Chapter 10
VIENNE's POV
The safehouse felt smaller with a prince in it.
Cassian sat at my war table—my table, in my territory, surrounded by maps and daggers and the smell of Torvald's forge drifting up through the floorboards—and looked profoundly out of place.
He'd traded his combat leathers for a plain grey coat and a hood that hid the royal features, but he still sat like he owned the room.
Straight spine. Shoulders back. The posture of a man who'd never once been told to make himself small.
"You need to slouch," I said, tossing him a cup of coffee. He caught it one-handed, wincing slightly as his bruised ribs protested.
"Excuse me?"
"Slouch. Lean. Look like you belong here instead of like you're auditing the premises for tax purposes." I pulled up a chair across from him, straddling it backward. "If anyone walks in, you're supposed to be a mercenary advisor. Mercenaries don't sit like they have a stick up their ass."
He looked at the chair. At me. At the way my arms rested on the backrest, my chin propped on my crossed forearms.
"That looks uncomfortable," he observed.
"That looks natural. Try it."
He tried it. The result was so stiff and awkward that Jinx, entering from the back room with an armful of fresh bandages, burst out laughing.
"Oh my gods," she wheezed. "He looks like a coat rack having an existential crisis."
"I look dignified," Cassian corrected, but there was a sheepish edge to his voice.
"You look like you're trying to fart silently," Jinx said.
She dropped the bandages on the table and looked at me.
"Kael's in position. Torvald has eyes on the palace gates. And there's a rumor that General Thorne is currently screaming at the High Council about 'barbarians in the arena' and 'the death of decency.'"
"Decency died when he ordered a massacre," I said. "I'm just dancing on its grave."
Cassian's expression darkened. He set the coffee down untouched. "My uncle has called an emergency session. Tomorrow at noon. He wants to revoke the... concession I made."
"The title?"
"All of it. The freedom. The right to bear arms. The legal protection." His jaw tightened. "He wants you declared an outlaw again. Public enemy. And he wants me censured for 'consorting with traitors.'"
"Charming." I picked up a dagger from the table, testing its balance. "And what does Morgana want?"
"She wants your head on a pike outside the east gate." He said it casually, but his voice had gone cold. "She's been lobbying the northern lords. Promising them Voss lands, mining rights, access to the eastern trade routes. All contingent on your... removal."
I smiled at the blade. "She's efficient. I'll give her that."
"She's dangerous," Cassian corrected. "More than you know. She has connections to the Blackwater Collective. The same group your friend Malachi answers to. And she's been importing weapons. Not swords. Not crossbows."
He looked at me, his eyes sharp. "Guns."
The dagger stopped spinning.
"Guns," I repeated.
"Small ones. Concealable. Aether-forged barrels, but the mechanisms are... different. New. She tested one in the palace gardens last week. Shot a target at fifty paces through a steel plate."
He leaned forward, his voice dropping. "She called it a 'revolution in personal defense.' I call it a prelude to civil war."
I set the dagger down. My mind was racing. Guns in this world meant someone had merged modern technology with Aether magic. And if Morgana had them, then she either had contact with the bomber—my bomber—or she was working with someone else from my world.
"Show me," I said.
"I can't. They're locked in her private armory. But I can get you close." He reached into his coat and pulled out a folded card. Embossed. Perfumed. The scent of jasmine and poison.
"She's hosting a gala tomorrow night. 'In celebration of the King's recovery.' A lie, of course—my father is barely conscious—but it's a chance for her to consolidate power. Display her new toys. And eliminate anyone who stands in her way."
He slid the card across the table. An invitation.
"She invited you?"
"She invited the Crown Prince. She didn't specify which one." A ghost of a smile. "I thought we might attend together. As partners."
Jinx made a gagging sound. "You two are disgusting."
"We're strategic," I corrected.
"You're both disgusting and strategic." She grabbed an apple from the bowl on the table, bit into it with a satisfying crunch, and pointed at Cassian with the fruit. "If you're going to this death party, you need a better disguise. That face is on every coin in the kingdom."
"Which is why," Cassian said, reaching into his coat again, "I brought these."
He laid three objects on the table. A vial of dark liquid. A small pot of wax. And a thin, flexible mask that looked like skin but wasn't.
"Prosthetics," he explained. "From the royal theater. The makeup master owes me a favor from a rather embarrassing incident involving a costume party and a very convincing goat disguise."
I raised an eyebrow. "A goat?"
"We don't discuss the goat." He pushed the mask toward me. "This will change your bone structure. The wax is for scars, the liquid for skin tone. With the right application, we can make you look like..."
"A noble?" I finished, unenthused.
"A foreign weapons dealer. From the southern archipelago. Dark hair, sun-weathered skin, a scar from a kraken hunt."
He was warming to the idea, his eyes bright with the same strategic intensity I'd seen in the arena.
"Morgana's been trying to acquire southern steel for months. If she thinks you're a potential supplier, she'll invite you into her armory herself."
I picked up the mask. It was lighter than it looked, almost weightless. "And you?"
"I'll be your bodyguard. Silent. Intimidating. Slightly stupid." He affected a blank, brutish expression that was so unlike him I almost laughed.
"Typecasting?"
"Method acting." The expression dropped, replaced by his usual sharpness. "But Vienne—if we do this, we need rules. Inside those walls, I'm not a prince. You're not the Lady King. We're merchant and muscle. If either of us breaks cover—"
"We die," I finished. "Or worse, we end up on Morgana's guest list for her next execution." I met his eyes. "I know the drill, Cassian. I've infiltrated more hostile territory than you have royal balls."
"That," he said quietly, "I don't doubt."
———
The gala was held at Ashford Manor, a sprawling estate on the capital's western edge that looked like a cathedral had married a fortress and produced an architectural abomination.
Spires of black stone rose against the moon, wrapped in thorny iron vines that served as both decoration and defense.
Aether-lamps burned blood-red, casting the arriving carriages in a light that made the nobles look like fresh corpses.
I arrived on horseback—a rented roan, cheap, unremarkable. My face was darkened by the theater paint, my cheekbones broadened by the wax prosthetic, my hair hidden beneath a wig of coarse black curls. The scar across my jaw—fake, carefully applied—itched like hell.
Cassian walked beside me. He'd grown a rough beard overnight—theater glue and horsehair, don't ask—and wore leather armor scarred by fictional battles.
He moved with a rolling gait, shoulders hunched, one hand resting conspicuously on the hilt of a broadsword that was almost too large to be practical.
The perfect southern bodyguard. All muscle, no manners.
The guard at the gate checked my forged credentials—Captain Riven Drake, purveyor of exotic armaments—and waved us through with barely a glance. The real security was inside.
Morgana met us at the door.
She was resplendent in a gown of deep crimson, cut to display the curve of her throat and the poison in her smile.
Her red hair was piled high, studded with black diamonds that caught the light like spider eyes.
When she saw me, her head tilted in that predatory way I remembered from the palace balcony.
"Captain Drake," she purred, her voice sliding over me like oil.
"How delightful. Your reputation precedes you. The southern kraken-hunter who sells weapons that can pierce Aether-shields."
She extended a hand, and I kissed it with the gruff efficiency of a woman playing a man's role. "And your... guard?"
"Grunt," I said, my voice pitched low, roughened by a fictional accent I'd based on a New Carthage dockworker. "Don't speak much. Broke his jaw on a hunt. Heals crooked."
Cassian grunted obligingly.
"How... charming." Morgana's eyes lingered on him for a fraction too long. My pulse kicked. But then she turned back to me, her smile widening. "You must see my collection. I've acquired something rather extraordinary. I think you'll find it... familiar."
Bingo.
She led us through the manor, past rooms of velvet and gilt, past nobles who laughed too loud and drank too fast, past guards who watched us with the flat eyes of men who'd been told to shoot first and never ask questions.
The armory was in the basement. A vault of reinforced stone, magically sealed, accessible only by a key Morgana wore around her neck on a chain of woven silver.
Inside, the room was a temple of violence.
Swords lined the walls—fine ones, ancestral blades with names and histories. Crossbows. Polearms. A rack of Aether-staves that hummed with contained power.
And on a central display table, under a glass case, lay six handguns.
They were beautiful and wrong. Sleek, black, with barrels that shimmered with embedded Aether-crystals. The grips were carved from a dark wood I didn't recognize. They looked like someone had taken a Glock 19 and asked a fantasy blacksmith to make it extra.
"Remarkable, aren't they?" Morgana said, running a finger along the glass.
"I call them Ashford's Bite. They fire projectiles of compressed Aether. No need for gunpowder. No need for magic. Just point, pull, and watch your enemy's head evaporate."
She looked at me, her green eyes bright with avarice.