Chapter Three- The utioner Prince #2
Just like I’m enjoying it now. I take inventory of all the small gestures he makes, the way his eyes dilate when hearing someone laugh with a vendor, the way his jaw feathers as he thinks.
Thanks to Crowley, I can see all of him even as I trail behind him.
Thorne adjusts his gloves often, as always.
He tugs them tighter up his wrists constantly, keeping them close as though he’s afraid to be without them.
We pass two gentlemen, clearly Arcanists, but they do not wear gloves.
They don’t have a need like Thorne does.
Thorne turns left from the heart of the Market District where a few people still chat and shop. A woman and her small child exchange colorful fabric for a few pears, blissfully unaware that Death walks these streets. Be it myself or Thorne, Death is here.
“Hail friend! Daggers at a discounted rate! Interested?” A merchant beams at Thorne who grunts and shakes his head.
I sigh slowly, my eyes scanning my surroundings—no, I'm scanning his surroundings. When did I start to care about his safety beyond my mission?
When someone bumps into Thorne, I step backward to keep my distance.
I can spot a pickpocket anywhere; their tells are all too familiar.
From scanning eyes to twitching fingers and far too slow movements.
Classic move, I grin to myself. However, I know Thorne doesn’t carry a purse like commoners. Royals have no need.
Beggars groan from small huts in old alleyways, fatalities of a system that has little use for non-magic folk who refuse manual labor. They’d be fighting the war in the Wastelands if they could stand, the first line of defense to absorb the spell casters’ attacks and weaken them.
I slide along a smooth building, my fingers dancing along the onyx stones, charged for protection. The texture settles something within me as Thorne moves swiftly through the streets.
Finally, Thorne leads us to a bar, one that I know for a fact was closed down for serving drinks laced with what they claimed to be “traces of Xuesis’s magic.
” Really, they were laced with Savorium, a drug that leaves those who drink it extremely sensitive to emotion and lust. I think Thorne had it shut down so he could have a convenient hideaway in The Market District.
Where his target has apparently been summoned to meet him tonight.
Thorne lays sprawled casually across the bar, his fingers wrapped around the neck of a bottle with amber liquid.
His arm is folded behind his head, his discarded cloak allowing me a glimpse of his abdomen as his shirt rides up.
I look away. I know if I look, I’ll think about what those strong V lines lead to, the taste of his skin…
A familiar voice startles me and I crouch in the shadows.
Crowley perches in silence atop my shoulder.
“Prince Thorne, you wanted to see me?” Blacksmith Trachor beams at the prince. I know him, I work with him. No. He’s a good person. Why would the King want him dead? My mind races with wild possibilities.
I take in Blacksmith Trachor’s relaxed demeanor, happy to see his Prince.
These people… they have no idea what Thorne has been turned into.
What he’s been forced into by the tyrant king.
They trust the royal family implicitly, whether they like them or not.
Trachor has no reason to believe he is in danger in the presence of Prince Thorne.
The pudgy man seems to have just gotten off work and is covered in a thick layer of grease. He runs his hands through thinning brown hair and smiles at Thorne as if it’s an honor to be summoned by him.
Fuck. I can’t do anything without giving myself away.
Trachor makes some of the best weapons, including some custom blades that currently line my person.
He’s gone out of his way to make our dealings discreet on a number of occasions.
Afterall, why would a Knight need weapons that none of the others have?
Knights have assigned weapons, standard in every way, and the same from one person to the other.
“Very glad you received my missive. I trust you were discreet about whom you were meeting?” Thorne pushes himself off the bar and stands before Trachor… Theodore. His first name pops into my head.
Trachor nods with a proud smile at Thorne as the Executioner Prince starts to remove a glove… no.
I’m not usually so sentimental when it comes to killing or those meant to die.
But I saved his daughter, Molly, from certain death just a month ago.
I didn’t do so to find her orphaned. She had been taken by a Nightwalker—a ghostly creature that is made up of the dark matter within our souls.
The evil parts of our beings given form.
“A noble knight, sir. Truly we don’t deserve you,” Theodore Trachor had said to me with tears in his eyes as I returned his daughter safely.
I want to save this man. An idea comes to me, a gloriously stupid idea that I’m acting on before I can think better of it.
To stop my target from killing my favorite blacksmith, I use my Fire magic to combust a wall of liquor on the other side of the room.
It takes only a snap of my fingers and the wall ignites.
Shades of red, orange, and blue flash across their faces in the split second before they register what has just occurred.
The sight and scent of fire is my oldest friend and I welcome it around me with a smile.
A gift for dark magic is usually also accompanied by one of fire magic, which is why Netherhelm and Incendria are close allies.
I move with my shadows into the flames, I feel them licking and pawing at me.
The energy reaches for me but I am the darkness within the flame, the shadow seeping from it, the smoke being cast from which it has destroyed. It cannot touch me.
“What the—” Thorne grunts and lunges for Trachor, protectively shoving him towards the exit.
For a brief moment I think I’m successful in saving the blacksmith. Surely Thorne’s move to shove Trachor from the flames is an indicator that he has mercy. Maybe Trachor isn’t his target tonight after all…
The thought vanishes as Thorne moves his ungloved hand up to the blacksmith’s throat.
The moment his skin makes contact, an animalistic wail escapes the man.
He reminds me of the way his little girl looked when I rescued her and she was frozen in terror.
The agonizing scream ruptures his lungs as his skin begins to rot and fray around Thorne’s touch.
Thorne’s muscular forearm grips harder as he grimaces, the veins there bulging, sinew flexing beneath his pale skin.
He appears so very ethereal in these moments, when he loosens his grip on that killing curse.
As if he can finally breathe while he’s doing it.
I still can’t help but swallow against nausea as I watch it.
I care not for the royal guards who met this fate but the blacksmith…
With a grimace, Thorne seizes his opportunity for an easy coverup and launches Trachor effortlessly into the raging flames that I created.
I don’t know now if his screams are from the flames devouring him or if he’s trapped in some relentless torment from the Executioner Prince’s touch.
Once the screams finally subside, Thorne merely regards the scene before him with annoyance before tugging on his glove and cloak.
He exits swiftly out of the back of the bar, leaving it to burn down completely in the coming hours.
When he shoves his hands in his pockets against the brisk night, he looks like nothing more than a citizen out for a midnight stroll.
This is exactly why infiltrating the Shadowfall kingdom and becoming a knight was crucial.
It has been the very definition of playing the long game.
Learning Thorne’s patterns, his acquaintances, his motivations, will all tie into a successful assassination.
Then again, so will learning how to kill him.
I am plagued, however, by the inconsistencies in what I thought I knew about Prince Thorne.
There are hours and sometimes entire nights where he disappears and I can’t locate him.
Often he emerges the next morning with lacerations and bruises.
Other times he is spotless, his hair disheveled and he’s hungover.
More and more he grows in complexity, defying everything I think he should be. He is cunning, but not cruel in the way most of his family is. He does not delight in the suffering of his people. He’s less interested in material possession than sentimental.
Where Prince Aleksander delights in the torturing of innocents and is keen to watch people starve, Thorne is not. I have witnessed him in quiet moments where he thought he was alone. He’s slipped coins into fretting mothers’ aprons and left food on the windowsills of the impoverished.
He smiles when he dances in taverns, his hood pulled low.
He is a wild thing, longing to be free, a caged animal, a leashed phoenix.
There is a complexity to him that the other royals do not possess, a distinctly human aspect.
These cracks in his facade make me stumble, stalling on this half-witted plan to kill him.
While I went into this motivated by anger and vengeance, it is now perhaps only the demands of my employer that motivate me. Because for all the suffering that this royal family has caused, I’m finding it harder and harder to place the blame on him. Wretched thing.
I wrestle with justifying what I know about Thorne against the quiet, festering hatred I harbor for the King. I remind myself again and again why I came, even as another part of me, cold and methodical, rises to the surface.
Do not make it look like murder.
It must be an accident.
Though, I am beginning to wonder why I was hired for this task as I finally fall into my bed in the early hours of the morning.
Perhaps my sudden desire to know why I was unleashed upon him has more to do with my attraction to him.
No. I’m better than that. I try to convince myself that I’m immune to whatever it is about Thorne that draws me to him as Trachor’s screaming echoes in my head. I’m lulled into a fitful sleep.