SSS Awakening: I Become The Strongest Breeding Knight

Chapter 117: 117. He Surrendered as a Man, and Got the Law Instead of a Rope

That night, we buried the dead we could find.

There weren’t many. Most of the Hollow’s black knights had been buried under the collapse, and I didn’t feel the way I thought I should about that.

I felt tired... I felt like a man who’d been holding up a ceiling and was looking for a place to put it down.

A few of Varn’s wardens had survived, and Holt had them tied up under guard, and none of them said a word.

But no one from our side had died, and I kept coming back to that fact, again and again, like a tongue returning to a missing tooth.

Garrick lay on a pallet beside the graves.

He’d asked to be put there. Wynn had carried him over after dark, wrapped in three blankets, and set him down on the flat grass between the birches and the little mounded rows, a few feet from the stone with the upside-down V.

He was a wreck. His left collarbone had snapped.

Four of his ribs were cracked, and one had punctured something that Laura said she didn’t want to name.

He had cuts across his face and arms, a split lip, and an expression of vague, drifting surprise, as if he’d gone out for a walk and been unexpectedly handed a medal.

But he was alive. I couldn’t get used to it.

I sat down beside him, with my back against a tree, and for a long time we said nothing. The stars came out.

A wind moved in the branches overhead, and the dead leaves rattled softly. Somewhere in the ruins, someone was playing a mouth organ, badly, and nobody had told them to stop.

”They’re good graves,” Garrick said, eventually.

His voice was a thread. ”I did a good job.”

”You did.”

”I wish I hadn’t had to.”

”I know.”

He moved his good hand slowly and fumbled in the pocket of his coat.

After a moment, he drew out a small, grubby, folded square of paper, creased so many times that it had gone soft as cloth.

I knew it before he unfolded it. A crude stick figure in red armor, with a very large sword and a very small smile, and in the corner, in jagged crayon capitals, four words.

’THANK YOU, MR. RED.’

”Take it,” said Garrick.

”I can’t... It’s yours.”

”It was never mine... It was hers.” He pressed it into my hand, and I felt how cold his fingers were. ”Give it back to Tilly.”

”When you see her... and tell her...” He stopped and drew in a slow, careful breath. ”Tell her Mr. Red held the roof until the end.”

I couldn’t speak. I folded my fingers around the paper and nodded and kept nodding, like an idiot, until he smiled faintly and turned his head away.

Sharon came across the grass a few minutes later, with her cloak pulled around her shoulders and a lantern in her good hand.

She stood over the pallet for a while without speaking. And then Garrick looked up at her.

”Lady Sanford,” he said. ”I’d like to put something on record, if I may.”

”Go on.”

”I surrender.” His voice was quiet and very plain. ”Not to you as a soldier... but as a man.”

”I was part of this, and I knew it, and I did nothing for a very long time... I won’t run.”

”I’ll stand in front of any court in the kingdom, and I’ll tell them what I saw, in the order I saw it... And whatever sentence they hand down, I’ll take.”

Sharon looked at him for a long moment. I saw her jaw working.

”You’ll get a court,” she said at last. Her voice was gruff and hard and entirely fair. ”A proper one...”

”With a clerk, a judge, and a lawyer who knows what he’s doing.”

”Not a rope, and not a firing line, and not a sentence handed down by someone who’s angry because they’ve had a bad week.”

”You earned the right to have it done properly.”

”That’s... generous.”

”It’s not generous... It’s the law. I just happen to believe in it.” She straightened and brought her heels together and gave him a short, stiff salute, with her fist against her chest. ”You held a line today, Commander.”

”I won’t forget it.”

For a moment, I thought Garrick might weep. But he didn’t.

He just lay there, looking up at her, and slowly, very slowly, something moved in his face.

A small, crooked, almost shy curve at the corner of his mouth. I realized that I’d known him for the better part of two weeks, and I had never once seen him smile.

”Thank you,” he said.

And then, because he was Garrick, ”Don’t let the rabbit hear... She’ll want to put it in a notebook.”

I laughed. And I couldn’t help it.

It came out cracked and rusty, and Sharon snorted, and the three of us sat there in the dark beside a row of ninety-one graves and laughed like fools.

After she’d gone, I stayed a while longer.

I looked at the little gray stone with its two uneven letters.

The barrier of Harrowmere was gone, and no one was going to bring it back.

The people under those mounds weren’t getting up.

I knew that, and Garrick knew that, and there wasn’t a single speech in the world that could make it any less true.

But there were other villages. There were other crystals still burning in other lamps and other people sleeping behind other walls who didn’t yet know how close they’d come.

Maybe that was what I owed him... Maybe that was the only thing I could do.

I laid my hand flat on the cold grass beside Lena’s stone, and I didn’t say anything at all.

I didn’t check my lust that night, and I’m proud of that.

I knew without looking. I’d spent everything I had on the Resonance and the Triune Link and a very long day of being hit with a very large sword, and what was left felt like a candle stub in a draft.

It was somewhere around fourteen percent, which is the kind of number that makes a sensible man go to sleep.

I’d eaten half a heel of bread and drunk a mouthful of water.

My arms were shaking. And I’d wandered away from the camp, past the last of the ruined houses, to an old oak tree that had survived the collapse by the simple luck of standing on the wrong side of the valley, and sat down against its trunk to feel sorry for myself in peace.

I don’t know how long I’d been there when I heard her coming.

I heard her before I saw her, because she was singing under her breath. It was a counting song, something small and silly, a children’s rhyme about a rabbit and seven carrots, and she was getting the numbers wrong on purpose.

Then the footsteps stopped. There was a long pause.

And then there was a sharp little oof,oof and a thump, and a rustle of leaves, and I looked up in time to see Eveline Whitehare go down like a felled tree over the biggest root on the whole damned hill.

’The usual.’

She tucked her chin.

She crossed her arms. She rolled over one shoulder in a neat, tight, perfect curve and came to rest flat on her back in the grass with her arms spread wide and her ears sprawled out on either side of her head.

A wrapped bundle of something sat on her stomach. She lay there for a moment, looking up at the stars.

”I had a speech,” she said.

I laughed.

I couldn’t help it. It came out of me in a huge, wheezing, undignified gust, and it hurt my ribs, and I didn’t care.

It was the best sound I’d made all day.

I put my head back against the oak and laughed until my eyes streamed, and she lay in the grass with her face going slowly red and her ears twitching, and when I’d finally finished, I stood up, held out a hand, and pulled her to her feet.

”That was a very good fall,” I said.

”No! It was a terrible fall!” She pouted. ”I went over a root... and I could see the root... I watched it the entire time.”

”You rolled perfectly.”

”I know I did... That’s what’s so annoying.” She brushed the leaves off her jacket, and I noticed that she was wearing a long blue cloak over her armor.

It wasn’t hers. It hung to her ankles and was too wide in the shoulders, and the hood was bunched up behind her neck.

”Laura lent me this... She said it gets cold under that tree.”

”It does.”

”She also said not to fall over, and I said I’d try.”