41. Chapter 41
Lunette
The door had barely closed behind Owain when I noticed the tray beside the hearth.
Silver gleamed in the firelight, piled high with candies in impossible colors. At the heart of the heap, a second elevated silver tray cradled a letter.
My pulse skipped.
There wasn’t time for this. The Assembly demonstration was moments away, and I still needed to compose myself.
I’d thought my curt response to Lord Coryanthus saying I was too busy for dinner would be enough, but Reina had warned me he was persistent. Just to make certain it was from him, I cracked the seal and allowed my eyes to skate down the page.
He was asking to take me on a tour of the Tir.
Little does he know I’ve gone on the most delightful tour of the keep already.
I threw that letter into the blazing hearth, just like the first one. I looked at the candy and decided the best place for it was the privy.
I refreshed myself and spent a few precious minutes playing with Muffin before heading back out. It was still early for our meeting time, but I wanted this display over with as quickly as possible.
When I walked into the corridor, the only people waiting were the usual guards. And ever-present Richart.
“My lady.” He straightened when he saw me, expression brightening in that earnest, slightly awkward way of his. “Were you hoping to be escorted to the king’s chambers?”
“I—” I shook my head. “Was I meant to be?”
A flicker of uncertainty crossed his face. “I just thought that might be what the Prince Regent sent me to guard you for, Lady Mage.”
Nervous, I hesitated for the space of a breath. Owain had said he’d be there. I could handle myself for a few minutes alone. All I’d be doing at first was surveying Berian’s body for any changes before the Assembly arrived.
“Let’s go,” I said.
The tension in Richart’s shoulders relaxed slightly, as though relieved to have guessed correctly. He waited for me to walk then followed.
Like a cobweb brushing against my skin, a subtle yet distinct feeling tickled my senses near the king’s door. I slowed.
Richart slowed with me.
I pressed my lips together and tested the air around me again with my sense for magic. As we neared, the feeling intensified, resolving into the faint, persistent buzzing of a thousand bees, waiting with stingers out to pierce my skin.
The device.
My stomach dropped. I turned to the nearest guard and asked, “Has anyone entered His Majesty’s room since the Prince Regent entered his?”
“No, my lady. All has been quiet.”
Proof that my anxiety was manufacturing magic. The device had left its residue in my mind and in this room. Just knowing the monsters were downstairs had made me invent danger in a vacant room. The guards would’ve raised an alarm if something was wrong.
“Thank you,” I said, relief coming at last. “We’ll enter.”
The hinges made the softest whisper as the door swung inward. Behind us, I heard the guards settle back into their posts. Everything was quiet until we walked deeper into the apartment.
Owain was there. He was cloaked in the same rich, dark fabrics he seemed to favor, crouched over the king, his stance almost tender, one shoulder turned toward Berian, head bent.
Another spark of relief. The guards hadn’t mentioned Owain being there because he was expected. My mind had been playing tricks on me in my nervousness.
“Owain—”
But the word died as the buzzing surged into something that seemed to scream in the air and beneath my skin.
Wrong!
The man turned. Not Owain.
The man we’d seen after visiting Mirelle’s jewelry shop.
The scream rose and died in my throat in the same instant. If I cried out, and he panicked, he’d finish his work on defenseless Berian.
Save a king. Stop a war.
I needed to slow this down, not escalate it. And I needed help to arrive when it was safe for everyone.
Everything moved at once. Richart stepped in front of me so fast his shoulder struck my arm. The rasp of steel was the only warning before his blade cleared its sheath.
Instinct screamed at me to use my rending magic or try fire. But getting closer to that device felt like stepping toward a drawn blade.
The intruder sidestepped. Richart pivoted to mirror it.
I had only one sensible option available to me. My hand closed around a quartz statue from the display shelf. Too small. Too delicate. But it was stone enough.
Magic ripped through me, flooding the quartz so quickly the crystal whined in my grip. I pulled on memory—on instinct—the echo of what I’d done in Selmont when melancholy and isolation had been all I’d had.
The assassin moved, reaching for a weapon.
With my free hand, I yanked Richart back. He let out a gasp of surprise just as the air in front of me trembled with disorientation.
The assassin lunged. His blade sliced through empty air where Richart had been a heartbeat before. The assassin’s expression flickered with irritation as his perception of the world shifted beneath his feet.
He came at us again. But the same confusion seized him mid-motion, making his strike veer right, his step half a foot span too short, momentum faltering.
Richart pressed forward to take advantage of it, one hand wreathed in fire, the other with blade outstretched.
“Don’t!” I snapped. If he walked into the ward, he’d be confused too.
Richart held his position. I prayed I wouldn’t have to reckon with the guilt that he’d listened later on.
The ward was insufficient to hold out against a single focused attacker. It was meant to confuse, to buy time. Time Berian didn’t have.
If he’s even alive. The king’s aura was so weak, I couldn’t feel it at all.
For three heartbeats, the ward held him. I let myself believe it would be enough.
Then the assassin stopped. He went so utterly, completely still that the room seemed to stop with him—no creak of floorboards, no shift of fabric, nothing.
His blade hung loose at his side. His head tilted a fraction, like he was trying to catch a sound at the edge of hearing. It made my skin crawl.
When he closed his eyes, I didn’t dare breathe.
Then he smiled like a man who’d solved a puzzle.
He took one step, eyes still closed. Then another.
Richart tensed beside me. My grip on the statue went rigid. My next breath didn’t come either.
He knows.
He’d already figured the same trick I’d told Owain to use back in Selmont—ignore everything your senses tell you and keep walking.
Everything was all happening so fast, the guards outside hadn’t even realized there was a problem yet.
Too late. Gone was the faltering hesitation my ward had once instilled. The assassin now moved with fluid precision.
Richart caught the first blow on his bracer rather than his blade. The impact sounded like a hammer striking stone. I shuffled out of the way, holding the warded statue like a shield.
Just as Richart’s offhand rose to unleash magic, the piercing shriek of the device assaulted my senses, causing an intense, unbearable pressure to build within my skull.
It felt as if my brain were hemorrhaging.
But Richart was the one hemorrhaging magic.
The fire wreathing his hand guttered out and his aura dimmed with amazing speed.
The assassin had used the device to siphon so much energy from him at once that Richart hit the floor hard enough to rattle the bedposts.
I took one step toward Richart before my own legs reminded me I was still standing in the room with the man who’d just dropped him. There was nothing I could do unless I got out of this room with my magic intact.
Then the assassin turned toward me, eyes still closed tight. I understood with a horrible certainty that the ward in my hand wouldn’t save me.
The assassin’s next step brought him too close.
The scream I’d been holding back out of hope tore out of me like a desperate prayer. “Owain!”
The assassin’s eyes snapped open, his mind rapidly re-evaluating the situation. He looked at me then at the window and made a split-second decision. The buzzing finally stopped as I caught my breath. He secreted the device somewhere inside the folds of his clothes, preparing his exit.
He turned to run. So I threw the statue at him—anything to slow him down. It struck his back with a hollow thud.
He recoiled as a sharp gasp betrayed sudden pain. He bent over, trying to collect himself.
The door didn’t open so much as cease to exist, and the sudden, overwhelming pressure of Owain’s presence filled the room. It seemed to take in a breath just as I did. Behind him, the guards poured in. Camrick brought up the rear with the mage contingent trailing behind.
The room became chaos before the assassin was able to make it ten feet. Someone knocked over the side table. A guard stumbled into my ward’s remnants and wobbled, disoriented, colliding with another man.
The assassin aimed for the window again.
Murder lived openly on Owain’s face. I expected him to go after the assassin, but he crossed the room in quick strides with his midnight gaze fixed entirely on me.
Without as much as glancing sideways, he cast a whip of shadow that caught the assassin by the ankle mid-scramble, dropping him in a heap to the floor.
Camrick pushed aside the mages arrayed behind him like useless, gawking hens to get to the intruder. He hauled the assassin upright by the throat against the far wall, one forearm braced across his windpipe in a relaxed way that suggested strangling a man was not a novel experience for him.
Owain’s eyes never left me. I’d never seen him look afraid before. His arms closed around me with bruising force, as if he needed proof I was still alive.
With a metallic clang, the assassin’s blade clattered to the floor. I watched, pressed to Owain’s chest, as one guard secured the assassin’s wrists and another retrieved the blade.
Reina rushed in, saw Richart, and dropped to her knees in front of him.
“He’s still breathing,” I whispered to her, convincing myself he’d pull through.
Then I turned toward the bed, panic rising anew. I pushed away from Owain, only to be stopped by the ring of steel that had surrounded the king.
“Move!” I shouted.
Without waiting for a nod from Owain, Camrick, or even Reina, they lowered their weapons and yielded the path to me.
Berian lay exactly as the assassin had left him, gray-faced and terribly still. His aura was alive—I could feel it now without the device screaming over everything—but it was so weak.
Not yet, I thought. I refused to let him die.
I climbed onto the bed and laid both hands on his chest. The room immediately fell away. My magic answered my call with everything it had left after daily healings and one unplanned ward. Violent with my anger, it tore through me with such intensity that black spots momentarily swam before my eyes.
I plunged it into his heart, his lungs, even his veins.
I pressed with a desperate plea and the force of command.
It answered by chasing down the threads of damage the device had left behind and undoing them with brute force.
The hollowness invaded my arms and feet first then spread up until it overran my abdomen, rushing straight toward my heart.
If Berian died, the fragile balance holding the realm together might shatter. War would burn villages like mine to the ground and leave children digging through ash for anything left behind that might resemble a life.
Selmont. Louie. Celine.
My chest tightened as the emptiness crept closer. But I had willpower and the sheer, stubborn refusal to let him die on my side.
Berian’s skin was cold under my hands, barely clinging to life. But it warmed by degrees as my own heart rate plummeted. I kept going even as my vision tunneled at the edges. Berian’s breath stuttered, caught, then dragged itself forward with a wet rattle.
I caught a flicker of skirts at the edge of the room. “The assassin…” my voice was barely more than breath, my lungs heaving into the void of my chest, “has what you’re looking for.”
Reina froze at the edge of my senses then turned.
Berian’s breath hitched again beneath my hands, a fleeting pause before continuing in a shallow, fragile rhythm. It was enough.
I’d given enough…
The last thing I heard was Owain saying my name, a raw, breaking sound, like it could drag me back from the dark. Then I felt his touch. And darkness, the kind that devours the light when you need it most, lifted me into his arms.