Am I real?
Real enough to ache with grief. Real enough to reach out a hand and savor the spring rain as it dripped coolly on his skin. To step out of the palace’s shelter and let it soak him to the bone.
And real enough to feel his heart quicken when the streak of darkness slid past against the pale sky.
He recognized the bird at once, knew it came from Vesk.
The foreign fleet had retreated from the mouth of the Isle, but the crown had yet to answer for its crimes. Col was dead, but Cora sat in the royal prisons, waiting to learn her fate. And here it was, strapped to the ankle of a hawk.
Word of Col and Cora’s treason had spread with the waking of the city, and London was already calling for Rhy to take the empire to war. The Faroans had pledged their aid—a little too quickly for his tastes—and Sol-in-Ar had returned to Faro in the name of diplomacy, which Rhy feared meant readying his soldiers.
Sixty-five years of peace, he thought grimly, ruined by a pair of bored, ambitious children.
Rhy turned and made his way downstairs, Isra and Tieren falling into step beside him. Otto was waiting in the foyer.
The Veskan magician shook the rain from his coarse blond hair, a scroll—its seal already broken—clutched in his hand.
“Your Majesty. I bring news from my crown.”
“What news?” asked Rhy.
“My queen does not court war.”
It was a hollow phrase. “But her children do.”
“She wishes to make amends.”
Another empty promise. “How?”
“If it pleases the Arnesian king, she will send a year’s worth of winter wine, seven priests, and her youngest son, Hok, whose gift for stone magic is unsurpassed in all of Vesk.”
My mother is dead, Rhy wanted to scream, and you would give me drink and danger. Instead he said only, “And what of the princess? What will the queen give me for her?”
Otto’s expression hardened. “My queen wants nothing of her.”
Rhy frowned. “She is her blood.”
Otto shook his head. “The only thing we despise more than a traitor is a failure. The princess went against her queen’s command for peace. She set her own mission, and then she failed to see it through. My queen grants Your Majesty leave to do with Cora as he will.”
Rhy rubbed his eyes. Veskans did not look at mercy and see strength, and he knew the only solution the queen sought, the only one she would respect, was Cora’s death.
Rhy resisted the urge to pace, to chew his nails, to do a dozen different things that were not kingly. What would his father say? What would his father do? He resisted the urge to look at Isra, or Tieren, to defer, to escape.
“How do I know the queen won’t use her daughter’s execution against me? She could claim I broke the final strands of peace, slaughtered Cora in the name of revenge.”
Otto said nothing for a long moment and then, “I do not know my queen’s mind, only her words.”
It could all be a trap, and Rhy knew it. But he could see no other choice.
His father had told him so many things about peace and war, had compared it to a dance, a game, a strong wind, but the words that rose in Rhy’s mind now were some of the first.
War against an empire, Maxim had said, was like a knife against a well-armored man. It may take three strikes or thirty, but if the hand was determined, the blade would eventually find its way in.
“Like your queen,” he said at last, “I do not covet war. Our peace has been made fragile, and a public execution could either quell my city’s anger or inflame it.”
“Something need not be a demonstration to be an act,” said Otto. “So long as the right eyes see it done.”
Rhy’s hand drifted to the hilt of the gold short sword at his hip. It was meant to be decorative, another piece of his elaborate mourning garb, but it had been sharp enough to cut down Col. It would do the same for Cora.
At the sight of the gesture, Isra stepped forward, speaking for the first time.
“I will do it,” she offered, and Rhy wanted to let her, wanted to shed the business of killing. There had been enough blood.
But he shook his head, forced himself toward the prison cell.
“The death is mine,” he said, trying to infuse the words with an anger he didn’t feel—wished he felt, for it would have burned hot where grief ran cold.
Tieren did not follow—priests were made for life, not death—but Otto and Isra fell in step behind him.
Rhy wondered if Kell could feel his racing heart, if he would come running—the king wondered, but didn’t wish it. His brother had his own chapters to close.
As soon as Rhy’s boots hit the stairs, he knew something was wrong.
Instead of being met by Cora’s lilting voice, he was met by silence and the metal tang of blood on his tongue. He plunged down the last few steps into the prison, taking in the scene.
There were no guards.
The princess’s cell was still locked.
And Cora lay inside, stretched out on the stone bench, her fingers trailing limply along the floor, nails swallowed by the shining slick of blood.
Rhy rocked back.
Someone must have slipped her a blade. Had it been a mercy or a taunt? Either way, she’d slashed her arms from elbow to wrist and written a single Veskan word on the wall above the bench.
Tan’och.
Honor.
Otto stared in silence, but Rhy rushed forward to open the cell, to what end, he didn’t know. Cora of Vesk was dead. And even though he’d come to kill her, the sight of her lifeless body, her empty gaze, still made him sick. And then—shamefully—relieved. Because he hadn’t known if he could do it. Hadn’t wanted to find out.
Rhy unlocked the cell and stepped inside.
“Your Majesty—” started Isra as blood stained his boots, splashed up onto his clothes, but Rhy didn’t care.
He knelt, brushing the limp blond hair from Cora’s face before he forced himself upright, forced his voice steady. Otto’s gaze was trained not on the body but the bloody word painted on the wall, and Rhy sensed the danger in it, the call to action.
When the Veskan’s blue eyes swung back to Rhy’s, they were flat, steady.
“A death is a death,” said Otto. “I will tell my queen it’s done.”
III
Ned was drooping with fatigue. He hadn’t slept more than a handful of hours in the past three days, and then not at all since the king’s visit. The shadows had stopped sometime before dawn, but Ned didn’t trust the silence any more than he had the sound, so he kept the windows boarded and the door locked, and stationed himself at a table in the center of the room with a glass in one hand and his ceremonial dagger in the other.
His head was beginning to loll when he heard the voices coming from the front step. He stumbled to his feet, nearly overturning the chair as the locks on the tavern door began to move. He watched in abject horror as the three bolts slid free one by one—drawn back by some invisible hand—and then the handle shuddered, the door groaning as it opened inward.
Ned took up the nearly empty bottle in his free hand, wielding it like a bat, oblivious to the last few drops that spilled into his hair and down his collar as two shadows crossed the threshold, their edges rimmed with mist.
He moved to strike, only to find the bottle stripped from his fingers. A second later it struck the wall and shattered.
“Lila,” said a familiar—and exasperated—voice.
Ned squinted, eyes adjusting to the sudden light. “Master Kell?”
The door swung shut again, plunging the room back into a lidded dark as the magician came forward. “Hello, Ned.”
He had his black coat on, the collar turned up against the cold. His eyes shone in their magnetic way, one blue, the other black, but a streak of silver now marred the copper of his hair, and there was a new gauntness to his face, as though he’d been long ill.
Beside him, the woman—Lila—cocked her head. She was rakishly thin, with dark hair that brushed her jaw and trailed across her eyes—one brown, the other black.
Ned stared at her with open awe. “You’re like him.”