Chapter 11
“H-h-how—I h-haven’t d-done anything!” Jonathan gasped, shouting between shocked breaths.
Harthon watched him with indifference from above. The blade rested easily in his hand, crimson coating the metal. The same crimson that was running in rivers down Jonathan’s arm, soaking his expensive sleeves, which trembled with his body.
“Jonathan Vessel, you are guilty of conspiring with our enemy to give him our magvis in exchange for power,” Harthon declared to the room, though his eyes never left his prey.
“Your plot, though a failure, ultimately resulted in battle. Good men lost their lives. And for your crime, you will be punished.”
Confusion had me sitting straighter. It’d been Jac, not Jonathan, who’d sent me to Koerlyn. Jac hadn’t mentioned a word about the Lord. This made no sense.
Jonathan was an insect—an annoyance and a constant thorn in Harthon’s side. But Harthon wouldn’t frame him for a crime he didn’t commit, just to spite him.
Would he?
“Your ear, for listening to our enemy,” Harthon explained. He began to circle the Lord, who was struggling back to his feet.
“It’s not true! I did no such thing,” Jonathan wheezed.
Harthon ignored him. “For communicating with him—” he paused, his predatory gaze running over Jonathan’s body. Then he grinned, more snarl than smile, and fear tripped my pulse, even though the threat wasn’t to me. “Well, of course, your tongue.”
Harthon sent a brutal kick into Jonathan’s knee, sending him to the floor once more.
“N-n-no! Please! You c-cannot let him do this!” Jonathan’s voice was the embodiment of raw, unadulterated panic.
But he’d forgotten: no one in this room let Harthon do anything. He did as he wished. He would not be stopped. And from the terrified whites of Jonathan’s eyes, he knew it as well as I and every person here.
A punch to the jaw stunned the Lord enough for Harthon to yank his mouth open and grab the appendage within.
I didn’t watch, staring at the floor beside him instead.
But I knew it was done quickly, because between one breath and the next, Jonathan was screaming, crying, balled up on the floor as blood streamed from his mouth.
They were noises I knew, noises I remembered from my first time in Koerlyn’s captivity, when he’d slaughtered villagers just because he could.
This is different. He’s guilty. Of something.
Just not what Harthon accused him of.
Harthon tossed something pink and fleshy aside, his hand gleaming in blood, that wicked grin still pasted on his face. Bile rose, and I realized it was a strategic decision to do this before dinner.
The room would be coated in vomit otherwise.
“I should let you lay here, dying a slow death,” Harthon said conversationally, tossing the knife in his hand. “But I’m hungry. Our guests are hungry. And no one wants to see you, pathetic and powerless and bleeding life as we eat.”
He crouched and gripped the frail wisps of hair on Jonathan’s head to expose his neck. “For the suffering and deaths you caused, your life.”
One brutal swipe across Jonathan’s neck ended the screams and cries.
Silence reigned. A sea of pale faces stared back at me. Fear was a heady presence in the room. I didn’t know whether I contributed to it.
Harthon released his hold. The body slumped to the floor with a thud as he straightened to his full height. “Remember where power comes from.”
He didn’t need to raise his voice for his threat to land. The threat had been made abundantly, startlingly clear.
Then, as if he hadn’t just tortured and killed a man before us at what was supposed to be a celebratory event, he said, “Now, we eat.”
I stared at him as he calmly took a cloth from the table and wiped his hand and dagger clean with practiced movements.
He’d seated me beside him, gave me a crown as if I was his equal, yet maimed and killed a man before me without sharing his true reasons, expecting me to sit here and watch like it was nothing.
He’d warned me he would act as he had at the justice hearing.
But there, every criminal was guilty of his crime.
Jonathan hadn’t been guilty of what Harthon accused him of.
And now, I was left to wonder whether there were valid reasons for doing what he did, or if Harthon could simply be a vindictive, brutal man.
* * *
Princeps Ellan from Fifth Territory was the only thing keeping me from replaying Jonathan’s death in my head.
As an ally, Ellan had been invited to the celebration. As a Princeps, he was seated at our table on the platform. And as himself, he was boisterous and loud and garbed in shades of gold and orange that were as obnoxious as his personality.
Not for the first time, I wondered if there were any standards for becoming Princeps.
“And I told him, ‘You, sir, are nothing but a peasant.’ And then he lobbed his own head off for me!” Ellan could hardly deliver his punchline before he guffawed, his cheeks bright red.
Edmund, his second-in-command, chuckled. Ana offered a polite smile. Callen gave me a flat look from the end of the table, which I returned.
When Ellan finally recovered, he finished off his wine. Lifting his goblet high, he demanded, “More drink!” Then his glazed eyes landed on me and my untouched goblet.
Here we go again.
“Still against both sex and wine, I see!” he commented jovially as a servant filled his cup.
Ana choked on her food. Callen blinked.
“I drank the wine at your party,” I pointed out calmly, though I wished to drive the prongs of my fork through his hand.
He gestured at me with his goblet, wine sloshing over the side. “Ah, you did! And then, if memory serves, you danced the most beautiful waltz with Princeps Harthon.”
I thought he’d been too intoxicated to remember that.
Not helping, Edmund, who until then had been relatively quiet, said, “It was enchanting, indeed.”
I could feel Ana’s eyes on me. Ana, who I still had yet to apologize to, and who might not love to hear how I’d drunkenly fawned over Harthon at that party.
Time to change the course of this conversation. “Do you dance, Ellan?”
“I do not. Perhaps if I was as beautiful as you and had a partner as—” he glanced at Harthon, “don’t take this the wrong way, friend—but as manly and handsome as Harthon, I might.”
Harthon’s face didn’t twitch. In fact, an impassive mask had locked over his features since he’d finished rending Jonathan and returned to his throne.
I’d hoped he’d whisper an explanation to me, allow me to understand why he’d done what he did. But he didn’t.
It irked me, and now Ellan was irking me further. A woman could only take so much.
I eyed the wine, considering it for a brief second. Perhaps being a bumbling, drunken fool was better than staying sober in both Princepes’ company.
“So what is the status?” Ellan asked, pulling my thoughts from the wine. When I gave him a questioning look, a hairy hand waved between me and Harthon. “You’re wearing a crown, seated beside your Princeps. That’s something usually reserved for a Princeps’ Lady. So what’s your status?”
If one more person tells me that only a Princeps’ Lady gets to wear a crown…
Harthon chose that moment to enter the conversation. “Etarla is the magvis, not a Princeps’ Lady. She’s more powerful and valuable than any of us.”
Ellan nodded. “Makes perfect sense.” He thoughtfully chewed a piece of meat, then narrowed his eyes, face twisting with mischief.
“But what about the status of you two? Together, I mean. She’s powerful.
You’re powerful. There’s no superior match, I’d imagine.
Think about the heirs. Her abilities, your mind and battle instinct—”
The carrot in my mouth lodged in my throat, and I coughed. Heirs? My mind fast-tracked from babies, to sex, to sex with Harthon, to the way his big hand had snaked beneath my tunic and touched me weeks ago—
He just tortured Jonathan for a crime he did not commit.
“You’re correct. It would be an incredibly advantageous and powerful relationship,” Harthon confirmed, unmiffed.
Meanwhile, my heartrate ratcheted up, because I’d never heard Harthon speak about us as a unit, or acknowledge the complex relationship between us.
And while I knew he’d never lay himself bare in front of company, some pathetic part of me ached for more insight.
A foolish, pathetic part that was oblivious to the frustration and confusion I currently felt toward him.
“But you speak as if the only thing of value Etarla has to pass on is her unusual abilities,” Harthon said.
Ellan tipped his head curiously, as if to say, but of course.
Harthon’s dark eyes slid to mine. “She is brave. Resourceful. Her determination is admirable, as well as her strength. She is tough, but also kind. She is bigger than herself, yet possesses an empathy that many of us lack. To know her is to be impressed and surprised by her with every passing day.”
I was no longer breathing. Every ounce of energy, every thought, had gone to absorbing his words, committing them to memory, and preventing my face from showing how deeply they struck me.
Harthon didn’t just say things. He didn’t need to say those things here and now.
If he was saying them, he meant them.
“All the more reason for you to be a united front,” Ellan commented, wriggling his brows.
Harthon was still looking at me when he replied, “Perhaps.”
My lips parted.
I’d expected him to deny Ellan’s comment. Not to…entertain it.
Ear. Tongue. Jonathan. Anger.
I reached for the wine.
Which was why the jewels on the chandelier were beginning to blur together as the meal ended and Ellan finally left us to lick the Lords’ boots, Edmund trailing him.
Callen left to take care of whatever a third-in-command had to take care of, and Harthon stood to greet North, who scowled first at the room and then at me.
The wine was probably why I smiled at him in return.
I sat back in my chair, nibbling at bread and watching attendees dance to an upbeat melody, the earlier violence forgotten. It was testimony to how regular death and suffering were in this world.
The weight of the crown atop my head grew heavier and heavier with every passing moment. Two months ago, I would have laughed at the thought of ever wearing one, of thinking about a Princeps and his lips and hands and the fact that he’d just brutally killed someone, all at the same time.
“You’re thinking hard.”
The bread dropped from my fingers. Ana sat beside me, her dark brown skin glowing in the torchlight, hair falling in perfect curls to her chest.
I took another long pull of wine, finishing the goblet. I wanted a refill, but I’d learned at Ellan’s party how that would turn out for me.
This was my chance to apologize. But I was a coward, so I nodded to the blood-stained stone and asked, “Did you know he was going to do that?”
“No.”
Some of the tension in my shoulders released. If she had known while I’d been kept in the dark, I wouldn’t be angry so much as hurt. That within itself was terrifying, because it meant that Harthon had some power over me. That I’d given it to him, without any promises made between us.
“You know what he said was false.”
“I do,” she confirmed.
“Did he have a reason? A real one?”
Ana rolled her lips. “I’d like to think so.” She hesitated. “But in the past, he…didn’t always.”
The bread in my stomach thickened.
“They weren’t ever innocent. They were bad people. But politics and power don’t always allow room for thorough justice.”
The hard metal of the crown dug into my skull. “We are the ones who create politics and power. We can make room for thorough justice.”
“I used to think so, too.”
I’d always thought myself more jaded than her, but now, I remembered her story. The daughter of a Lord who turned against her own father and joined a band of mercenaries. Her upbringing may have been different from mine, but it was equally brutal.
I took a deep breath, set down my goblet, and said, “I’m an ass.”
“North is an ass. Harthon is occasionally an ass. You had reached your limit, and I pushed you over the edge,” she replied matter-of-factly.
Her empathy only made me feel worse. “There is enough pain in this world. I didn’t need to add to it.”
She shook her head with a light laugh. “Words stopped hurting me long ago. It takes a dagger to make me bleed, now.”
Some of the tightness in my muscles vanished. “I thought I made you hate me.”
“No. You’re the only other person around here who isn’t just a cock with a head attached to it. I need you too much to hate you.”
It didn’t make me laugh—I wasn’t sure it was a joke—but it did free my tongue further.
“What was it like, when you were with Harthon? Not with with him,” I rushed to correct, wincing. “But with his group, before he became Princeps?”
My fumble didn’t affect her. She exhaled, long and slow. “Brutal. Bloody.”
“Why did you stay with them?”
She shrugged. “For the same reason you came back to us from Koerlyn. Because no matter how brutal and bloody it is, it’s the only thing I’ve found that wishes to create some good.”
My gaze flitted to Harthon, to his deadly hands. “Do you ever doubt that potential for good?”
“In this world, there is no path to good. It hasn’t been carved yet.” She followed my eyes. “We must carve it ourselves, and carving a path requires force. It’s never soft or pretty, but I cannot think of a better path-maker.”
As I silently processed her words, she added, “Though a path-maker is no good without someone to show him the way. He’s half of what he can be.” Her hand landed on my arm, drawing my attention away from the man she spoke of. “And you, Etarla, are the one to show him that way.”
The seed beside my heart awakened, heat swallowing my lungs as it pulsed like the start of a fire—a small flame that grew into a blaze as Harthon finished his conversation and strode toward me with deliberate steps.
When he reached me, he extended a hand. It was the one that had slain Jonathan. In a low voice, he asked, “Would you dance?”
I studied the calluses on his palm and fingers, the faded white lines of small wounds from long ago that marked his skin. All that heat in my chest expanded, flaring low and up to my shoulders, burning my throat with one word.
I scanned him from his forearm to shoulder, to the strong cords of his neck, to that angular jaw dark with hair.
There was a shadow of hesitation on his face, I thought.
Maybe because he’d been holding his hand out for several seconds, his request lingering between us.
Or maybe because he knew what he’d done a little over an hour ago would not be forgotten.
“Yes.”