Seven Twenty-One
COLSAR
The last deathmage does not see him coming.
That is the difference between the ones that were disguised and the ones that are not.
The disguised ones had been patient, positioned, waiting in corridors they had no business being in.
These later ones are simply present, as though whoever sent them ran out of time for subtlety.
They move with the coordination of things being instructed rather than thinking, their bodies carrying them forward without the hesitation that belongs to anything still alive.
He has killed four between the Queen Dowager's estate and the palace gates. He kills this one the same way he killed the others — quickly, completely, without pausing to examine what he has done. The body drops in the outer corridor and he steps over it and keeps moving.
The palace is wrong.
He has known it since he turned onto the main road and felt the quality of the air change the way it changes when something has been disturbed.
He could not name it precisely. He knows Asharin the way he knows his own breathing, the frequency of her, and something in that frequency has gone quiet in a way that makes the back of his neck pull tight.
He takes the children's corridor first.
He does not slow as he pushes through the door, scanning the room in a single pass, taking in Saurin and Cambra at the far wall and Kentan already turning toward him, one child against each shoulder.
"We are under attack," he says. "Take them to Urasal. Now."
They do not ask questions. Kentan is already moving.
"Colsar—"
"Go."
They go.
He turns and runs.
The Great Hall is at the far end of the east wing and he covers the distance faster than he should be able to, past guards who flatten themselves against the walls and a servant who drops something ceramic that shatters across the floor and a corridor that seems to stretch longer the faster he moves through it.
The clock on the east wall reads seven twenty-one as he reaches the doors.
He pushes them open.
Nothing could have prepared him for what is on the other side.
He takes it in the way he takes in everything under pressure.
In pieces, catalogued fast, and understood faster.
The broken window, cold air moving through the hall in a way that does not belong to an evening like this one.
The dead deathmage against the far wall, the lightcraft in the air around it still faintly present, sharp and clean, unmistakably hers.
The blood on the table, at the head, on the floor beneath it, spreading in a pattern that tells him exactly whose it is without needing to be told.
Sevrin's. He knows that blood. He would know it anywhere.
He takes all of that in.
And then he sees her. She is on the floor near the table, one hand slightly extended as though she reached for something and did not quite make it.
She is still. Not the stillness of sleep or exhaustion or unconsciousness.
This is a different kind of still. The kind that has no movement left underneath it.
He crosses the room. He drops to his knees beside her and his hands find her face and he is already talking before he has fully processed what he is seeing.
"Asharin." He turns her face toward him.
"Asharin, wake up. Look at me." He presses his fingers to the side of her throat.
Nothing. He moves them, presses harder. "Asha.
I am here. Open your eyes." He pulls her upright against him, his hand at the back of her head, and he can feel it already, the particular weight of her, the way her body does not respond, does not shift, does not adjust to him the way it always does.
"You haven't eaten. That's all this is. You haven't eaten and it has been too long and you pushed yourself and that is all this is.
" He is still talking. He cannot stop talking.
"Wake up. Asha. I need you to wake up right now. "
She does not wake up.
He pulls back and looks at her face and sees the dried white foam at the corner of her mouth and the pallor of her skin and he knows, he has known since he walked through the door, he has known since his hands found her and felt what they felt, but he is not ready to accept it.
He lifts his head.
The sound that comes out of him does not belong to anything human.
It tears through the hall and the walls answer it, dust falling from the upper corners as the pressure of his power surges outward without direction or intent, cracking the plaster along the ceiling in a long jagged line before he pulls it back, drags it inward, forces it down into something he can hold.
A guard appears in the doorway.
"Get the healer," Colsar says. "Now."
The guard goes.
He looks back at her. He smooths her hair away from her face the way he has done a thousand times and his hands are shaking and he does not care.
The healer arrives breathing hard. She kneels on the other side and her hands move over Asharin's throat, her wrists, her chest, and Colsar watches every movement.
"She has been poisoned," the healer says. "Something I am not familiar with. Forced, given the bruising along the jaw." A pause. "The mode of poisoning is no longer relevant, Your Highness."
"Why?” he asks.
The healer does not look away from him.
"Because she is dead, Your Highness." Her voice is even, careful, the care of someone who has done this before and knows there is no good way to do it. "Her body has already begun to firm."
The hall is very quiet.
He looks at Asharin's face.
He thinks about when she told him about the twins, the way she had taken his hand and placed it against her and said two and watched his face with those careful eyes of hers, waiting to see what he would do with it.
He thinks about the night she fed him her blood and stayed beside him until dawn and wrapped her wrist in linen and said nothing about what it had cost her.
He thinks about her voice in the dark saying I am yours.
Only you. You are my family, Colsar. There is nothing else.
He thinks about the future he had been building in his head the way you build things when you believe in them without question. Veynar settled. More children. Something quieter than the past, something that belonged only to them.
He cannot see any of it without her in it. His hand finds the knife at his boot. He looks at it for a moment. At the blade. At the simplicity of what it would mean.
Then he thinks of Kiss. He thinks of Ari.
He thinks of two small bodies in Kentan's arms going somewhere below the surface, somewhere safe, somewhere that is safe because he sent them there, because he is here and he is alive and he is the thing standing between them and everything that just happened in this room.
He puts the knife away. He hears boots in the corridor. Fast and heavy, the rhythm of a soldier who has stopped caring about composure.
Trophi hits the doorway at a run and pulls up short.
He takes it in the same way Colsar did. The broken window, the deathmage, the blood, and then his eyes find Asharin on the floor and he goes very still. A look crosses his face that Colsar has never seen there before. It is not grief but something else, and it is gone before he can place it.
Trophi has stood in front of undead armies and deathmage attacks and the mountain pass in the dead of winter and his face has never looked like that.
It registers slowly. Then all at once.
Before he can speak Colsar says, "Search the palace. Up and down. Every corridor, every room, every passage. Do not rest until you find out who has harmed your queen."
Trophi looks at Asharin one more time. His jaw tightens. Then he turns and walks out and within seconds his voice is carrying through the corridors, sharp and absolute, barking orders that echo through the palace walls and do not stop.
Colsar looks at the healer. Then at the guard still standing near the door.
"Get out," he says.
They go.
The doors close.
He pulls Asharin back into his arms and holds her against his chest and presses his face into her hair and stays there in the quiet of the room, in the cold coming through the broken window, in the dark that the guttering candles are losing ground against.
"You do not get to do this," he says. His voice is barely held together. "You do not get to leave me here without you. Do you hear me?" His voice breaks. "Asharin."
She does not answer.
The sound that comes out of him the second time is worse than the first. It tears through the room and this time he does not pull it back.
Fire bursts along the far wall in a line that has no direction or intent, just heat and grief and the siakar rising in him with nowhere to go.
Flames catch the curtains. A candle holder melts along its base.
Through the broken window, from somewhere outside, the sound of the outer palace wall beginning to give follows, stone crumbling under the weight of something it was never built to carry.
He calls for the Fyrekin council the way he called for them in the snow that night, from somewhere below everything else, below reason and control and the part of him that knows how to be a king.
They arrive without announcement. The three council members, and behind them Arabar, his Sentinel, who takes one look at the room and says nothing.
"Fix her," Colsar says.
None of them speak immediately.
"Fix her," he says again.
The council member closest to him looks at Asharin in his arms and does not look away when he answers.
"We cannot resurrect the dead, Your Highness."
"Then what use are you?"
"We are Fyrekin," the woman says. Not unkindly. "We are not gods."
Arabar steps forward. His voice is measured, the voice of someone who has spent decades being the calm point in difficult rooms. "The bond between a siakar and his mate deepens significantly after she gives birth," he says, addressing the council.
"In this case it is something more than that. I have not seen its like before."
"There is no Fyrekin without her," Colsar says. "There is no me. Whatever I am to you, whoever I am, it ends here. It ends in this room. There is nothing left of it without her."
The council is quiet.
Then one of them, the third, who has spoken least, begins to say something and stops.
Colsar looks at him.
The air in the room tightens. The pressure builds inward until the council members feel it pressing against their lungs.
The man coughs.
"Speak," Colsar says.
Another cough. The man's hand moves to his throat.
"We cannot resurrect dead humans," he says, the words pulling out between labored breaths. "Only creatures. And even that is difficult at best."
The pressure does not ease.
Colsar looks at him. Then he looks down at Asharin in his arms. If she were to wake up she would not be able to breathe this way. The pressure in the air eases.
The council looks at Arabar.
Arabar nods once.
They file out without speaking. The doors close behind them. The fire along the far wall has burned down to embers. The cold is still coming through the broken window.
Arabar does not leave. He moves to the far edge of the room, into the shadow beside the curtains, and becomes very still.
"The children are safe," he says quietly. "They are not in the palace. They are with your uncle."
Colsar does not answer.
He is looking at Asharin.
He adjusts her against his chest, her head in the crook of his arm, the way he holds her when she has fallen asleep somewhere she did not intend to and he is moving her without waking her.
His hands are pale. They have not stopped shaking since he found her on the floor and they are not stopping now, a fine continuous tremor that he cannot control and has stopped trying to.
"Wake up," he says.
His voice is barely a voice.
"Asha Bear." He smooths her hair back from her face.
"Wake up. You are going to wake up now." He presses his mouth to her forehead and stays there, his eyes closed, his hands still shaking against her.
"I need you to wake up. Do you hear me? I need you to open your eyes and tell me I am being unreasonable.
" A breath. "Tell me I am overreacting. Tell me to put you down. Tell me anything."
The candles have burned very low.
His hands do not stop shaking.
"There is no version of this that I accept," he says. "Do you understand me? There is no version of this that I accept."
He pulls her closer and holds her there in the dark and the cold, his face in her hair, his hands pale and trembling against her, and he does not let go.