“We’re leaving.”
People stare daggers at me, faces twisted into sneers.
Another exhale, and this time, it’s Queen Kaila’s voice herself from that night. “It’s clear that her loyalty lies with Fourth Kingdom. Let her lose her favor. It’s what she deserves.”
Then Midas’s voice sounding pleading. “Auren, come here right now.”
“Never.”
Another word out of context, used to her narrative’s benefit.
“You want to leave? To be the whore of King Rot?” Midas’s voice spits.
“Better the whore to the man at my back than the favored to you,” comes my reply. “We’re leaving. You’d be wise to do the same.”
The way she’s reenacting this makes it very clear that I meant it as a threat.
“You want to leave, Auren? Then go. Let Ravinger’s pollution leave this kingdom.”
The poor, rejected king, giving up his favored.
Kaila doesn’t make it known what really happened next, doesn’t make it clear that we did try to leave. No. Instead, she makes it sound like Midas was this spurned, betrayed king who was letting me walk away.
Which of course, isn’t true at all.
Queen Kaila pauses, looks out at the crowd. “Lady Auren refused to leave. She attacked Midas right in front of me, and when he tried to use his gold to protect himself, he couldn’t.” Her head shakes and she makes a somber sniff, gathering more and more sympathy from the watchful faces. “Lady Auren was jealous he had announced his engagement to me. In her rage to get back at him, she seduced King Ravinger, and then she attacked.”
My teeth grind together. Heart pounding against my skull. I don’t know what’s more prevalent, my anger, fear, or exhaustion.
“This next part is violent,” she goes on. “I caution anyone with young children or sensitive dispositions to cover their ears.”
Then she blows out another breath.
This time, there aren’t voices that she feeds out, but screams. They rend out across the square, clacking against the walls, making the people balk and cringe and look at me with horror. The noises ring in my ears, my memories lining up with each one. I can see the guards swallowed by gold, melted through, sliced and slashed and smothered.
I did that.
Just like I was responsible for the carnage at Carnith.
Then there’s Midas’s voice. Tinged with the timbre of his plea. “Auren.”
I can feel it—how the crowd turns on me. The pity they feel for King Midas. I’m already the villain in their eyes. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that being the villain isn’t always a bad thing.
“Thank you, Queen Kaila,” the king announces. “But one must ask, were you in the room while King Midas was killed? Did you witness it firsthand?”
Kaila pauses before answering, “No, King Merewen. I had to flee.”
“Flee? Why is that?”
“Because Lady Auren didn’t just trick and kill the king,” Kaila states. “She also holds a dark power that none of us knew.”
“What power?”
Her sharp eyes look straight ahead, like a performer delivering her perfected lines to the audience. “I witnessed Lady Auren stealing Midas’s gold-touch. And she killed him with it, just as she tried to kill me.”
The crowd erupts into gasps and whispers.
King Merewen looks at me. “How does the accused respond?”
“I didn’t steal anything,” I grit out.
I don’t trust these monarchs. What if they want to keep me in here and force me to gild things just like Midas? They have a goal in mind for this Conflux, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to kidnap me. If I defend myself, will they only use it against me?
“No?”
“No,” I reply through gritted teeth. “I didn’t steal Midas’s magic.”
In the worst timing imaginable, all the gold that’s been gathering beneath my grip starts to dribble down the poles in thick streams.
The gathered throng erupts with exclamations, fingers pointed, eyes widened.
“It’s true!”
“She’s got King Midas’s power!”
I glare at the crowd, trying to scream back. “It’s not his power! It never was!” My voice is inconsequential. Drowned out by a sea come to wash me away.
“She’s a thief, a cheat!”
“Guilty! Guilty!”
I yank my hands away from the thin pillars, but all that does is ensure that gravity is not on my side. Now, gold no longer drips slowly from my hands. It floods out of my skin, streaming from my fingers to puddle on the floor. It soaks the bottoms of my burnt feet, staining the hem of my dress, gathering higher, but being contained by some invisible barrier that doesn’t allow it to pass the poles.
“Guilty!”
It’s like being cut open at the wrists and watching myself bleed. I can’t stop the flow, but I can feel its deluge draining out of me, weakening me even more.
That’s when I notice threads of black appear inside the gold.
At first, it’s just a single line of it that drips down in a heavy, dense drop and splashes at my feet. Then there’s more, until it’s streaking through every single rivulet, like someone has dumped black ink and swirled it around.
What is that?
The gold is pouring out of me now, and I know the monarchs are speaking, know the throng is shouting, but my ears are ringing, heart pounding, because these dark lines...they look like— “Great Divine.”
My head jerks up at Queen Kaila’s voice, at the way she’s pointing at me, the shock on her face so apparent that I’d bet nearly everyone in the crowd can see. “She stole King Rot’s power too!”
She screams it.
And the crowd screams with her.
But I’m in too much of a shock to say anything at all, because she’s right. Those are the same seeking strands that Slade spreads through the ground, the same veins that writhe beneath his skin.
In some sick twist of fate, these lines of rot are spreading, digging, tunneling through my gold like roots twisting through to grow a plethora of festering weeds, right here for everyone to see. Rot sprouting from that single speck that Slade left inside of me, the seed that we thought was dormant.
“She stole gold-touch! Now she stole rot! She can steal more!”
“Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”
My world tips. I stumble back against the poles, feet splashing in the pooled up metal. I need this pull on my magic to stop, need to cut it off, yank it out, but I can’t.
I was drugged for days, I’m dehydrated. Hot. Exhausted. My feet are charred. Every place where Queen Isolte tortured me feels like one crushing wound. My magic is gushing out of me with a deadly and unstoppable force, and I’m trapped.
I’m trapped.
My whole body starts to tremble, eyes flaring around wildly, heart feeling like it’s too big for my chest, too thundering for my pulse.
“Monarchs, give your vote!”
Every single one of them joins the voices of the crowd.
Guilty, guilty, guilty.
King Merewen turns to his people. “The royal Conflux rules that she is guilty!”
The voices of the crowd spread into a thousand cracks.
“The verdict is immediate execution.”
And everything around me shatters.
Guilty guilty guilty.
CHAPTER 64
AUREN
There’s a recoil that happens in your brain when something shocking occurs. Something so violently harrowing that your thoughts blanch and withdraw. As if your mind becomes a protective mother, shielding its child’s eyes and muffling the frightening noises while the massacre occurs and she knows they’re next. Subduing the receptors, mentally numbing the fallout—it’s the last thing it can do to offer protection.
The last thing it can do to soften the impending blow.
So I hear the crowd continue their chant.
Guilty.
I see the shouting faces, the movement of the monarchs, the spill of my stained gold.
Yet all of it is dulled. Soft. Monotone. Slow like I’m in a dream. As if this is only a nightmare, and my mind is reminding me to keep me calm.
Except I know this isn’t a dream. The worst things that have happened in my life have always been while I was awake. This is no different.