Chapter 15
VIENNE's POV
The palace was burning before we arrived.
Not all of it—just the eastern gate, where someone had detonated a cache of Morgana's Aether-guns, turning the fortified entrance into a mouth of splintered wood and screaming stone. Smoke rose in a black pillar, visible from miles away, a signal fire that said the war has started without you.
I kicked my horse harder.
We came through the Merchant's Quarter at a gallop, two hundred and forty-seven soldiers in black and crimson, our boots thundering against cobblestones that had never seen an army march for the people.
Citizens poured from their doorways—shopkeepers, laborers, children with soot on their faces—watching us pass with a mixture of terror and hope.
"Stay inside!" I shouted as we rode. "Lock your doors! This isn't your fight!"
But it was. They knew it. We all did.
Jinx's network had delivered the news an hour before dawn: Darius had moved.
He'd arrested the remaining council members who opposed him, executed two in the palace square, and declared himself Regent-Protector until the "traitor prince" could be apprehended.
Morgana stood at his side, wearing a crown of her own design—a circlet of black iron and red diamonds that looked like a wound made jewelry.
And Cassian...
"They have him in the throne room," Jinx had reported, her voice crackling through the comm-crystal.
"Surrounded. Darius wants to execute him publicly at noon. Make an example."
Over my dead body. And possibly his.
We turned onto the Royal Promenade. The palace rose before us, its spires clawing at a sky turned orange by fire and dawn. And arrayed before the main gate, in perfect, terrible formation, stood the Royal Host.
Five thousand men. Maybe six. Blue-and-silver armor gleaming, pikes set, Aether-cannons mounted on wheeled platforms that hummed with contained destruction.
Behind them, floating above the palace like predatory whales, were three airships. Royal cruisers, their hulls armored in steel and rune-etched wood, their bellies bristling with bomb bays and Aether-lances.
Kael pulled his horse up beside mine. His face had gone pale beneath his helmet. "Wolf. That's... that's not a garrison. That's a killing field."
"I see it." My hands tightened on the reins. My heart was hammering, but my mind was cold. Mafia cold. The kind of cold that let you walk into a room full of enemies and smile while you planned their deaths.
"They'll cut us down before we get within a hundred yards," he said. "The cannons alone—"
"We're not charging the gate." I pointed to the left, where the Promenade curved around the palace gardens. "Jinx. Status on the aqueduct?"
Her voice came back, small and steady. "Clear. The bomber's old route. It'll take you under the east wing, but Wolf—the structural damage from the explosion..."
"Is exactly what we need." I turned to face my army.
Two hundred and forty-seven faces. Two hundred and forty-seven heartbeats. "Listen up! The Royal Host thinks we're going to do the honorable thing. They think we'll line up in their pretty field and let them shoot us down like targets. They think we care about glory."
I drew my sword. The Aether-blade Cassian had given me, the one that glowed with pale fire when I fed it my will. It had taken me weeks to learn how to channel Aether—this body's muscle memory, Iraia's gift, finally unlocking under pressure.
"They're wrong," I said. "We don't fight for glory. We fight for the person behind us. The memory ahead of us. The truth that doesn't fit in their textbooks."
I raised the blade. It caught the firelight, blazing white.
"Legion! Split by squads! Kael, take Alpha and Bravo around the gardens—hit the cannon crews from the flank. Charlie and Delta, you're with me. We go through the aqueduct. We find the prince. We hold the throne room until the city turns."
"And the airships?" someone called.
I looked up. At the floating leviathans, their shadows passing over us like the wings of death.
"Leave them to me."
The aqueduct was a throat of wet stone.
We moved through it in single file—twenty of my best, Rynn at my side, the blacksmith whose name I'd learned was Corvin bringing up the rear.
The water was ankle-deep, cold, carrying the ash of the burning gate.
Above us, the stone groaned. The explosion had weakened the structure.
Somewhere ahead, daylight stabbed through cracks in the ceiling.
"Wolf," Rynn whispered. "Do you hear that?"
I did. Footsteps. Marching. Above us and to the right.
"Palace guard," I murmured. "Reinforcements for the throne room. If they reach Cassian before we do..."
"We run," I finished.
And we did.
We splashed through the aqueduct, boots hammering stone, until we reached the drainage grate beneath the east wing kitchens. I didn't have tools. I had rage. I slammed the pommel of my sword into the rusted bars—once, twice, three times. Aether flared. Metal screamed.
The grate tore free.
We climbed into chaos.
The kitchens were abandoned, pots boiling over on fires that had been left untended. A serving girl cowered in the pantry, her eyes wide as we poured in like wraiths.
"Throne room," I snapped. "Which way?"
"S-second floor," she stammered. "But they're all up there. The general. The lady. They have the prince on his knees. They—"
"How many guards?"
"Fifty. Maybe sixty."
I smiled. It was not a comforting smile.
"Good odds."
The throne room doors were oak and iron, reinforced with Aether-steel. They were also closed. Which meant Darius thought he had time. Which meant he didn't know we were already inside his house.
I pressed my ear to the wood.
"...last chance, nephew," Darius was saying, his voice carrying even through the barrier. "Renounce your claim. Name me Regent. And I'll let you live. Exiled, humiliated, but breathing."
"And if I refuse?" Cassian's voice. Steady. Defiant. Alive.
"Then Lady Ashford will demonstrate her new toys on you. One limb at a time. The crowd loves a show."
I looked at my squad. Twenty faces. Twenty blades.
"On three," I mouthed. "Break the door. Kill anyone in blue. Protect the prince. No retreat."
They nodded. Rynn's knuckles were white on her sword. Corvin hefted a cleaver he'd taken from the kitchen.
"One."
I channeled Aether into my blade. It blazed, white-hot, hungry.
"Two."
I felt the familiar calm descend. The place beyond fear. The place where Vienne Delgado had lived and died and been reborn.
"THREE!"
The door exploded.
Not from the outside—from within. I'd channeled everything I had into a single strike, a blade of compressed Aether that sheared through oak and iron like paper. The doors blew inward in a storm of splinters, and we poured through the breach like a black tide.
The throne room was a cathedral of gold and blood.
Darius stood on the dais, his sword at Cassian's throat. The prince was on his knees, his hands bound behind him, his face bruised but unbroken. Morgana sat in the queen's chair—my chair, some part of me snarled—wearing her black crown and holding one of her Aether-guns.
And between us and them, fifty guards in blue-and-silver.
"KILL THEM!" Darius roared.
The guards charged.
We met them.
It was not a battle. It was a slaughterhouse.
My squad moved like we'd trained—pairs covering pairs, blades finding the gaps in armor where the neck met the shoulder, where the glove ended and the wrist began.
Rynn spun through a guard's defense like water, her knife opening his throat.
Corvin used his bulk like a battering ram, shoving men into each other, breaking formations.
I didn't fight. I danced.
The Aether-blade sang in my hand, leaving trails of white fire in the air.
A guard lunged—I ducked, pivoted, and opened his belly.
Another swung a halberd—I caught the haft, pulled him off-balance, and drove my sword through the gap beneath his arm.
Blood sprayed, hot and copper-sweet, painting my face, my hands, my black armor.
I didn't feel it. I was the storm now. The reckoning. The Lady King come to collect.
"Seraphine!" Darius's voice cracked. "Stop! I'll kill him! I'll—"
I threw my dagger.
It wasn't the blade in my hand. It was the backup, strapped to my thigh, drawn in a motion so smooth it looked like magic. It crossed the room in a silver blur and buried itself in Darius's sword hand.
He screamed. The blade at Cassian's throat clattered to the floor.
The prince moved. Even bound, even beaten, he moved—throwing himself sideways, rolling, coming up against the throne with his bound hands searching for the dropped sword.
Morgana rose.
She moved faster than she should have. The Aether-gun came up, not aimed at me, but at Cassian.
"No!" I screamed.
I channeled everything I had. Every ounce of Aether in this borrowed body. Every drop of rage from two lives. The blade in my hand blazed so bright it seared the eye, and I threw it—not at Morgana, not at Darius, but at the space between the prince and the bullet.
The sword struck the Aether-round in midair.
The explosion threw me backward. I hit the marble hard, my ears ringing, my vision swimming. I tasted blood. Felt something broken in my ribs—maybe two things.
When my eyes cleared, Morgana was standing over me.
Her beautiful face was ruined. The explosion had scorched half her features, peeling back the skin to reveal something dark and glistening beneath. Not bone. Not flesh. Something like tar, like oil, like the blood magic she'd been hiding.
"You," she hissed. Her voice was wrong—layered, echoing, as if something else spoke through her. "Interloper. Thief. You don't belong here. You don't belong anywhere."
She raised the gun. The barrel smoked. She had one shot left.
I smiled up at her. Bloody. Broken. Grinning like a demon.
"Neither do you."
I kicked her knee.
Not hard enough to break—hard enough to buckle. As she fell forward, I rolled, snatching the dagger from Darius's still-impaled hand, and drove it up, under her ribs, into the space where a heart should beat.