Chapter Twenty-Seven - The Prince Who Fell
“Let him go!” Julien cries as throws himself towards the dais, only to be snatched up by a cloaked Black Lantern.
“Release my brother,” Thorne commands.
The Black Lantern does as he says.
Julien scrambles onto the bookshelf where we stand. His hair is streaked with sweat, his face covered in blood that doesn’t appear to be his. His eyes are wide as he tries to get to his father.
“What’s happened?” He asks. I can see in him the man he will one day become. But today, he is still just a boy.
“King Dreven’s reign has come to an end,” I say simply.
“Son, help me, they’re going to kill me,” King Dreven pleads with Julien. He’s not wrong.
“Thorne—” He turns to his older brother, bewildered.
“Julien, there are things at play that you do not understand.” He places a gloved hand on his little brother’s shoulder and Julien looks at the siphons in Thorne’s skin in horror.
The crowd erupts in chants for us to kill the King. Julien looks around in astonishment.
“Our mother—” Thorne starts to ask King Dreven a telling question in order to convince Julien.
“Your mother’s death couldn’t have come sooner,” he snarls. “All she was good for was lying on her back.”
I watch Thorne’s face fall and, for an instant, those beautiful blue eyes fog with pain, devastation, hatred… and I lash out.
“Enough!” I scream because suddenly he is not just talking about Ivy, but my mother, too. All the people he wrongfully silenced.
My thirst for blood and my need for vengeance has no limit. I am the darkness which night calls upon to cradle its shadows. To lay them to rest. I have returned home, guided by the hands of the Titans to deliver this very blow.
I swing my sword around in a vicious arc, forcing my blade through the royal skull with an audible cracking and squelching sound.
The hard bone brings the blade to a halt, and I swear the King blinks, his eyes still open in shock. His mouth hangs open, drool and blood dripping down to my shoes as his body twitches.
Time stops, everything slows down. The crowd gasps, someone vomits.
I try pulling my sword from his head, yanking it violently but his lifeless body has slumped forward, holding my bl.
Stubborn bastard.
I bring my foot up and brace myself against his chest. I kick him hard and pull my sword free. Pieces of flesh and brain decorate the wooden platform beneath us as it is painted with his blood.
Many things happen at once, then. Julien rams his full weight into me. Thorne moves to stop him. Reese kicks Dreven’s body to the feet of the court who turned on him so easily. A result of ruling with fear instead of compassion. Screams pierce the library. Am I in shock? No.
I let Julien tackle me to the floor; he’s screaming at me, his voice becoming hoarse with curses. Thorne grabs him by the back of his tailcoat.
“What did you do, Serpent?” Thorne asks, not in anger, but as if I don’t understand the weight of what I’ve done.
I want to say; he hurt you. He hurt me. But I don’t. I just stare at him in disbelief as he forces Julien to turn around and hug him. Julien allows himself to be comforted and I feel I’ve done Thorne a favor. Julien didn’t have to see him kill his father.
A new sort of broken contorts Thorne’s features, screwing his eyebrows upward as he thinks.
He and I hold each other’s gaze, exchanging words we can’t give life.
We look to Reese, who stands motionless, before people start panicking and filing out of the room, towards something happening in the outer courtyard.
In fragments, I hear people shouting Prince Aleksander’s name.
I’m still trying to reconcile my thirst for vengeance with having finally found it.
I swear I see one of the King’s fingers twitch and I’m entranced.
Those hands cursed Thorne from the moment he was born, tortured him with such cruelty and ferocity.
The idea of it fills me with such anger that before I realize I’m even doing it, I start stomping on his hands.
The same hands gave the kill order for my birth mother.
The hands that have caused the suffering of thousands, the starvation of children alone in gutters, allowed his nobility to rape and pillage as they please.
I unleash all my anger, leaving his corpse pulverised as the library empties.
“Wait!” It’s Reese that grabs me around the middle. Only he and a few Black Lanterns remain.
I don’t stop, though. What is wrong with me? I am a rabid, starving thing; the stitches holding me together have frayed.
King Dreven’s hands are stomped into mangled stumps of blood, flesh, and bone. Thorne has already rushed out of the library with Julien to learn what the commotion is. Has there been a breach?
“We need his body identifiable!” Reese shoves me back into a pillar.
At this, I laugh. It escapes me in a feverish manic way because he’s worried people won’t believe what hundreds have just witnessed.
Maybe I laugh because I expected something like relief or praise from Thorne.
Instead he rushed away from me the first moment he could.
Doesn’t he know I did it for him? Sure, the death of my mother played a role, but if I’m honest with myself, that stopped being the main reason a long time ago.
“The King is dead, Harrow. You need to go out there and face the reality of what just happened. It was never meant to be you,” Reese drops his head. He’s pinning me against the pillar by my shoulders, keeping me still until I calm down. I don’t know what he means and I don’t care.
When I push to the front of the crowd assembled in the southern courtyard, I am first aware of the fact that the sounds of fighting have ceased.
There are no longer booms of magic or swords colliding.
Perhaps Aleksander did return, maybe he brought soldiers to stop the Frostguardian assault.
I see Black Lanterns holding Frostguard soldiers in chains.
Meanwhile, Lord Matthias and Lady Braker are fighting against the hold of a few more Black Lanterns, shouting and trying to get through to a defeated-looking Prince Aleksander.
He is on his knees in the dirt, at first only allowing me to see the mess of hair falling around his shoulders in black waves.
I search the crowd for Thorne as the line of Black Lanterns lets Reese and I through.
“Keep them chained!” Reese demands of the rebels. “Chain Prince Aleksander, too!”
When Reese’s back moves from my line of site, I am finally able to see why Aleksander is on the ground.
“No!” The broken prince screams as the Black Lanterns try to take him. No, they try to peel his arms off of the limp body he’s holding.
Julius…
The boy is half in Aleksander’s lap, half on the ground.
His intestines have been hastily shoved inside of him and poorly stitched closed.
They are not pink with life but pale and stiff, just as his body is.
His eyes and jaw hang open, scratches over his face.
He’s been dead for a while. My legs threaten to give way; he’s too young to have been a victim in this feud.
“Take Prince Julius’s body!” I shout to someone, anyone.
A kind woman who I think is a cook in the royal kitchen stumbles forward for him. Her trembling hands speak to her grief and familiarity… She has probably cooked for him since he was a child, if her age means anything.
Aleksander isn’t sobbing, just staring blankly at the ground as she takes his brother from him. As the smoke of battle threatens to clear, I push my hair from my face with a blood soaked-hand. Finally, I find Thorne. He is crouched in the garden with Julien, who is inconsolable.
I silently curse myself for how quickly we lost control of this situation.
“The King is dead!” Lady Braker wails, because Aleksander remains unresponsive.
I step towards the cruel prince who I witnessed derive joy from torturing Thorne. My love.
“What say you, Heir of Netherhelm?” I demand of him, grabbing his head and forcing him to look at me. He’s staring at the blood on my boots, but I feel refreshed, I feel focused.
He tilts his head in that wicked way of his. But all he does is sneer, the numbness of grief consuming him. Behind me, Thorne is murmuring something to Julien.
Who allows a boy into war when they have plenty of troops at their disposal?
“Julius’s death is on you,” I shove him backward by the jaw. A Black Lantern harshly pulls Aleksander’s arms behind his back.
Aleksander whispers something, maintaining eye contact with me.
“What was that?” I lean closer.
“Exa-tolkeim, Kingkiller,” he smiles.
The spell launches me backward, over the crowd and into the stone building. When I collide with it, it feels like my bones liquify inside of my skin.
He shouts another spell and the crowd hits the floor, groaning and screaming in pain. All except the Black Lanterns… I think. I’m still trying to blink away the stars from my vision when the ground shakes beneath my feet.
Aleksander’s most loyal soldiers clash with droves of Black Lantern rebels all around us. I cough and choke up blood. I’m only able to use a small healing spell to get myself functional and drag myself to my feet.
Aleksander has killed the two Black Lanterns that held him, impaling them on jagged rock formed by dark magic that shot from the ground. Grave fog begins to swim over the crowd and I should be sinking into psychosis, too… But I’m not.
That’s when I see Thorne’s siphons glowing, his magic protecting Julien, who has definitely gone into shock, himself, and me.
I try to recover from the collision with the stone, try to get my brain to clear because Aleksander is stalking towards me while his subjects writhe in pain, sinking into psychosis.
Titans bleed me.