“You should have killed them.”

Redmun stared down at his hands. One dirty and worn, the other clean and new. The dim light of the single candle set Redmun's sight in lines of black and orange that sent his imagination whirling.

“You don't really think that,” Jessa said. She had her foot out, the raw flesh of the wound battered and bleeding from a day and a night of running. They'd run straight past the tree of nocturnal insects, fleeing to the far tree beyond. The last in the Plains. Tomorrow they'd see the wall of Khelvorias, and descend into the woods at its base. “You'd hate me if I'd actually killed innocents. You'd hate yourself.”

“They weren't innocent.” The anger in him was a boiling river, an expanding forced that threatened to rip him apart. He'd held it back in the need to escape, to be away from those wretches, but now it was flooding him. He had to be rid of it, and it leaked out of his voice. Those hands wrapped around each other, straining. “They're murderers. Insane cultist murderers.” He covered his eyes, shame rising up in him. “Oh, god.” It did nothing for his shame.

“This isn't your fault, Redmun.” Limping footsteps, then an arm around him. “You didn't do this.”

“No, I didn't.” Redmun glance up, staring into the darkness. “WHY?”

“Don't bother.”

You did it, Redmun, the Evil said, even as Jessa spoke. You used my light to stop the blade, not me. I merely let the act shine longer.

Redmun stood, screaming into the echoing roots. “Long enough for their insanity to catch? Long enough for Dren to die? Was that it?”

Yes.

Redmun slipped his dagger from its sheath, and pressed it against his chest. He'd lost his breastplate long ago, and he felt the thing's sharpness against his flesh, straight between his ribs. Fury demanded him do it, demanded he murder the thing's home. Anything to hurt it. Anything.

“And what about this?” Redmun asked, spittle dripping out from his mouth. “Was this in your plan too?” He saw Jessa's feet, but he couldn't see her face. He didn't want to. She said nothing. “If I die what happens to you, hmm? Do you die too, or do you just get stuck here with no-one to latch on to? I'll kill you. I swear I'll kill you.” The words spilled out and he meant them. He'd stick the blade in and twist if he thought it would rid the world of the thing in his heart.

I won't let you.

The blade went in. The pain was incredible, but with it came a weakness. He heard Jessa's screaming, heard the Evil in his head, felt the cold steel against his tissues, the ruined, pitiful beating of his heart. None of it mattered. That weakness… the peaceful fragility of dying.

The Light flared, hotter than ever before, and the weakness fled. The blade shifted. His still beating heart became stronger. He was on the ground, and the blade began to slip out of its own accord, pushed out by the healing of the flesh, until it was gone, and his flesh was whole.

Unbidden, rolling with misery and self-loathing, his mind made an accounting of everything that had happened. Master dead. Layla killed. Lutmouth destroyed. The Liabirs in the hands of Cielaine, and her mad cultists. Him, their savior. Lloyd no doubt hating him, thinking him a monster. Dren... All that, because of one Evil, and Redmun's inability to control it.

Sobs shivered their way through his numb body. He was on the floor, nothing but a hole in his shirt for all his effort, shaking with tears, shaking with dread. Jessa held him.