he draped the jacket over her shoulders, Feather Blue did not move. The indigo silk settled around her, and then it, too, was still. Left in shirtsleeves and his waistcoat, Jannik rolled his eyes. "Ungrateful as ever," he tutted. "Ah, well."

He finally, finally took a seat, perching on the armrest aside his intended.

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