“What do you say now, Father?” Balekin demands. “Brother?”
Two bolts fly from the shadows, thudding into Balekin’s side. He staggers forward. The cloth of his doublet appears ripped, a gleam of metal underneath. Armor. I scan the rafters for the Ghost.
I am an agent of the prince as surely as he is. It’s my duty to get to Dain. I shove forward again. In my head I can see a vision of the future, like a story I am telling myself, a clear, shining narrative to contrast with the chaos around me. Somehow, I will get to the prince and defend him against Balekin’s treachery until the loyal members of his guard reach us. I will be the hero, the one who put herself between the traitors and her king.
Madoc gets there before I do.
For a brief moment, I am relieved. His commanders’ loyalty might be bought, but Madoc would never—
Then Madoc thrusts his sword through Dain’s chest with such force that the blade emerges on the other side. He drags it up, through his rib cage, to his heart.
I stop moving and let the crowd flow around me. I am still as stone.
I see a flash of white bone, of wet red muscle. Prince Dain, who was almost the High King, falls on top of the gem-crusted red cloak of state, his spilling blood lost in the jumble of jewels.
“Traitors,” Eldred whispers, but his voice is amplified by the space. The word feels as though it rings through the hall.
Madoc pauses and then sets his jaw, as though he is doing some grim duty. He is wearing his red cap now, the one I saw sticking out of his pocket, the one I have studied in its case. Tonight he will freshen it. There will be new tide lines. But I cannot believe he is doing this on anyone’s orders.
He must have allied with Balekin, misdirected Dain’s spies. Put his own commanders in place, to keep the royal family isolated from anyone who would help them. Urged Balekin to orchestrate a strike at the one time no one would expect it. Even figured out that the only way not to trigger the crown’s death curse was to move when it rested on no one’s head. Knowing him as I do, I am sure he planned this coup.
Madoc has betrayed Eldred, and Dain is gone, taking all my hopes and plans with him.
Coronations are a time when many things are possible.
Balekin looks insufferably satisfied with himself. “Give me the crown.”
Eldred drops the circlet from his hand. It rolls a little ways across the floor. “Take it yourself if it’s what you so desire.”
Caelia is making a terrible keening sound. Rhyia stares at the crowd in horror. Val Moren stands beside Eldred, his narrow poet’s face pale. With the knights circling it, the dais is like a terrible stage, where all the players are doomed to run through their roles to the same bloody end.
Madoc’s hands are gloved in red. I cannot stop staring at them.
Balekin lifts the High Crown. The golden oak leaves glitter with the light of candle flame. “You waited too long to depart the throne, Father. You have become weak. You let traitors rule little fiefdoms, the power of the low Courts goes unchecked, and the wild fey do as they like. Dain would have been the same, a coward who hid behind intrigues. But I am not afraid of bloodshed.”
Eldred does not speak. He makes no move toward the crown or toward a weapon. He simply waits.
Balekin orders a knight to bring him Taniot. A female redcap in armor steps onto the dais to grab the struggling consort. Taniot’s head lashes back and forth, her long black horns cutting into the redcap knight’s shoulder. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. There are too many knights. Two more step forward, and there is no more struggling.
Balekin draws himself up before his father. “Declare me the High King, put the crown on my head, and you may go from this place, free and unharmed. My sisters will be protected. Your consort will live. Otherwise, I will kill Taniot. I will kill her here in front of everyone, and they will all know that you allowed it.”
My gaze goes to Madoc, but he is on the steps, speaking in low tones to one of his commanders, a troll who has eaten at our table, has teased Oak and made him laugh. I laughed, too, then. Now my hands are shaking, my whole body trembling.
“Balekin, firstborn, no matter whose blood you spill, you will never rule Elfhame,” Eldred says. “You are unworthy of the crown.”
I close my eyes and think of Oriana’s words to me: It is no easy thing to be the lover of the High King. It is to always be a pawn.
Taniot goes to her death with grace. She is still. Her bearing is regal and doomed, as though she has already passed into the realm of ballads. Her fingers are laced together. She makes no sound as one of the knights—the redcap knight with the slashed shoulder—beheads her with a single swift and brutal strike of her blade. Taniot’s horned head rolls a short ways until it hits Dain’s corpse.
I feel something wet on my face, like rain.
There are plenty of the Folk who delight in murder and plenty more who delight in spectacle. A kind of giddy madness seems to come upon the crowd, a kind of hunger for even greater slaughter. I fear they may have a surfeit of satisfaction. Two of the knights have seized Eldred.
“I will not ask you again,” Balekin says.
But Eldred only laughs. He keeps laughing when Balekin runs him through. He doesn’t fall like the others. Instead of blood pouring from his wound, red moths stream out, into the air. They rush out of him so quickly that in a moment, the High King’s body is gone and there are just those red moths, swirling up into the air in a vast cloud, a tornado of soft wings.
But whatever magic made them does not last. They begin to fall until they are scattered across the dais like blown leaves. The High King Eldred is, impossibly, dead.
The dais is strewn with bodies and blood. Val Moren is on his knees.
“Sisters,” Balekin says, striding toward them. Some of the arrogance is gone from his voice, replaced with a horrible softness. He sounds like a man in the midst of a terrible dream from which he refuses to wake. “Which of you will crown me? Crown me and live.”
I think of Madoc telling my mother not to run.
Caelia steps forward, dropping her knife. She is dressed in a stomacher of gold and a skirt of blue, a circlet of berries in her loose hair.
“I will do it,” she says. “It is enough. I will make you the High King, although the stain of what you have done will forever taint your rule.”