Chapter Thirty
Thirty
When shapeshifting, a Moonborn cannot contort their own voice. Transformations are limited to the body alone.
—PROSPERO THE ALL-KNOWING, THE CELESTIAL BODIES
Insults flew across the council room.
Roland had his ankles crossed on the table. He fiddled with his pearl earring, head tipped back. Oliver sat by his side, a quill tucked behind his ear again.
When I pushed through the door, the councilors fell silent. Roland’s earring swung back and forth, strummed by his finger, but all else in the room was still.
Roland noticed my expression. “Out,” he said with all his authority. “Everyone out.”
“Your Grace, we’ve only just begun,” Wyatt Francis protested.
A sigh, a hand tugged through his hair. “I do not care, Wyatt.”
The councilors grumbled as they collected their pens and papers and cases, bowing as they backed away. Only a few tipped their caps to me. Most eyes glittered with suspicion. Oliver whispered something in Roland’s ear, then winked at me as he passed.
Roland pushed his chair back, rushing over to me. I gasped into his mouth as he kissed me hungrily. “I woke up and you were gone.”
Denying him another kiss, I tugged on his arm. “Come. Quickly.”
He followed me to the king’s apartments. It was not far, only separated from the council room by two staircases and the gallery of queens. “Has it happened?”
“Yes,” I said over my shoulder.
“Where are the guards?”
“Just one. In here. Sleeping.” We stepped across the body, and then he saw the aftermath of what I had done. The king, the pool of blood. The spray from his chest. The knife and the portal in the stone.
After I showed him the memory, worry strained his face.
Not for the king, but for me. He pulled me against his chest. I trembled there, clutching him.
He pressed soothing kisses to my brow, to my cheekbones, to my mouth.
“It is done now,” he murmured. “You carried out his destiny. That is all. He was meant to die today, and now he is dead.” When I didn’t respond, he took my shoulders and shook me a little.
“Mouse, he was always going to die. He was an old man, and he deserved such an end. He deserved to feel such anguish.”
I lifted my face. His lips tasted of salt now. “But would I have done it if I hadn’t already known he was to die? If we hadn’t found that star chart?”
“Would he have murdered his own son if he knew it would lead to this end?” he countered.
Both of us stared into the beckoning portal.
I knew why I was being summoned, and I didn’t want to walk toward it alone.
I had isolated myself for so many years.
Convinced myself I was better off. But even my magic refuted that belief.
Loving—and being loved—was the armor itself, not the gaps in it.
“I changed the color of my gown,” I told him. “So it would all blend—” I trailed off.
He understood. The satin was now the red of the king’s blood.
Roland’s magic seeped the bloodstains out of the wood floors and out of my gown. We locked every door of the apartments, shut the windows, pulled every curtain.
“We need to hide the body.” He reached forward and touched my hair when I didn’t respond. “Mouse, we need to hide the body,” he repeated. “Can you transform it?”
I flinched. I had been staring at the wall. The king looked so feeble dead. So small—incapable of all the horror.
I wondered, not for the first time, what the limits to my exalted magic were. I had turned stone into coin. Could I do the same for a corpse?
“What shall he be?”
Roland frowned. “A plant? A coat?”
“A coat. You’ll wear him, so we can take him with us.”
“This is sickening. Will it smell like him? Can’t you make him a ring?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I can do. A ring seems too small.”
I laid my hand on the king’s body and pictured fabric and folds and embellishments in tiny golden thread.
I thrust the transformation out, let it hover over his skin, sewing him into something new.
The coat looked like one Wyatt Francis would wear, with its thick fur collar the same gray as the king’s hair.
Roland sniffed it. “I’m not wearing it. We’ll leave him in the wardrobe. When we return, we’ll bury him.”
A chill draft drifted from the Saturn doorway. “What if we don’t return?”
“Well.” He hooked the king inside a wardrobe and shut him in. “No one will guess that the king of Alvion hangs in his own wardrobe, now, will they?”
Balthasar waited in his audience chamber of dark, igneous stone.
He seemed surprised when Roland stepped through the archway at my side, but he recovered quickly, drawing his face into a tight smile.
“Roland Daymour,” he said in his quiet, curious voice.
Roland swept into his courtier’s bow. “Balthasar.” His playful grin was just as forced.
Balthasar seemed to disappear under a cloak of space itself, materializing several feet away from us. The air clouded with his breath. His gaze slinked past Roland, fixating on me. “Bianca Mortlake. You are just the person I wanted to see. Thank you for answering my call.”
Roland frowned mockingly. “Oh, that’s a shame, Baz.
I thought you would be delighted to see me, too.
” He began to circle the Saturn like some kind of mountain cat, his thumb brushing the back of my hand as he passed.
“So. You’ve summoned Bianca here because the king of Alvion passed through into your realm. Didn’t he?”
“Smart man,” Balthasar said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I was waiting, wondering who it would be. But what was more intriguing, in fact, was when a specter named Tom Guildford arrived yesterday.”
Roland had begun inspecting Balthasar’s throne, and my mouth fell open in shock when he sat in it, testing its comfort. “This requires padding, Baz. The jagged stone intimidates, of course, but I would add a cushion.”
“Get out of my chair,” snapped Balthasar.
Roland tilted his head. “You were asking us about Guildford, were you not?” He bit his lip. “Well, some men are so rotten, they are far better suited to your dreary court.”
“Get out of my chair,” demanded Balthasar a second time. Roland held his hands up, rising to his feet.
“You two must think yourselves so clever now that you’ve managed this clumsy ascension. This little coup.” Balthasar swept a hand through his dark hair. “You must think you’ve succeeded. How did you manage to get him—” He inclined his sharp chin toward Roland. “—out of the Archimago Tomb?”
“How did you know he was put there?” I asked.
Balthasar’s eyes narrowed to slits. “The Tomb is Saturn-built.”
“No. You have other sources in Alvion, don’t you? Fulke Roet.”
Balthasar nodded. “Of course Fulke Roet. Fulke is my emperor’s nephew, too, just as he is nephew to your king. Do you think the emperor would let you accuse his own blood of treason and throw him in the Tomb? Do you think the emperor would let you deny Fulke what is rightfully his?”
“Where is the emperor, Baz?” Roland asked. “Does he loathe your company, too?”
The Saturn’s lip curled. “With his wife.”
“His dead wife,” Roland clarified.
“Do not be mistaken. He has still instructed me in this matter.”
“Fulke will never be—” I paused at the triumphant look on Balthasar’s face. The Tomb is Saturn-built, he’d said. “You have him. You took him.”
Balthasar smirked, as if he couldn’t fathom how it took us so long. When Roland clenched his fist, I stroked a finger along his knuckles.
Balthasar took particular interest in where we were joined.
He said, “There is no place out of bounds for me, Bianca Mortlake. There is nowhere you could lock a man up where I couldn’t find him.
I opened a portal in his cell. Yes, even the Archimago Tomb is a cobweb to me, so easily brushed aside.
Fulke is here, safe, in Bastian. Oh, your guards thought he simply vanished.
” He laughed airily. “I’m sure they will be arriving soon to tell you.
I’m sure you forgot that once the king died, the rule over the Tomb would pass to Fulke, the rightful heir. ”
Roland snapped his fingers. “Ah. Are you sure about that? The king’s new will, Mercury-sealed just yesterday, declares that any heir who intends any harm against His Majesty King Richard forfeits his claim to the throne.”
Seams of worry appeared on Balthasar’s face. “You truly think a Planetborn can rule without royal blood beside them? The people will riot in the streets before they allow it.”
“No,” I said. “I am like you. I understand that the true power is the shadow behind the man. I’ll be the shadow for the rest of my life.”
“If you stand in the way of Fulke,” he bit out, his patience waning, “the emperor’s armada will sail for your shores. His army will sweep through the doorways I will open into your kingdom. I am a dangerous enemy to make.”
“So you have Fulke,” said Roland, pushing off the wall. “We have control of Alvion’s court, our own army, our armada—shall I go on?”
“Roland Daymour, you have demonstrated a complete inaptitude for international politics. We are not negotiating.”
“We aren’t?” Roland’s eyes flared with power. Balthasar slammed his own head into the wall. “Then why aren’t we using magic? I had assumed we were being civilized.”
Blood dripped from Balthasar’s brow onto the granite floor. He laughed to himself, then his fist disappeared inside a pocket of space, colliding with Roland’s cheek, over ten feet away. Balthasar grinned. “Now we’re playing, aren’t we?”
Roland stumbled, nearly fell. Balthasar wrenched his hand back through the window he’d created.
“Do you know what is strange about desire?” Roland said, rotating his jaw.
“Sometimes we cannot comprehend the things we want or the things we want to do. They have no explanation, no reason. They are base. Primal.” He shrugged.
“For instance, why is it you long to slam your head into a wall? You must crave pain.”
“Stop!” I cried. “Stop it, Roland.”
I placed a gentle hand on his chest. He heeded me with a sigh and a final glance toward Balthasar, still working his jaw.