“So this was always your plan? Kill your cousin and commandeer the throne?”
Tristan stared at her for a long, hard beat. Why were his eyes so black? There was violence in them. She remembered the way he’d swung the pewter candlestick in the Sacristy, how he so clearly derived pleasure from breaking anything breakable. She felt him fighting the urge to wrap his hands around her neck.
“Pretty demon,” he said, “but stupid. I had nothing to do with the assassination. Though thanks to a spectacular twist of fate, I will now get everything I want.”
When he crouched in front of her, she saw it. Through the cleft in his shirt, a silver chain hung around his neck, a pendant swinging at his heart. The stone was pearly white, delicate and orbed. A moonstone.
Panic blanked out Mia’s mind.
“Where is she? What have you done to her?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve hurt her. She would never give you that stone. Not willingly. Not unless . . .”
“Your sister is a special girl.” His lips curled. “You needn’t worry; she’ll be well cared for. I, unlike you, will keep Angelyne safe. I want only the best for my bride.”
Mia’s chest seized. She saw everything with sickening clarity: the duke, always with an eye for personal advancement, had seen his opportunity and pounced. He didn’t merely lust for the river throne: he lusted for her sister. And now he would get everything he wanted.
His crown, his queen.
She feared Angelyne was too weak to resist him. Hadn’t she said she wanted to live in a castle and marry a prince? But even if Angie were frivolous enough at fifteen to believe a royal marriage was what she wanted, Mia knew her better. The misery would creep into her heart like a cold, wet fog.
Angie was moonlight and music and swannish grace. She didn’t deserve death in a gilded cage.
A spike of ice skewered Mia’s skull. Hate, hate, hate—Tristan’s or hers, she didn’t know. With her body so closely attuned to everyone else’s, how could she tell which feelings were her own and which had taken her hostage?
He leaned closer. “Don’t you have anything to say?” He raised his knife and she winced, waiting for the sting of metal. Instead he traced the blade over her clavicle and flicked it lightly over her breasts. Porcelain bosom, Mia thought, and the memory nearly broke her heart.
She felt Tristan grow aroused, trailing the knife down her stomach, and her heart withered in her chest. So this was it, then. This was the end. He would kill her, or worse, rape and kill her. She would die at the hand of the duke, violated and diminished, unable to ever protect her sister again.
Her heart punched a hole through her chest.
She had magic.
Mia didn’t need a blade to kill a man. She could stop his heart. She didn’t know exactly how to stop his heart, but if she summoned love, rage, and terror, she might be able to channel her magic, and at the moment, all three were alive and well. If not kill, then she could at least enthrall him—and buy herself a chance of escape.
Magic was wrong, wicked, evil. She knew all those things. But this was life or death.
She had to convince Tristan to touch her. “Your Grace,” she murmured in what she hoped was a breathy, sultry voice. She knew the duke was a regular at the brothels in Killian Village, a place where pretty girls pet his ego and pretended to enjoy his company. “I’ve wanted you to touch me for as long as I can remember.”
“Do you think me a fool?”
Mia sensed his hesitation—his suspicion mingled with his lust. He drew the back of his knife blade slowly up her thigh, then her stomach, then her neck. Though she tasted acrid bile in her mouth, she let out a low moan.
“Yes,” she said. “Like that. Now let me feel you, flesh to flesh.”
“You aren’t wearing gloves. You aren’t wearing much of anything.” He pressed the tip of the knife into her bottom lip, his touch light, but even so she felt a tiny bead of blood bubble up to the surface.
“Such a pity,” he said, “that I can’t even give you a good-bye kiss.”
He wasn’t going to touch her.
Her mind spun in desperate circles. What was it Quin had said in the hot spring? That perhaps magic didn’t always require touch?
It was her only hope, and she hurled herself toward it. She let her feelings course through her unchecked, fury flowing upward from her belly to her brain. She loosened her logic, held her reason under the roiling surface of her thoughts until it sputtered and drowned. She stacked everything into a bundle—terror, rage, love—and lit it on fire.
Nothing happened.
“Tristan. Cousin.” Quin’s voice was a dry croak in his throat.
The duke’s arm tensed, the knife poised at Mia’s neck.
“I owe you an apology.” Quin wheezed. “I owe you many apologies.”
“I’m not interested in your apologies.”
“I know you’re not. You do what you must. We’re as good as dead anyway. I only mean to say . . .” He trailed off. When he spoke again, his voice was choked with emotion. “I’ve underestimated you. My whole life I’ve underestimated you. And for that I am sorry. I see now what a mistake that was. I can’t ask anything of you . . . I deserve nothing of you . . . but if you would hear me out, I have but one final request.”
They all waited. Tristan’s hounds pricked their ears, and even the three guards leaned forward. Mia couldn’t believe these were the same men who had sworn to protect her only a week before. Now they would stand idly by while she bled out on the snow.
“One last toast,” Quin said. “One last drink together. That’s all I ask.”
Tristan’s eyes narrowed. “Why would I grant you this?”
“Because you are the man who will be king. You’re more of a man than I ever was. You understand power and influence—you won my father’s favor in a way I never could.” His voice wavered again. “I was never fit to be king. I knew it, you knew it, and my father knew it most of all. In a way you do me a great service, releasing me from this burden. I am a dead man. I’ve always been a dead man. But you, Cousin; someday, you will be king.”
He cleared his throat and swallowed. “A king grants a dead man his last request, because a king can.”
The duke hesitated. Mia could see him turning the proposal over in his mind. A dark smile stretched from his shadowed cheeks to his cold black eyes.
“Very well.” Tristan sheathed the knife in its scabbard. “Because a king can.”
Chapter 28
Broken
THE DEMON’S DWAYLE WENT down like a tube of pig’s grease, thick and rancid.
Mia hadn’t wanted to drink it, but Quin insisted.
They were gathered in Tristan’s camp around a crackling fire made by one of the guards. Mia had watched the man tie his long black beard into a knot at his chin and take a knife to a stick of softwood, using sharp, short strokes to shave a fuzzy mop of curls. He sparked a rock and lit the shavings, and soon the campfire was christening his satiny taupe skin with soft flecks of ash. When he’d seen her watching, he’d said, “It’s all in the wrist,” and given her an almost paternal wink.
It was a strange thing, envying a man’s fire-making abilities minutes before your execution.
“It’s good to drink together,” Quin said, clinking his flask to Tristan’s. He waved the guards over. “Them too. Them too.”
He had convinced the duke he deserved to toast his successes (“because you got what you came for, did you not?”), that the drink should be hot (“there can be no demon in demon’s dwayle without a red flame!”), and that they should all raise a glass (“the man who drinks alone is cold as stone”). He’d even managed to cajole his way out of his shackles, though they’d kept Mia’s ropes tied. The men had prodded her forward with sticks, careful to avoid touching her skin.
Quin had talked a blue streak and gotten Tristan to agree to all sorts of things. Unfortunately, none of them included sparing their lives.
The prince raised his flask.