Bandages wove around his ribs and over his shoulder, too tight, the skin beneath already closed. Healed—if that was the word for it. But it wasn’t, because Rhy Maresh hadn’t healed in months.
Healing was natural, healing took time—time for muscle to fuse, for bones to set, for skin to mend, time for scars to form, for the slow recession of pain followed by the return of strength.
In all fairness, Rhy had never known the long suffering of convalescence. Whenever he’d been injured as a child, Kell had always been there to mend him. Nothing worse than a cut or bruise ever lasted more than the time it took to find his brother.
But even that had been different.
A choice.
Rhy remembered falling from the courtyard wall when he was twelve and spraining his wrist. Remembered Kell’s quickness to draw blood, Rhy’s quickness to stop him, because he could bear the pain more than he could bear Kell’s face when the blade sank in, the knowledge that he’d feel dizzy and ill the rest of the day from the magic’s strain. And because, secretly, Rhy wanted to know he had a choice.
To heal.
But when Astrid Dane had driven the blade between his ribs, when the darkness had swallowed him, and then receded like a tide, there’d been no choice, no chance to say no. The wound was already closed. The spell already done.
He’d stayed in bed for three days in a mimicry of convalescence. He’d felt weak and ill, but it had less to do with his mending body than the new hollowness inside it. The voice in his head that whispered wrong, wrong, with every pulse.
Now he did not heal. A wound was a wound and then it wasn’t.
A shudder went through him as he reached the bottom step.
Rhy did not want to do this.
Did not want to face her.
But someone had to handle the living, as much as someone had to handle the dead, and the king had already laid claim to the latter. His father, who was dealing with his grief as though it were an enemy, something to defeat, subdue. Who had ordered every Veskan in the palace rounded up, put under armed guard, and confined to the southern wing. His father, who had laid out his dead wife on the stone grieving block with such peculiar care, as if she were fragile. As if anything could touch her now.
In the gloom of the prison, a pair of guards stood watch.
Cora was sitting cross-legged on the bench at the back of her cell. She wasn’t chained to the wall, as Holland had been, but her delicate wrists were bound in iron so heavy her hands had to rest on the bench before her knees, making her look as though she were leaning forward to whisper a secret.
Blood dappled her face like freckles, but when she saw Rhy, she actually smiled. Not the rictus grin of the mad, or the rueful smirk of the guilty. It was the same smile she’d given him as they perched in the royal baths telling stories: cheerful, innocent.
“Rhy,” she said brightly.
“Was it your idea, or Col’s?”
She pursed her lips, sulking at the lack of preamble. But then her eyes went to the bandage that peeked through Rhy’s stiffened collar. It should have been a killing blow. It had been.
“My brother is one of the best swordsmen in Vesk,” said Cora. “Col has never missed his mark.”
“He didn’t,” said Rhy simply.
Cora’s brow crinkled, then smoothed. Expressions flitted across her face like pages flipping in a breeze, too fast to catch.
“There are rumors, in my city,” she said. “Rumors about Kell, and rumors about you. They say you di—”
“Was it your idea, or his?” demanded Rhy, fighting to keep his voice even, to hold his grief at bay, the way his father did, sadness kept behind a dam.
Cora rose to her feet despite the weight of the manacles. “My brother has a gift for swords, not strategies.” She curled her fingers around the bars, metal sounding against metal like a bell. The cuff slipped down, and again Rhy saw the bruised skin circling her wrist. There was something unnatural about those marks, he realized now, something inhuman.
“That wasn’t your brother, was it?”
She caught him looking, chuckled. “Hawk,” she admitted. “Beautiful birds. Easy to forget that they have claws.”
He could see it now, the curve of talons he’d mistaken for fingers, the prick of the creature’s nails.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” said Cora, and what he hated most was that she sounded sincere. He thought of the night they’d spent together, the way she’d made him feel less alone. The ease of her presence, the realization that she was just a child, a girl pretending, playing at games she didn’t fully understand. Now, he wondered about that innocence, if it had all been an illusion. If he should have been able to tell. If it would have changed anything. If, if, if.
“Why did you do it?” he asked, his resolve threatening to break. She cocked her head, perplexed, like a hooded bird of prey.
“I’m the sixth of seven children. What future is there for me? In what world would I ever rule?”
“You could have killed your own family instead of mine.”
Cora leaned in, that cherubic face pressed against the cell bars. “I thought about it. I suppose one day I might.”
“No, you won’t.” Rhy turned to go. “You’ll never see the outside of this cell.”
“I’m like you,” she said softly.
“No.” He shoved her words away.
“I have hardly any magic,” she pressed on. “But we both know there are other kinds of power.” Rhy’s steps slowed. “There’s charm, cunning, seduction, strategy.”
“Murder,” he said, rounding on her.
“We use what we have. We make what we don’t. We’re truly not so different,” said Cora, gripping the bars. “We both want the same thing. To be seen as strong. The only difference between you and me is the number of siblings standing in our way to the throne.”
“That’s not the only difference, Cora.”
“Does it drive you mad, to be the weaker one?”
He wrapped his hand around hers, pinning them to the bars of the cell. “I am alive because my brother is strong,” he said coldly. “You are alive only because yours is dead.”
VI
Osaron sat on his throne and waited.
Waited for the impostor’s palace to fall.
Waited for his subjects to return.
Waited for word of his victory.
For any word at all.
Thousands of voices had whispered in his head—determined, weeping, crowing, pleading, triumphant—and then, in a single moment, they were gone, the world suddenly still.
He reached out again and plucked the threads, but no one answered.
No one came.
They couldn’t all have perished throwing themselves against the palace wards. Couldn’t all have vanished so easily from his power, from his will.
He waited, wondering if the silence itself was some kind of trick, a ruse, but when it stretched, his own thoughts loud and echoing in the hollow space, Osaron rose.
The shadow king walked toward his palace doors, the smooth dark wood dissolving to smoke before him and taking shape again in his wake, parting as the world should for a god.
Against the sky, the impostor’s palace of stone stood, its wards cracked but not broken.
And there, littering the steps, the banks, the city, Osaron saw the bodies of his puppets, their strings cut.
Everywhere he looked, he saw them. Thousands. Dead.
No, not dead.
But not entirely alive.
Despite the cold, each had the essential glow of life, the faint, steady rhythm of a heart still beating, the sound so soft it couldn’t crack the silence.
That silence, that horrible, deafening silence, so like the world—his world—when the last life had ebbed and all that was left was a shred of power, a withered sliver of the magic that had once been Osaron. He’d paced for days through the dead remains of his city, every inch gone black, until even he had stilled, too weak to move, too weak to do anything but exist, to beat stubbornly on like these sleeping hearts.
“Get up,” he ordered his subjects now.
No one answered.
“Get up,” he screamed into their minds, into their very cores, pulling on every string, reaching into memory, into dream, into bone.
Still, no one rose.