Destin Karn dressed for his meeting with King Gerard Montaigne of Arden, knowing that he might not survive it. He knew the price of failing to meet the king’s expectations, and he had failed at Oden’s Ford.
It wasn’t for lack of effort. Destin had it on good authority that ten bodies had been found in and around Stokes Hall—but none were students. Five were Darians and five were school officials—provosts and dorm masters. They’d all been killed with conventional means—if throat-cutting could be considered conventional. None had been killed with conjury, so they hadn’t been done by the witch queen’s son. That fit with what Tourant had said—that the boy had been training as a healer, and so would be an easy mark.
According to the academy, two students had gone missing: Lila Barrowhill, a cadet in Wien House, and Ash Hanson, a northern student who was a proficient in Mystwerk. It appeared that a great deal of killing had happened in Hanson’s room—it was awash in blood. But the two bodies in there were both Darian brothers.
Had the Darians and provosts killed each other? Had Lila intervened? Why would she? From what Tourant had said, she and sul’Han weren’t particularly close at school. Nor was she the hero type. Anyway, Destin found it hard to believe that a woman could be responsible for so much bloodshed. The king had ordered him to keep Lila away from the killing field as a precaution. Montaigne had no intention of risking one of his most promising operatives in case a sudden attack of citizenship prompted her to intervene.
The irony was that Destin was the one who had recruited Lila—he’d been her handler for the past two years. But now, more and more, she interacted directly with the king. Destin didn’t like losing control of that relationship.
He never should have allowed her to leave the party—he knew that now. If Lila and sul’Han were both dead, Destin had failed. If they were both alive, Destin had failed.
There had been just one verified student casualty. Renard Tourant, an Ardenine cadet, went missing that night and was found floating in the Tamron River a few days later, apparently drowned. Destin wished he’d been able to take a little more time dispatching that blundering fool, but he’d been in a bit of a hurry to get out of town before anyone thought to question Denis Rochefort, a visitor from Arden.
It was possible that the scheme had succeeded. It was possible that there had been more than five Darians, and that the survivors had carried the bodies of Barrowhill and sul’Han away for one of their ghastly rituals. They were blood-hungry bastards, always fighting like jackals over who got to do the deed. Destin preferred a more dispassionate approach to killing. It was sometimes necessary, but Destin didn’t enjoy it as a rule.
It was possible, but Destin didn’t believe it. He’d been promised proof of the kill that he could take back with him to Ardenscourt, but had not received it. According to his sources, the two missing students had not surfaced, alive or dead, in Arden or the Fells, in the weeks since.
Destin suspected that it was only that bit of hopeful ambiguity that had kept him alive this long. That, and the fact that the deans at Oden’s Ford had been unable to prove that Arden was behind it.
Oh, they suspected plenty. The Darian Guild was tied to the Church of Malthus, the state church of the Ardenine Empire. The king of Arden had long claimed the right to search the academy campus for saboteurs, spies, and contraband, though he’d never before tried to exercise that right. The administration at Oden’s Ford sent stern letters to the king and to the principia of the Church of Malthus, demanding to know what, if anything, they knew about the violation of the peace. Since it appeared that those responsible had fled into Arden, they further demanded that the culprits be apprehended and returned to the academy for trial.
Agents of the church and the empire denied any knowledge of the attack at the academy. They pointed out that Arden had no reason to attack students at Oden’s Ford, assuming that the school was not harboring enemies of the state. They suggested that they look to the north for the guilty parties. After all, one of the victims was a citizen of Arden. Perhaps the two missing students were responsible for the killings. The king of Arden offered to station soldiers at Oden’s Ford to protect students and faculty if the academy requested it.
The academy declined.