The Honorable Thing

Wick Halovar could have taken the knife across his own throat. He says so himself, after, soaked in a stranger’s blood in Hal’s front room, refusing every kindness his friends try to hand him: I could have done the honorable thing and just taken it. Instead he did the other thing, and now he is a man who has murdered an innocent woman he cannot name, and the whole shape of who Wick was is gone.

Track how far he fell to get here. Wick began as the Creed’s true believer’s grandson, and his arc has been one long, painful unlearning — renouncing the Candescent Creed as his grandmother’s propaganda even as the Light answered him fuller than ever and raised him winged from death (c4e010, c4e018). He learned what he was — an aasimar drawing on a caged angel’s blood, his own ancestor Aetheon bled in a basement (c4e027) — and used it, out-conning the Photarch for an unrolled natural 20, then walking right back into her grip because that is Wick’s tragic competence: he is always brave enough to enter the lion’s den and never quite able to stay out. Last episode Yanessa named him her heir over her own son (c4e030), the mole planted at the center of the Creed. Tonight the plant walked, alone, into Obrimus Manor on the worst night of Primus Tachonis’s life, because he felt Teor die through the Light and couldn’t not go.

What Brennan does to him in that courtyard is merciless and precise. Primus has just murdered a druid mid-sentence and choked his own sister; he is, in poker terms, tilted — unhinged and violent — and every lie Wick tries lands worse than the last, because Primus is scarier telling the truth than most men are threatening. He drags a weeping woman across the gravel and gives Wick a choice with no honorable exit: slit her throat, or die. And Wick — gentle Wick, the priest, the romantic, the man who blesses everyone with may the Beam guide you — looks Primus dead in the eye and draws the blade across her throat. She rises as a zombie behind him and goes back to loading the wagon. He gets in his carriage and cries the whole way to Hal’s.

The genius of the beat is that it isn’t a corruption. Wick doesn’t discover a taste for it. He is destroyed by it, immediately and completely, and the destruction is the point. They ruined my faith, they killed my friend, they took away my love, and they have now taken away my innocence. He itemizes the theft like a man reading his own obituary. And then — this is the turn that makes him tragic rather than merely broken — he converts the ruin into a vow. Teor swore himself to protect Wick and died doing it; it’s only fair that I swear to avenge him. He wants to kill Primus, and he wants to do it with the man’s own knife — the same blade he was just handed to murder a stranger. The instrument of his fall becomes the instrument of his revenge. That’s not healing. That’s a wound learning to walk.

Here is what’s unresolved and frightening about Wick at c4e031: his family trusts him. Stocks in Wicander-as-chosen-scion are, as Tyranny puts it, way up. He is more useful to the resistance now than he has ever been — the perfect inside man, grieving and hollow and hungry, with a real reason to smile at Primus while he waits. But we’ve just watched exactly how far he’ll go when the choice is his life or his soul, and he chose his life. The next time Primus tests him, there may be nothing left of the priest to test. The Light raised Wick winged from death because the power was never the Creed’s to give. The open question of this chapter is whether it will still answer a man who has learned he’ll kill to keep breathing — and whether Wick, who could have taken the honorable thing and didn’t, will ever forgive himself enough to find out.