The Sword-Edged blonde by Alex Bledsoe

the goddamn country
, he’d roared.
If you’d died too, then maybe we’d have some dignity left, but you couldn’t even do that right
. “Well, he always tended to speak before he thought.”
    “Something I noticed
you
don’t ever do.” He took another drink. “What do you really think happened, Eddie? To my wife, to my son? Please, man.” The pleading was so honest it damn near broke my heart. I never expected to hear Phil beg anyone, let alone me, for anything.
    “I think,” I said carefully, “that your wife knows more than she’s telling, and that someone from her past, from before you met her, is out to get her. I don’t know why they picked
now
, and I don’t know why they chose
this
particular way.” I took another drink. “And that’s why she has to go to jail. I have to do some poking around outside Arentia, and that may take a while. I need all the cover I can get. The
best
cover is to let whoever did this think they got away with it.”
    “But I can’t even tell Ree.”
    “
Especially
not Ree.”
    “She’ll think I hate her.”
    “And so will everybody else, which is the important part. She has to believe it, or no one else will.”
    “How long will you be gone?”
    “As long as it takes me to find the answers, or at least find better questions to ask.” My sympathy got the better of me. “I’ll go as fast as I can, Phil. I promise.”
    We stopped talking then, but kept drinking. Eventually we staggered downstairs, gave each other drunken hugs and stumbled off to our respective rooms. Mine kept spinning whenever I lay down, so I paced for a long time, trying to burn off enough buzz to get to sleep.
    I snuck back out and made my wobbly way to the royal portrait gallery, where paintings of the Arentian rulers and their families had hung for generations. I wanted one look, just for a moment, to see if my memory had embellished itself or if she’d really been as beautiful as I recalled.
    The gallery was dark, of course, since it was the middle of the night, but the moonlight shone through the huge windows and illuminated the paintings on the opposite wall. I’d entered on the far end, where the legendary founder of Arentia, King Hyde, began the progression. I quickly moved down to the most recent paintings.
    And there she was. Dark hair cut shorter than was fashionable at the time, framing a face that was still a little too round to be striking. And yet she was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Never mind that she was a child when this was painted, barely two monthsbefore her death; I’d been a child, too. Both of us sixteen, full of the certainty of our own immortality. And the moonlight in the painted eyes seemed an especially cruel reflection of the trust I’d once seen in them, a trust I failed in the most horrendous possible way.
    Hell, Janet
, I wanted to say.
I did the best I could. I’d do it all so much better now
.
    The painting was too high on the wall for me to touch. I stared at it for a long time, marveling at how accurately the artist had captured her smile, the cocky tilt to her head, the way she’d lean her weight onto her right hip as if readying for a scrap. We should’ve had a lifetime of scraps; but we never even had time for one.
    I fell asleep fully dressed, and dreamed the worst dream ever, of Janet screaming for me to save her while the men who’d killed her laughed at me. I hadn’t had that dream in years, and hoped the wine would dull my head enough to avoid it now. I awoke in tears, but luckily no one was there to see it.

 
     

ELEVEN

     
     
    I left Arentia before dawn, two days after my interview with Queen Rhiannon. I slipped out of the castle with the morning garbage detail, and waited at the dump outside town for an hour to make sure no one had followed me. My adversary, whoever he was, clearly had his fingers on a lot of spider webs. I wanted to make sure mine didn’t quiver.
    A day’s ride on my stolen horse brought me almost