WRAITH DECREE
Esme could smell the trap on the air the second she stepped into the meeting room.
Isobel sat at the head of the table, her hands crossed neatly across her lap.
She finally looked the part of a sovereign rather than a figurehead, with a back so straight it might crack and hair unbound.
She wore no makeup, no fancy dress. Wariness drew severity on her face.
Her eyes were cold, watching each required person come into the room and take their seats.
Janos sat to her right, Bal to her left.
Esme tapped the table impatiently beside Bal, and Urias beside Janos.
The rest of the Wraiths hadn’t been invited, and judging by the emptiness of the room, neither had the advisors.
“War is a promise,” Isobel said. She didn’t even have the highness to her voice anymore. Esme suddenly remembered the queen was forty, and she heard each one of those cruel years plain in her voice. “I am unequipped to lead us in one. It would be foolish of me to even attempt.”
Esme never thought she’d see the day Isobel would admit to not being able to do something. It made her stomach knot.
“The competition isn’t finished. How do we crown a king without it?” Esme asked, but she didn’t need to remind Isobel about the spell. The queen’s wounds were open and weeping.
“I have devised a solution,” Isobel choked out. “Janos, you won the second trial.”
“No, he—”
“Silence.” She was still queen, and the Bond slapped the words right out of Esme’s mouth. Isobel didn’t speak again immediately. Instead, her eyes flew up to the ceiling, then to the window.
Then, she smiled.
She’d figured out Esme’s little lie.
“Janos was the last man standing, proving his skill. I’ve said it, and the will agrees,” Isobel said. Her eyes dimmed again, all the triumph of the moment sucked out by the truth of it, too.
“This only ties them,” Urias said. “How will you decide a winner?” He eyed her like he could lunge at her at any second. He felt the dread closing in too, then.
“Mak’kon!” Isobel snapped. The door’s handle dipped down, and there he was—and he was not alone.
Behind him, rope tied round her neck like a noose, was Yanor, the woman who’d escaped from the Lake.
Her arms were bound behind her back, which pulled her simple dress open enough for everyone to see the scars crisscrossing her chest. If her skin pulled any more taut, the wounds would spill blood.
Esme jumped to her feet. “Why is she here?”
“Down.” Isobel barked.
The Bond grabbed Esme’s ankles and dragged her back to her seat. She clawed at the table to pull herself forward, and the wood splintered under her nails, her fingers bleeding. She wasn’t stronger than the Bond—she never had been. It threw her back in her chair with a thud.
“Neither of you may move,” Isobel said. “Neither of you will help. You will watch. You will be silent until this is over.”
“How did you find her? How did you know?” Esme screamed behind her locked teeth. She could barely blink. She could just watch Yanor, her young face hard as steel and her gray eyes locked on the prince she so hated.
“Your friends are very loyal to you, Esmerelda,” Isobel said. “Paula told me nothing. Luckily, Yanor would tell you anything.” Isobel nodded across the room to Mak’kon, and suddenly his glamour shifted, his skin darkening, hair growing. Soon, it was not Mak’kon holding the rope but Esme herself.
Even wearing her face, Mak’kon’s cringed in disgust. He dropped the glamour but still wore his shame at what he’d done.
“It is simple,” Isobel said. “Janos, this girl knows what you have done. She has told people of power about it and conspired to keep you from the throne.” She unclipped a knife from her belt.
“Balthazar, you do not know this woman. She escaped from the Lake to Amaris after her father was killed. She lives with her sister and her nephews, and she is the sole provider for the four of them.” Isobel did not offer Bal a good reason to kill Yanor, because he didn’t have one, because she didn’t want him to kill her at all. Because she knew he wouldn’t.
“What are you suggesting?” Bal’s voice quivered when it came out, his eyes drawn to the knife and the girl he feared it was meant for.
“One of you will kill this girl today. Janos, to shed your past and seize control of this country. Balthazar, at the expense of the morals you’ve devoted your life to,” Isobel said, pushing the knife between them. “Whoever gets to it first wins the third trial and will be king.”
Janos leapt from his seat like he might wring Isobel’s throat. “Isobel, no! She’s a child!” But his spell curled in on itself and his eyes rolled up. His body slipped back into his chair.
“Oh, please. She’s twenty. You’ve killed real children, Janos,” Isobel said evenly, face drawn and dour. “Do not develop a conscience now.”
Janos’s rage fell from his eyes as he realized that Isobel had designed this test to be easy for him.
His lip hitched and he shakily righted himself in his chair and braced his hands on the table.
With determination chiseled into his face, he seemed a thousand years old.
His hands shook and his chest fluttered.
The Betrayer’s Serpent he’d been tricked into tore at his throat.
The wounds gushed blood down his plain blue shirt.
He would die if he did not abide by Isobel’s command.
“I’m not doing that ever again. You can’t make me do it!” Every word was a losing battle against the spell strangling him. His skin blackened in its grip. “Not you, not Lukas.”
Isobel’s own spell squeezed her neck and she whipped her head to the side and hacked. “We have a deal, Janos,” she seethed. “Pick up the fucking knife.” When Janos didn’t move, she spat out a glob of blood. “Fine. Take out your daggers.”
Both Janos and Bal’s eyebrows drew together. The command was not for them.
“Stab yourselves.”
Esme and Urias drew their blades and plunged them into their guts.
Balthazar screamed. The sound rang in Esme’s head, halfway between a shriek and a sob, and his hot hands wrapped around her cold ones and tried to pull out her knife.
Her muscles wouldn’t let him.
She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t soothe that heart-wrenching terror on his face and tell him she’d be okay.
She wouldn’t be okay. It hurt so bad, her vision blurred.
Blood seeped out all over her dress, gluing her to the chair.
It was oily between her fingers, and yet her hands did not slip when he tried to pry them off her blade.
Across the table, Urias and Janos burned in a similar hell.
The prince grabbed Urias’s face and begged him to say something, to fight the Bond and help him pull out the knife, but Urias couldn’t move.
Janos was too weak to do anything, and yet he clawed at Urias’s grip with all the strength that hadn’t been wrung out by the spell.
“Please, you can’t do this, Isobel! It’s too much!” Balthazar sobbed, his hands dripping with Esme’s blood.
Esme’s eyes followed him frantically, whipping between him and Isobel.
“They can die, you know,” Isobel said emptily. “Muhnir lets his creatures escape him only for so long.”
As if on cue, a little sound slipped out of Esme’s mouth. Urias’s eyes caught hers from across the table. More than anything, she wanted to crawl to him, and judging by the way his fingers twitched on his blade as he tried so desperately to move, he wanted just as much to crawl to her.
Janos’s blood-slicked hands were losing their grip on his consciousness. He was only human, and fighting two spells. He eyed the knife on the table and lumbered to his feet, his lithe body weaving and bobbing, and he wrenched something out of the back of his belt.
The blade Urias had given him.
Esme’s vision dimmed. Oh, Ojalla, this was going to kill her. Not just the stab; all of it. It was over. This was all over. Janos would do it. He wouldn’t have any other choice but to do it.
She slipped to the ground, still clutching the hilt of her blade to her stomach. Her blood made a mess all over the floor, and she knew it would be only minutes until she was dead. Janos would be king.
Fuck. Fuck!
She’d let Yanor down. She’d told her he wouldn’t win. She’d promised. And now Yanor would die by the hands Esme had promised to save her from.
She’d failed.
Janos would be king. Another sixty years under a murderer, and another sixty of his cruel son, and another sixty of his. Hundreds of years wasted under murderous bastards and their murderous bastards. Hundreds of years letting people like Yanor down.
No. Esme had wasted enough of her life under bad men.
She smiled at the ground below her, serene for a small second. The realization settled on her so comfortably.
If Esme couldn’t have her good king, she refused to live under another bad one.
She spotted Urias across the underside of the table.
He was splayed out flat, holding the dagger to himself with all the tranquility of a death sculpture.
Blood dripped out of her mouth when she grinned—it wouldn’t be long.
His eyes lit up at the gesture, and then he noticed how her hands tightened on the blade.
Esme hitched the blade up. The Magic thrashed around in her body, squeezing her lungs and shredding her muscles and making a grand fucking mess of her.
Still, she pulled the knife up. All she had to do was get to her chest, and then she could rip her heart out her-fucking-self.
Magic clamped on her throat, sent needles into her fingers, but Esme would not stop.
This was her freedom, but no one was going to give it to her.
She was going to have to carve it out of herself.
Her hands shook so hard, she didn’t know how they stayed tight.
With sheer fucking determination, her eyes burned as bitter Magic ate through her tongue.
It just fed her strength. How dare you? How fucking dare anything ever try to stop me from doing what I want? How dare anything seek to control me?