“Who the hell do you think you are?” Dagrun answered. “Get out of here, boy.”
Then banging sounds, bodies moving in the darkness. Kepi twisted left and right, throwing the blanket off, trying to find her clothes, her sword. “No!” she screamed, fumbling in the darkness. “Seth—no!”
Dagrun, naked, scrambled toward his discarded clothes to look for a weapon, for something, but he was moving strangely, awkwardly—something was wrong with him. Where was Seth? Where was Dagrun’s sword? Then she knew that Seth had gotten hold of it somehow, that a servant had come into the room and stolen the king’s blade for him.
In the darkness, Dagrun turned and caught the boy’s wrist with both hands, held Seth’s sword hand away from his body until the boy cried out. The blade clattered out of his hands and slid across the smooth stones of the floor, and Dagrun went scrambling after it, hoping to get there first, but the king did not move with his usual speed. He stumbled and fell to the floor, his hand resting just short of the grip. That was when Seth took out the dagger from his belt, raised it above his head, and plunged it into the smooth skin of Dagrun’s back.
Kepi screamed.
Blood poured from Dagrun’s wound, great buckets of blood that spread out across the floor. Dagrun crawled a few inches, his arms reaching back painfully to try to touch the wound, but his strength was failing, he was falling, gurgling sounds coming from his throat, the wet sounds of sucking breath and blood in his lungs. “Kepi,” he said, “Kepi…”
Seth rushed toward her, dagger in hand, angry, confused, his eyes darting. “Are you okay, Kepi? He’ll never hurt you again—”
But the moment he reached her, she began to beat Seth with her fists, catching him in the face, in the gut. “You stupid boy!” she cried. “I was willing. I was his wife.”
Then, she saw in Dagrun’s cup a wisp of red, a dark coil that wound like a serpent’s tail through the pale amber. When Seth slipped into the room to take the sword he must have also poisoned the amber. That’s why Dagrun was so pale, why his eyes were bloodshot and he had not moved with his usual speed. Seth had poisoned him. Surely the king would have otherwise bested the boy.
Seth was no warrior.
Even in the dark, with surprise on his side, Seth would not have defeated Dagrun. He had cheated. He had procured a poison and poured it into the king’s cup. He must have made it himself, or perhaps the physician made it for him. There were many who did not accept Dagrun’s reign, the king had said so himself. Seth had said so. Now those men had aided Seth, and the boy from Harkana had stolen her husband.
“The servants are revolting. They are taking over the caer. We should go!” Seth sputtered, but Kepi was no longer listening.
She fell to the floor, naked still, sobbing, her body still charged with the electricity of their sex. She crawled to her husband and covered his body with her own. “Don’t leave me,” she said, petting Dagrun’s hair, his face. His skin was white, the poison making him look strange. His eyes were wide open, staring. He was already gone.
She collapsed next to her dead husband, Seth howling her name—and then she turned on him, the one she’d thought she’d loved, the boy who was now a murderer. “What have you done?” she wailed.
“I came to save you. I thought he—” Seth took a shuddering breath. “Kepi, I—”
“I’m not yours to save, Seth!” She turned on him, her eyes flashing hatred. “You couldn’t have left when I gave you the chance? I told you it was all over, I set you free to go home to your family, and this is how you repay me?”
She stepped toward him, her hands clenched into fists, but he still held the bloody dagger in his hands. Instead, she went to the chest and, at last, found her sword, advancing on him with fury in her eyes. “You won’t kill me,” he said. “Kepi, it’s me, it’s Seth—don’t you remember? You love me!”
“I don’t love you. I told you that in the yard. I told you, but you wouldn’t listen!”
Shouts rang through the door. Soldiers approached. She heard a scuffle, raised voices, and swords meeting armor. Dagrun’s soldiers were here and were fighting the men who had aided Seth. The conflict reached a fearsome crescendo, coming closer. Seth took a step back, his eyes always on the tip of her blade. He was reaching out to push it away when he backed up to the doorway, right into the guards who were coming into the room, staring with horror at the dead king lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, the boy holding the bloody dagger, the queen defending herself with her own sword.
They took hold of the boy roughly. “I didn’t kill him!” Seth lied.
“My lady?” said the captain of the guard, looking at the queen.
“It was him,” she said. “He killed the king of the Ferens.”
“No! It was her, it was her!” Seth cried, but the men were already dragging him away.
Even as he tried to put the blame on her, she knew why he had done it. You thought Dagrun Finner was no different from Roghan Frith. Two brutes, two Ferens. You were wrong, Seth.
The soldiers went to their fallen king, checking to see if his heart still beat, but Kepi knew the truth already, that her husband was dead. The floor was slick with his blood—it would never be clean again, no matter how often it was scrubbed.
The morning light was still coming in the windows. A moon ago she had been a girl still, a king’s daughter of Harkana, thinking only of her own wants, plotting her escape from Harkana with Seth, wishing Dagrun dead. It had all happened—Dagrun was dead, and she and Seth had escaped Harkana. Not the way they had intended, but it had happened nonetheless.