“This is why you shouldn’t fall in love, it blinds you. Love is wicked distraction.”
“Now you have put me off my lunch.” He fed the rest of the pork roll to Malky. “What in the world do you know about wickedness? You’re a bit player in this network of renegades, aren’t you? You’re a novice.”
“I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness,” she said.
“And of women?”
“Women are weaker, but their weakness is full of cunning and an equally rigid moral certainty. Since their arena is smaller, their capacity for real damage is less alarming. Though being more intimate they are the more treacherous.”
“And my capacity for evil?” said Fiyero, feeling implicated and uncomfortable. “And yours?”
“Fiyero’s capacity for evil is in believing too strenuously in a capacity for good.”
“And yours?”
“Mine is in thinking in epigrams.”
“You let yourself off lightly,” he said, suddenly a little annoyed. “Is that what you’re engaged by your secret network to do? Generate witty epigrams?”
“Oh, there’s big doings afoot,” she said, uncharacteristically. “I won’t be at the center of it, but I’ll be on the fringes helping out, believe me.”
“What are you talking about? A coup?”
“Never you mind, and you’ll stay blameless. Just as you want to be.” This was nastiness on her part.
“An assassination? And so what if you do kill some General Butcher? What does that make you? A saint? A saint of the revolution? Or a martyr if you’re killed in the campaign?”
She wouldn’t answer. She shook her narrow head in irritation, then flung the rosy shawl across the room as if it infuriated her.
“What if some innocent bystander is killed as you aim for General Pig Butcher?”
“I don’t know or care much about martyrs,” she said. “All that smacks of a higher plan, a cosmology—something I don’t believe in. If we can’t comprehend the plan at hand, how could a higher plan make any more sense? But were I to believe in martyrdom, I suppose I’d say you can only be a martyr if you know what you are dying for, and choose it.”
“Ah, so then there are innocent victims in this trade. Those who don’t choose to die but are in the line of fire.”
“There are . . . there will be . . . accidents, I guess.”
“Can there be grief, regret, in your exalted circle? Is there any such thing as a mistake? Is there a concept of tragedy?”
“Fiyero, you disaffected fool, the tragedy is all around us. Worrying about anything smaller is a distraction. Any casualty of the struggle is their fault, not ours. We don’t embrace violence but we don’t deny its existence—how can we deny it when its effects are all around us? That kind of denial is a sin, if anything is—”
“Ah—now I’ve heard the word I never expected to hear you say.”
“Denial? Sin?”
“No. We.”
“I don’t know why—”
“The lone dissenter at Crage Hall turns institutional? A company gal? A team player? Our former Miss Queen of Solitaire?”
“You misunderstand. There is a campaign but no agents, there is a game but no players. I have no colleagues. I have no self. I never did, in fact, but that’s beside the point. I am just a muscular twitch in the larger organism.”
“Hah! You the most individual, the most separate, the most real . . .”
“Like everyone else you refer to my looks. And you make fun of them.”
“I adore your looks and I acknowledge them. Fae!”
