He was weary. Used up. He had been weary for months, for more than a year. In that weariness, in the exhaustion of his spirit, lay the seed of what he was; of what he had become. Of what they had made him, Saladin’s men, and all the others as well. Even his own kind. She had cried out for him to beware, when his horse had been hurt, and fallen. And again when he’d stabbed into the boar’s throat. He recalled it clearly: “Be careful!” she had cried. “Oh my lord, take care!” But nothing else, past that. Because with the cries of his horse in his head, and the stench of blood in his nostrils, what he killed was no longer a boar. What he was, was no longer a man, but a body, mind, and spirit remade on the anvil of war, remixed in the terrible crucible of a holy insanity.

Author: Jennifer Roberson