The Beasts We Bury (The Broken Citadel #1)

8. Silver

8

S ILVER

|10 DAYS UNTIL THE ASSURANCE|

I’m cleaning one of the grand windows that looks out onto the mountains when suddenly Guerre appears on the castle wall, silhouetted by the morning sun. I jerk back, leaving a long streak on the glass. I could swear he wasn’t there a second before.

He doesn’t look at me, but he does angle his head in my direction enough to let me know he’s aware of me. Then he ambles along the edge of the wall, casual as anything, and descends the stairs into the courtyard.

He’s dressed like a gardener today. The beard is gone, but his hair is longer and stragglier. He looks tanned, too. More weather-beaten. Older, somehow.

Without ever looking up, he disappears into the gardening shed on the edge of the lawn.

The message is clear. I toss my rag into the bucket of sudsy water and head out to meet him.

As promised, my second task is just as impossible as the first.

I’m supposed to steal a sword. But not just any sword: the Victory’s Herald, a blade even someone like me has heard of.

Lore has it some Prime a long time ago made the first kill of an apparently unwinnable ancient war with it, and then ultimately emerged victorious from the not-so-unwinnable-after-all campaign. Instead of crediting some superior strategy or, I don’t know, the humans who did all the actual killing, I guess the Prime decided the sword should get the accolades.

So now it has a fancy name and several ceremonial functions. It’s the sword the Cliff Realm has used to formally start and end every war since. It’s also the sword Prime Merod will use to anoint Mancella as his heir in a week and a half. But more to the point, it’s the sword the Prime keeps in a locked box in his locked desk in his locked office in the middle of a castle stuffed to the gills with guards.

Which is not ideal.

I puzzle over it all morning, but I’m not going to be able to come up with much of a plan until I can get a solid feel for the obstacles. So after lunch I start a (very small, nothing to worry about) fire in the kitchens and sneak in an attempt at unlocking the first door while everyone is distracted.

Now, usually, I’m pretty good with locks. I’m more of a pickpocket than a burglar, admittedly, but there have been a few times I’ve found the need to branch out. This lock is weird, though. It doesn’t make sense. My picks can’t even penetrate it, like the empty space inside the lock isn’t really there. I can see it, but when I try to stick my tools into it there’s some kind of invisible barrier, like—

“Like magic,” I say out loud, shaking my head. “Of course it is.”

I guess it makes sense that his study would have some kind of extra protection, but it’s still annoying.

Because now I have to figure out how to talk Mancella into letting me in there, and I’ve got no great ideas.

But before I can dwell on it too much, a guard strides around the corner and I hastily shove my picks into my waistcoat and rush past him, making a show of clutching the bucket of water I’d announced I was going to get.

Hopefully no one notices it’s the same one I was using to clean the windows earlier.

“Prime Azele finally wrote back,” I mumble to myself as I pace down one of the many glass-strewn halls later that night. “Weirdest thing, though. She says we can only read the letter in your dad’s office. I dunno, Primes are kooky. Best do what she says, though, don’t you think?”

That’ll definitely work.

I glance through a door at yet another reading room or breakfast nook or solarium or whatever (I genuinely cannot tell these rich-people rooms apart) and then turn a corner, only to find that I’ve already paced this hallway.

Which means that since my shift ended two hours ago, I have officially looked in every room of the castle, and Mancella wasn’t in any of them.

Man, she’s annoying me and I haven’t even started talking to her yet. I don’t know why I spent the last several days memorizing her schedule if she was just going to disappear on me as soon as the information became relevant.

A night guard steps into the hallway, so I duck through the closest doorway to hide. I’m supposed to be asleep right now, since my shift tomorrow is the earliest one. There’s a balled-up pair of jackets under the blankets on my bedroll in case anyone checks, but if I run into any actual people that flimsy alibi will be destroyed immediately.

The guard’s footsteps echo down the corridor, getting closer. I can’t close the door or he’ll hear it, but the room doesn’t have any great places to hide. If he so much as glances inside as he passes, I’m done for.

Just before the guard walks by, I ease open a thankfully well-oiled window and slip outside.

I crouch in the bushes below for several beats, just to be safe, but when there are no sounds of pursuit, I straighten and pull the window shut again.

It’s a nice evening. The moon is bright and full, the stars are starting to come out. Maybe Mancella went for a walk. In one of the half dozen gardens.

And maybe I should just wait until tomorrow.

But I step out into the darkness anyway because I am physically incapable of quitting anything I’ve started.

With no real direction, I pass the perfectly manicured lawn, the greenhouse, and the hedge maze and step into the glass garden near the back of the grounds.

It’s where I would go for a walk. Unlike the haphazard shards strewn around my house and the weaponized pines around the castle wall, these trees were grown purely for the aesthetic. I think about the warlord who sent my family to die growing this gorgeous garden for his own family to enjoy and I hate every sparkling inch of it, but that doesn’t keep me from wanting to stroll through it, wanting to brush my fingers on the leaves that look so delicate but feel so strong.

It’s genuinely breathtaking. Something about the magic in the glass catches the moonlight and refracts it, so that the whole garden is splintered with pale white light. There are magnolias covered in crystal blooms, fruit trees bursting with glittering pears and apples. There are topiaries like giant glass sculptures crafted into the shapes of animals made of thousands of intricately placed leaves. There are even palm trees that would never be able to grow here, stretching their broad fronds up to the sky. And whenever the wind rustles the leaves, they make this soft chiming noise that makes you feel like you’re in another place entirely, somewhere beauty and music make sense. Somewhere… magical.

But then I hear another sound as the wind dies down and the leaves settle.

A scream of rage.

I whip around and scan the grounds until I find her. Mancella—her cheeks flushed and her hair loose around her shoulders. She’s… punching a wisteria.

My shoulders relax and I approach, bemused.

The tree tinkles raucously as she hits, kicks, and yanks on its shining boughs. She’s really going at it, throwing herself into the attack like the wisteria might start fighting back any minute. And each strike is punctuated by another grunt or shriek or growl.

When I picture the dolled-up Seconde who appears at formal events, this deranged, screeching child seems like a different person entirely. Yet another side of her that the public never gets to witness.

Knowing that, I observe her in silence for a minute, taking it in. Reveling in what feels like an uncovered secret.

Then finally I step out of the shadows.

“I get mad at trees, too,” I say. “They can be so rude.”

She startles, shifting back onto the balls of her feet like she’s preparing for a blow, but when she sees it’s me she straightens again and turns her back to me, tossing inky hair over her shoulder.

“I’m not mad at the tree,” she grumbles, hunching her shoulders.

“You seem mad at the tree, though.”

“What reason would anyone have to be mad at a tree?” she snaps. “That would be ridiculous.”

“Of course,” I say, lifting one corner of my mouth in a smirk. “I’m sure you were in a slap contest with an inanimate object for an entirely sensible reason.”

She glowers at me over her shoulder, and I lean against a knotted glass oak and raise an eyebrow at her. Seeing that I’m not leaving, she bares her teeth at me like a dog defending its territory.

“Fine,” she growls. “I’m mad at the tree. Are you happy? Will you leave now?”

I snort at this admission. “May I ask what exactly the tree did to offend you?”

“No, you may not.”

“You expect me to just go about my day pretending I didn’t witness the future leader of the realm flailing her arms and bellowing at a bunch of see-through flowers?”

“I was not bellowing.”

“You were,” I say. “But don’t worry, it was a very ladylike bellow.”

“There’s no such—” She pinches her nose and takes a deep breath like conversing with me is taking all of her patience. Some small voice in the back of my head tries to remind me that I’m supposed to be getting into her good graces, but most of me is too entertained to care. “Look,” she says. “I’m dealing with a lot tonight and I’d like to be alone right now. If I tell you why I was attacking the tree, will you go away?”

“If that’s what you really want,” I say. Even though I most certainly will not.

She looks up at the sky, biting her lip like whatever she’s about to confess is difficult for her. In spite of myself, I lean forward, interested, wanting another secret about her to add to my growing collection.

“It won’t break,” she says finally. “I can’t… break it. It’s got these infuriating, delicate-looking leaves but they’re impossible to even scratch. No matter how hard I try, I can’t change a single thing in this entire, perfect garden. And it infuriates me.”

I’m surprised to find that I understand that. I think about the bolted-down furniture in the Academy, immobilized to prevent us from chucking chairs at one another’s heads. Some days, in an environment so aggressively controlled, the inability to even move a table an inch to the left was unbearable. It’s the reason I’ve spent the last few days in the castle turning vases the wrong way and pushing statues slightly off-center.

I notice her hands balled at her sides and I tap my fingers against my arm, thinking.

Her emotions are a little too raw to just be general dissatisfaction with a garden’s unchangeability. Something happened today. Something that made her go off on a sparkly houseplant.

But I realize she gave me the first secret to protect the second, so she probably won’t tell me that one outright. I decide to take a different tack entirely.

“You can, you know,” I say.

“Can what?” she asks.

“Break them. My whole neighborhood is covered with smashed-up trees from the battles with the Forest Realm, so there’s definitely a way.”

“Still?” She looks puzzled. “But those battles were years ago. Why hasn’t anyone cleaned it up yet?”

“Great question,” I say. But there’s too much of an edge to my voice so I quickly plaster on a grin to soften the statement and hurry on. “The point is, you may not be able to break it with your hands, but magic is vulnerable to other magic. Have you tried breaking it that way?”

“What do you want me to do?” she asks. “Hit it with a monkey?”

“You have a monkey?”

“Two,” she says dismissively. “Neither of which makes a great sledgehammer.”

I chuckle and look around. Most of the trees are gargantuan, showy pieces. But there are also tiny bonsai lining the path, each twisted into the exact same delicate arches, like a row of flawless, crystalline soldiers.

I bend over and yank one out of the ground. Then I toss it a little ways down the path where it lands with a clank, still looking infuriatingly poised, its now-exposed roots curved in perfect waves.

“Run that over with a horse,” I say. “See what happens.”

She gapes at the bonsai, then at the yawning hole I pulled it from. And I don’t blame her. It looks like the garden path has a missing tooth now. The whole symmetry of the arrangement is completely ruined.

What I expect is for her to tell me I can’t do that, to demand that I replant the work of art immediately and apologize.

Instead, she summons a stallion. He bursts into being, stamping the ground with his feet and snorting. I can see the whites of his bloodshot eyes. As his hooves pound against the ground, his nostrils flare with his hot breath, and his ears are all the way back against his skull.

So… she’s more upset than I thought.

I flex my fingers apprehensively and press myself closer to the strangely smooth bark of the oak, regarding her more carefully than I did before. Now that I’m looking, I can see there are tracks of tears on her cheeks and her eyes are red. Sweat makes her hair cling to her neck. How long has she been out here fighting like that?

She doesn’t give me long to ponder the question. Undaunted by the rage of the beast towering behind her, Mancella buries her fingers in his mane and swings herself onto his sweat-flecked back. Then she digs her knees into his sides and he charges forward. Unconsciously, I hold my breath as the animal bears down on the hunk of glass, closing the distance pace by pace until…

It shatters beneath his thundering hooves.

Mancella gasps, and the horse disappears. She falls to her hands and knees directly into the broken remains of the bonsai, crying out as they cut her. I push off the tree and jog up to her as she sits back and pulls a shard out of her palm, staring with wide eyes while her hand fills with blood.

“Are you okay?” I pant, throwing myself down to my knees next to her. If anyone in the castle finds out I caused injury to the Seconde, I’m done for. Yet another fireable, if not execution-able, offense. I curse and rip my shirt off, wrapping it around the wound and pressing down with my thumb to stop the bleeding. “We need to get you to a healer. Can you walk? Did you get glass anywhere else? Are you—”

It’s around this point that Mancella bursts into hysterical laughter.

“It worked!” she cries. “It really…”

She shoves me off and stands, pacing back and forth along the path. Occasionally she squats down to poke at the broken branches and cackle.

Which is very concerning.

I sit back on my heels and watch her, trying to make sense of this weird breakdown.

“There was a way,” she mutters to herself as she stands and moves back down the path again, my bloodied shirt trailing behind her. “My whole life, I thought it was impossible, but there was a way. So there must be a way with this, too. I can figure it out. I just need to think about it from a different angle. A different—”

She turns on her heel, hair flying behind her, and something about the look in her eye makes me shrink back.

“I’ve got it!” she says. “Can I kill you ?”

There are very few times in my life that I’ve been at a loss for words, but when the future Prime of the realm latches her eyes onto mine and politely requests the privilege of my murder, I have to admit that my mind goes completely blank.

“I-I’m sorry?” I splutter.

“That came out wrong.”

“I should hope so.”

“Hear me out.”

“About my own death? I’m gonna be honest, I don’t think I can be persuaded. But I do appreciate you including me in the decision-making process.” As I ramble, I am slowly rising into a crouch, tensed and ready to make a run for it if she tries to grab me. Although if she summons that horse again, there’s no way I can outrun it. Maybe if I climbed a tree? There’s a fairly large willow with branches I’m sure I can scale. But what if she decides to wait me out?

I snatch a sizable shard of glass and palm it.

“Wait, wait, wait,” she says, waving both hands in the air in front of her. “Let me start over. I don’t want to actually kill you. I just need you to let me pretend.”

What kind of sick request was that? Are the rumors true? Is she one of those people who takes pleasure in the pain of others? I grit my teeth and grip the shard harder, even as I feel it slice my skin.

Mancella reads my expression and puts her uninjured hand over her face.

“I’m not expressing myself very well at all, am I? I’m sorry, I… I’m not used to asking for help.” She takes a step toward me but I flinch, and she must notice because she stops in place, holds up both hands, and sinks to the ground, sitting cross-legged. “Here’s the situation,” she says. “To summon an animal, I first need to kill it with my bare hands. I’m sure you know this.” Of course I do. Everyone knows about the future Seconde’s barbaric magic. I lift my lip in a sneer. “Well,” she continues. “My father has a theory… that if I kill a human, I might be able to summon them, too. He wants to know what that might look like.”

That’s it.

I shoot to my feet.

I knew this family was despicable. I don’t know why for even a second I thought there might be a softer side to the next generation. Her grandfather was a warmonger, her father is a tyrant, and she’s no different. They’re monsters. Every one.

I back up rapidly, upsetting the branches of a beech tree and causing the leaves to clang together in a series of sharp notes that sound like an alarm.

“Wait!” Mancella cries. She launches herself at me with surprising speed and latches onto my arm. I try to shake her off, but she’s unyielding. I press my lips together and raise the shard, wondering where best to plunge it. “That’s what he wants, but I don’t want to hurt anyone!” she cries. “I would never kill a human. I don’t even want to kill my animals, but he forces me. And I can’t let him force me into this, too. It’s too far. But… but maybe you could help. If I could pretend to kill you and then pretend it didn’t work, he’d have to drop the whole thing. Right? No one would need to die at all!”

My hand stills, just short of the underside of her rib cage. With her clinging to my arm and my fingers a breath away from her stomach, it almost feels like we’re in an embrace. It would take only one small movement to finish my attack, but it would be just as easy to turn the action into a caress.

She doesn’t pull away from either possibility. As my mind spins over her words, she only holds her breath, grip tight and eyes pleading, seemingly unaware of the weapon hovering between us.

Does she really not want to kill?

My first instinct is not to believe her. She has so many animals. The people tried to keep track at first, but we lost count a long time ago. She has to enjoy it to some degree to have accrued that many.

But she said he forced her.

Could that actually be true?

Sensing that I’m no longer running, Mancella eases off my arm and raises her hands again in surrender. And my breath catches when the contorted moonlight slashes across them.

Because I’ve never really looked at her hands before.

They are littered with scars. Serried white lines score her palms and wind around her fingers like a road map of where she’s been, some old, and some fresher, one still red and sickly purple along its edges.

Suddenly a part of me wonders if she’s actually telling the truth. I mean… would anyone really choose a life that led to scars like that? What would it mean if she truly didn’t want to kill? If she never did?

The possibility is an uncomfortable one. It doesn’t fit with what I thought I knew about her. And I’m not sure if I’m ready for what it might mean.

“So?” she prompts, and I remember that she’s waiting on an answer.

About playacting my demise.

I shake my head and purse my lips as I consider it. This seems like a very, very dangerous idea. She could slip up and kill me accidentally. Her father could discover the plot and kill me on purpose. There are actually quite a lot of ways that this idea could end with me dying. And whether she’s a monster at heart or not, I owe her nothing. I owe the stranger she would kill if I don’t agree nothing, too. Better them than me. That’s been my motto for a long time.

But then a thought occurs to me.

Mancella is clearly desperate. Her fingers are flexing like she’s ready to make another grab for my arm if I move an inch. Her eyes are worriedly tracking my every change in expression. Her mouth is pinched up into an anxious knot. I turn it all over in my mind.

I was hoping to win some of her trust tonight, but leveraging her desperation may work just as well.

“I’ll help you,” I say. “But I want something in return.”

“Anything,” she breathes. “Name it.”

“I want the Victory’s Herald.”

The silence that follows is heavy, and I grow conscious for the first time of how late it’s gotten. How high the moon hangs in the sky and how quiet and still and thick the darkness is around us.

“Why do you want that?” she asks in a whisper.

A great question, to be fair. I’ll need a really good lie to sell this. She’s desperate and everything, but we’re talking about a blade that could literally start a war. You can’t just hand something like that out to random servants.

I shift, considering.

Usually, it’s best to tailor a falsehood to what the listener wants to be true. It’s easier for them to swallow that way.

Which means I have to take a gamble on what it is that Mancella Cliff truly wants.

I think about the cries for peace in her letter to Azele, and about what she’s just told me of her powers. It’s hard for me to believe she’s sincere, but I’ll need to decide in this moment, because whether I’m right will determine the effectiveness of my lie. And the effectiveness of my lie will determine whether my imminent death is a performance or a reality.

I don’t know why, but I decide to take a chance. “There’s something I haven’t told you,” I say. “And I didn’t ever plan to. But if we’re going to do this, then we need to trust each other.” She narrows her eyes, waiting, and I swallow before pressing on. “What I said on the rooftop was true, but there’s more to my presence in this castle than just that. I’m… part of a clandestine organization that seeks peace between realms. We have members all over and aren’t loyal to any particular Prime, just to our ideals. And we have reason to believe that your father is on the verge of starting a war that would be even more destructive than the last one. We believe we can divert it, but we’ll need time. If you gave me the sword, then we could delay a rash action on your father’s part. Its absence won’t prevent him from declaring war forever, but he values tradition enough that it might buy us a couple of days. Then, once the danger is past, we could return it. Certainly before your Assurance. If all goes well, he won’t even notice. But if we don’t take it and things go sideways, then the consequences could be catastrophic.”

She searches my face, her eyes wide. “How do you know all this?” she asks.

I don’t, of course. I don’t know anything. But the bluff seems to be working, so I shake my head slowly, wanting to press my advantage and keep the lie as simple as possible. “I can’t tell you any more. I’ve probably already said too much. I just… feel that I can trust you. I hope I’m not wrong?” I reach forward and touch her arm lightly, fingertips tracing her elbow.

She follows the movement with her eyes, looking troubled. “I… I don’t know,” she says. “It’s a big ask.”

I step forward, into her space, and lower my voice. “What you’re asking for isn’t a small thing either,” I say. “Putting aside the danger of playing at murder, to avoid getting caught we would need more people. The person who fights you needs to be in on it, but so does the person who checks the body for a pulse, as well as the person who carries the corpse away. If you insist on disposing of it yourself and don’t let anyone touch it, it will raise more than a couple eyebrows. Which means if we don’t have a detailed plan and a full crew, we’ll be caught, and you’ll be right back where you started, or worse.” Her face darkens and her shoulders slump, but then I continue. “I can take care of all that.”

Her head shoots up. “You can?”

I give her a sardonic smirk. “Like I said, there’s a whole organization behind me. I’m confident we can put on a convincing show. All I need from you… is the sword.”

She crosses her arms again. Shakes me off and walks away from me.

Doubles back.

I wait, letting her work through the problem in her own mind. Letting her realize that what I’m offering is too good to pass up, and that the theft is in line with her own goals anyway. Finally, she comes to a stop in front of me.

“All right,” she says, voice shaky but decided. “You’ve got a deal.”

I feel a flash of surprise that arguing for peace actually worked. She’s even willing to undermine her father’s wishes in pursuit of it. In that moment, something shifts in my chest, and I find that I suddenly believe the things she’s been telling me about herself.

Mancella really doesn’t want the life of violence that she leads.

It’s a shame that I could only realize this in the middle of deceiving her. But I’m too far in to back out now.

She extends a slender hand, and I take it. We both flinch as our cuts collide, but we shake anyway, ignoring the pain.

Ignoring the blood that drips onto the shattered branches of the bonsai tree glimmering at our feet.