42. Chapter 42 #2
The assassin choked down a scream.
I tucked the crack and the scream safely away in my mind, where I wouldn’t have to feel them. Not now. Not while my hands were still moving. Something inside me tried to name what this was—to call it wrong, to make me stop.
But I crushed that too.
Guilt was a future problem.
It felt like I was moving through deep water in the dark. The assassin’s pain was simply information—useful insofar as I could measure it against his resistance. His defiance, nothing more than an obstacle. I had only one focus.
Distantly, I was aware I was choosing not to care.
“Why her?” My voice seemed alien to my own ears, lacking any rise or fall in its tone.
The assassin didn’t answer. So I asked again. And again.
Lost in a fugue state, I attacked him again. This time, I saw myself wrap my hands around his uninjured biceps and forearm. Knew I was doing the math so that I could angle the force so the bone would give but not break through the skin. Watched as I wrenched my hands in opposing directions.
Reina didn’t protest or command me to stand down. I felt her watching. The Nocthel in her understood that when someone threatened family, there was no line left to cross.
But I distantly registered Camrick saying my name. “Owain.”
The sound dragged at something buried under the violence, but not enough.
This hired killer had decided she was my weakest point because he’d seen me carry her from the room. He was right and wrong.
She was the only reason I was still letting him breathe.
“Owain.” Camrick’s voice again. This time it came out in something more effective than a warning. It was the same voice he’d used as a teenager when we were broken young men, and he was talking me down from the edge.
The sound was a reminder of who I was supposed to be. Of who I chose every day not to be.
Back then, I’d been stuck in my room most of the time, only let out for official functions, because my magic was so unstable. But that wasn’t the only reason. Reina feared that if the Assembly knew the true extent of what I could do, they’d do more than insist on taking me away.
Camrick, who had survived the Assembly's fortress in Caervorn the same way I'd survived my own cage—by choosing, every single day, to still be himself on the other side of it.
The training the mages put him through as an elemental savant was brutal.
He hated every day he had to study under those hypocrites.
Even while he suffered, he sat with a broken, volatile, teenaged me and said I believe in you when no one else dared get close enough. So I listened when the message below the sound said, I see you. I’m still here. Come back to me.
“Tell me,” I said softly, stepping away from the edge of madness I’d been treading, “did they show you proof your wife or daughter was untouched?”
The assassin’s eyes flickered. That was all I needed.
“No,” I murmured. “Just promises.” I leaned closer. “Then you’ve already condemned her.”
The words landed harder than anything I’d done to his body. His breath hitched from something that had nothing to do with his broken bones and everything to do with imagination.
I let the shadows settle, just enough that he could think.
“They won’t wait long,” I said quietly. “Those bastards upstairs have probably already sent a message.”
His pulse stuttered.
I saw the moment the would-be assassin regretted resisting. Saw him try to collect himself like one does after a stumble in public. But the stumble had happened. We both knew it.
“Your healer became the primary target,” he said, his voice rough at the edges from pain. “Finding out about her made them speed up the plan for the king.”
“Yet you didn’t touch her.”
“I don’t hurt women!”
That single sentence would have me granting him a swift death instead of a painful one.
He stopped to breathe and seemed to be considering how much to say. “The device doesn’t destroy magic.”
Reina’s voice was smaller than I’d ever heard it when she spoke up. “Explain.”
“It drains it so they can give it to someone else.” He said it as though it should’ve been obvious. “They convinced your idiotic king that his Fae blood was corrupting him, like it has you.” His eyes moved to me and held. “Your king believed it. Started begging them to take it out of him.”
Thibault. The shadows at my feet stirred, circling like eager, bloodthirsty hounds ready to find new prey. I knew without being told that they’d been trying to get me weak and unguarded all this time so they could do the same thing to me.
“The Chancellor has been perfecting the device for years.”
So, this went all the way to the top of the Assembly. I’d known Maeron had dirty hands; this just confirmed it.
“How fucking long?” Reina demanded. “How long have they been doing this to people?”
He began to shrug, but the pain from his two broken arms halted the movement. “At least two decades.”
Reina didn’t make a sound. But when I turned, I saw that the blood had drained completely from her face. Grief over my mother had begun to overshadow the burning rage within her.
His lips were loose now. “They only realized how to make this one work well,” he said, the words coming faster now, sharpened by something that looked almost like satisfaction, “when that cursed artifact started wearing the prince of Darreth like a skin.” He swallowed.
Emrys.
When Emrys was young, he’d been kind, listened more than he spoke, and asked careful questions. He’d never bullied me even though I was younger than him and Nisien. His potential to be a strong and capable ruler was evident from a very young age.
Now he was impulsive, incredibly powerful, and dangerously violent because of an accident of fate. The most terrifying part of his situation was that the monster hadn’t taken the boy’s place. He was still in there.
“They cursed the king?” Camrick asked.
“No…” The assassin choked as he tried to laugh, half-hysterical from pain. “That artifact was what they wished they could make this device into.”
Everything became clear to me. The Assembly wanted a weapon. A god made flesh—even if it drove the recipient mad. But one thing didn’t make sense. “They told King Emrys they didn’t know what his curse was.”
The opportunity for revenge I’d just offered seemed to give the assassin strength. “They knew,” he said flatly. “Maybe not everything, but enough to recognize it and know that staying silent would benefit them. They have a library full of books on the Fae.”
So, Luna’s book wasn’t that unique after all.
“The ring he found was used to execute criminals. Every drop of magic and life was ripped out of them in an instant. The Fae believed they were stripping evil souls from the world by doing it.” His gaze held mine as if he wanted to be certain I understood.
“The rings were all supposed to be destroyed once full. Thrown into the ocean or some such because of what they held, but it seems one survived.” The assassin’s smile twisted.
It made me brace myself before he even spoke.
“Parts of the people they drained were still in there.”
My stomach tightened. “What do you mean, still in there?”
“Parts of who they were are all stuck inside him. Murderers. Madmen. Abusers. All crowded together in a prison of flesh with no way out. Compressed into one new being of hatred and power.”
The shadows around me pulled back. Whatever had survived the stripping—the dregs of a condemned soul, still capable of rage and despair—were locked inside my friend. And Emrys had been fighting all of them, alone, since he was just a teenager. Not knowing what they were.
Gods below, he’d been living through a nightmare for years. He wasn’t cursed; he was outnumbered in his own body. Emrys had survived it by sheer will.
I had to stop moving. I stood there, staring at nothing, while the torchlight swam. I thought of every time I'd watched Emrys fight something invisible behind his eyes. Every time I'd been relieved it wasn't me. Every time I hadn't asked.
And now the Assembly wanted to make someone just like him by stripping me and my brother of our magic. They were trying to build a weapon that wouldn’t fight back like Emrys had.
I’d already guessed correctly about the assassin’s wife or daughter; now I thought I understood something else about him. “You know all this,” I said slowly, “because they used the device on you.”
He didn’t meet my eyes. There was a reason I’d thought him a low-level mage.
“How much did they take?” I asked.
“Enough.” His mouth twisted. “Magic comes back if they don’t kill you with it first. They’ve kept me drained for years.”
Reina let out a sigh that sounded relieved. She was worried about Richart.
“For money?” I asked.
“And my life,” he said simply. “But then they took my daughter, and it stopped mattering what happened to me.”
I hadn’t realized how many shadows had leaked out of me into the room until that moment. The single remaining torch threw Camrick’s face into sharp relief. He was looking at me with an expression that was uncomfortably close to dismay.
Fuck.
A cold, creeping dread settled beneath my ribs. “Why do they want Berian and me when there are thousands of less protected mages walking all across Avanfell?”
“Fae blood,” he said. “The device is based on their design. The more you have, the cleaner your magic stores. That’s another secret they don’t tell anyone. If you’ve got magic, you’ve got a strong Fae bloodline. Really just about everyone is some part Fae, they just don’t know it.”
Of course. It was so obvious in hindsight. Though I wasn’t certain it was a good thing. There was already so much division in the world, knowing that something else set mages and mundane apart would only make it worse. That information was so enormous, I had to tuck it away for later.
He went on, stopping occasionally to breathe. “The Shadow Prince’s magic was meant to be the finishing flourish in building themselves a monster.”