Chapter Nineteen #2
“I must,” said Max. There was an odd tone to his voice, like he was talking to a stranger. False sincerity. He didn’t sound
like Max, Cyrus’s Max, the man he—
“I’m sorry, Cyrus, but I must leave. I’ve always been planning to leave. You know that, don’t you?”
The void pulsed around him. The pressure grew tighter still. Every breath rattled in his chest. His head felt like it was
going to explode.
And yet somehow, none of that compared to Max, to that strange pitying expression as he watched Cyrus struggle at his feet.
The whisper slipped out from between numb lips. “No.” It wasn’t a refusal. It wasn’t even denial. He was begging.
“It’s been fun, this game we’ve played, but I’ve won my reelection now.
” Max sighed, a pitying sound. The edges of him flickered, throbbed with the void, then stabilised.
“You knew this was never going to be real, didn’t you?
I’m one of the strongest champions in the kingdom. I have to think of my image.”
Silence, silence, silence. The scream of it all around. He was caving in on himself.
“You’re very gullible for a wrongdoer, aren’t you? You really thought I cared.”
You really thought I cared.
The look of anguish in Max’s eyes when he wounded Cyrus in Heliarth. The touch of his skin against soft sheets. Breath shared
between their bodies, the sweetest ache. A familiar grin and a wit more wicked than anyone would believe. Honey and blackberries.
Max looked down at him. Cyrus stared back, utterly frozen. Against the oppressive silence all around, he could hear the uneven
thunder of his own heartbeat—could feel it in his chest, his wrists, even his lips. Max’s mouth curved into a patronising
smile, and then he laughed.
It was not Max’s laugh.
Cyrus’s thoughts snapped back to himself in an instant, like the realisation had shoved the hostile magic right out of his
mind.
That was not how Max laughed.
Cyrus stared at the face before him, so dear and yet—
So wrong.
Now that he knew to look, now that the terrible fog had been pushed from his mind, he could see it. How had he ever missed
it? The signs were everywhere.
The strange look on Max’s face when he walked out and saw Cyrus in the crowd, like he didn’t know how he should respond. A red cloak he did not own. No speech to mark his win, when Cyrus knew he had agonised over finding the right words.
And—there. Right there in front of him all this time, and Cyrus had been too blinded by the maelstrom of terrible, hurt grief
to recognise it.
Cyrus had mapped out every mark on Max’s face and treasured each one, but none so much as the tiny scar that had sat above
his cheekbone since the day Cyrus flung a handful of burning embers in his direction. It had faded in the months that had
passed, the burn paling to memory. But a silvery pink crescent remained. A tattoo to mark the start of everything. The beginning
of them.
The Max standing in front of him bore no such scar. He was someone’s notion of Max, an unmarred copy. He watched Cyrus with
new wariness from his imposter eyes.
Cyrus knew what he had to do.
The blackness still surrounded him, pressing unforgivingly tight and chasing the air from his lungs, but Cyrus did not care.
His fingers scrabbled sightlessly over the ground, closing around the handle of a dropped dagger. No time to think, to consider
what he was doing. What he had to do. When Cyrus surged to his feet, the dagger was clenched tight in his fist, and when he
hurled it, the blade buried itself in Max’s chest.
A moment of gut-churning horror at the sight before him, fear closing Cyrus’s throat.
Max’s eyes opened wide, an expression of shock twisting his features as he looked down at the dagger protruding from his chest. He didn’t move.
He didn’t vanish, or fade, or change. He just stood stock-still, lifting a shaking hand and touching the blade.
His brow furrowed with bewilderment as he slowly looked back at Cyrus.
Fear turned to terror. Cyrus choked on it, his heart squeezed mercilessly tight. Max’s hand was red, so red, droplets rolling
between his fingers and tumbling to the ground between them until they splashed the flagstones with terrible finality.
Cyrus had done that. Max was bleeding. Max was dying. Cyrus had—
But then Max’s face shifted. It writhed somehow, like there was something underneath the surface of his skin, contorting flesh and bone and sinew. He was shrinking
too, suddenly shorter than Cyrus and slimmer and dwarfed by the clothes he usually wore so easily, blood rapidly leaching
across the front of the cream shirt.
By the time the body toppled backwards, it didn’t look like Max at all. It was a young man who looked barely out of his teens
with gingery hair and skin so pale it was almost translucent. Cyrus had seen him before, in the news. A young champion making
a name for himself. Rare magic. A shapeshifter.
His head jerked up, staring wildly into the darkness. The imposter was gone, but the blackness still clung all around.
“I see through your magic!” he roared into the void. “Stop hiding and face me!”
Nothing. Then, just as Cyrus opened his mouth to yell again, the darkness vanished. His senses rushed back to him, the world
suddenly so bright and loud that Cyrus reeled backwards in shock.
He did not have time to coax his senses into order, or to appreciate them now they had returned to him.
He did not have time to look down at the corpse of the shapeshifter who had masqueraded as Max, or at his own hands, still shaking from what they had been forced to do.
He was encircled by the young champions, Avexa among them. Their faces were like stone.
“You’ll regret that,” said one of the champions, very quietly. Cyrus did not recognise her, black-haired and pretty, but he
could sense magic crackling in the air around her. Presumably she was the one with the ability to suck out a person’s senses
and leaving them drowning in darkness.
Some gift, for a champion of the realm. Athaca should count itself lucky that she had not opted to become a wrongdoer.
Cyrus looked back down at the man lying before him. He could not shake the image of Max, trembling fingers touching the blade
buried in his chest. The blade Cyrus had wielded in his own hand. The blot of red, unforgiving.
He had done that. He had raised a hand against Max’s form, he had risked—
But they had forced him. They dared to take Max’s image, to wear his face as their own. To puppeteer his body and wrangle
his voice for themselves.
They had made Cyrus believe, even for a moment, that Max had—that Max would—that Max was not his.
That Max would ever do that to him.
The sense of falling in on himself vanished, reversed. He was building back up, piece by piece, and he was angry.
“He brought it on himself,” Cyrus said, quietly. He had not taken his eyes away from the shapeshifter’s collapsed form.
The black-haired woman took a step forward. Her hands were curled into fists; Cyrus could see them in the periphery of his vision.
Avexa laid a warning hand on the woman’s arm. “Phelia,” she said, but the black-haired woman shook it off.
“He deserves to—”
“Maximillian,” Cyrus interrupted, and finally he looked up. His eyes burned hot again, and he knew they must be glowing purple,
his magic must be straining at every pore to escape.
The champions did not respond. Cyrus let his eyes travel across their faces one by one until they settled on Avexa.
“Where is Maximillian?”
The group of young champions also looked to Avexa. Like Max before her, she did not need magic to be a leader. She met Cyrus’s
gaze contemplatively, her mouth pursed. Then she nodded. “Let him see.” Her chin jerked towards two of the young champions,
who peeled away from the group to walk quickly back to the castle.
“No!” Phelia was quick to object, rounding on Avexa. “We cannot allow—”
“He cannot do anything. He is outnumbered.” A smile twitched at Avexa’s mouth. “Let us see our fallen champion and his . . .
lover? That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what you are?”
Cyrus said nothing. He kept his eyes on the detestable face until he became aware of movement beyond Avexa’s shoulder—the
two champions returning, and this time not alone.
Max was on his feet, awake, but his movements were lurching and unsteady.
There was blood on his shirt, his own blue cloak, his hair.
As they came to a stop before Avexa, he struggled to lift his head, blinking laboriously.
There was more blood at his temple. His lip was split.
His eyes, when they found Cyrus, were tight with pain.
Cyrus had known anger before. But this. This was new. It was all-consuming, white-hot, crackling in every atom of him. His
chest ached with the force of it, acid burning through his veins.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen, you know,” said Avexa. Her eyes were on Max, but Cyrus knew she was speaking to him. Cyrus
didn’t take his eyes off Max either, staring at him until his vision went blurry. “We all knew Maximillian was old news, but
we thought he’d just fade into obscurity once he lost the election. He wasn’t supposed to stage a comeback. And that’s just
what you did, isn’t it? Staged it all.”
There was a smirk in her voice. Cyrus’s pulse had forgotten how to keep time, hammering so fast in his veins it turned to
a constant roar, like rushing water at the back of his mind.
“Quite the surprise for Forwick when—Balthazar, is it?—went to her and told her all about your scheme.”
Cyrus remembered Balthazar, motionless in the doorway. I need to talk to you. Had he wanted to make a last-ditch attempt to convince Max to end his partnership with a wrongdoer, once the election was
called? But he’d seen the two of them together with his own eyes, and he’d been forced to accept the truth of it: Max would
never be willingly parted from Cyrus.