Chapter Four
FOUR
The smell of blood, copper, and salt fills my nose as Keeva leads me toward the merchant quarter, cutting through the early grip of night clinging to the streets.
There’s no cleansing wash of the sea breeze now, no soothing echo of waves this far into the slums, where the King’s Road slices through Quayside uphill toward Castle Mount.
There’s only the urgent beat of my hammering heart and my feet on damp earth, and the sharp, wondering terror of what will happen if we’re caught.
Impalement is a slow, agonizing way to go—more often than not, it takes days to die. And no one in Quayside will risk putting the condemned out of their misery and being branded a traitor themselves by one of the gardai.
We let them suffer to keep ourselves safe.
But Finn… Fiery certainty heats through my bones.
I won’t let her suffer.
“Why didn’t the tincture work?” My words come out in a whisper as the deepening night stretches out around us. We can’t be more than two hours to midnight, judging from where the moon hangs in the sky above.
Keeva draws in a heavy breath.
“The tincture I tried fights infection. If it’s poison, Maeve, not all of them have simple antidotes. Or if there’s something like mage bones ground into it…” Keeva shakes her head.
“We both know that’s just a story.” I shake my head too.
There’s no magic left, let alone in old mage bones.
Keeva’s dark eyes dart up the King’s Road. She bites at the inside of her bottom lip like she’s debating something, but the look vanishes in a heartbeat. “Let’s move,” she murmurs.
In the hours since the gardai massacre, no one’s come to clean up the blood or carry the bodies away. They lie strewn across the ground and in all the side streets branching out from the King’s Road, in pools of crimson and mud.
I pull my thin cloak tighter around myself.
None of this is normal. None of this is right. Even if no one’s doing a damn thing to try to change it, that doesn’t make any of it less wrong.
And none of it makes a shred of sense.
The High King has always been brutal. But this feels different. This is madness, indiscriminate and random. And on top of dwindling grain and soaring prices? He’ll have another uprising on his hands in no time.
Starving people are desperate. And desperate people don’t care what they risk as long as there’s a chance of change—of hope.
We round a curve of the King’s Road where it stretches from Quayside into the merchant quarter—and I freeze.
Even under the moonlight, it’s teeming with gardai and crowds, and if any of the gardai see the green underneath my worn cloak, I’m dead. I forgot to take it off in the panic earlier.
Old Ones, I’ve never seen so many gardai in one place before.
Not dozens but hundreds of them. Bodhran drums beat out a deep, steady rhythm. Each strike on the ancient war drum sends a rumbling vibration through the misty night, and I swear the wind could carry the sound all the way to Castle Mount.
A pipe joins in, banners in every color snapping in the damp wind.
A lone cheer erupts from the far edge of the King’s Road where it enters the Dyfflin gates from the world outside.
No one’s allowed in or out without a permit, and those cost money.
I’ve always assumed it’s what Finn’s been pilfering coins from the weapons stall for, so we can get out of here one day. Go somewhere quiet. Somewhere safe.
The silent crowd is packed so tight, we can’t see a thing beyond the space right in front of us, and the gardai seem only too ready to smack at anyone who steps out of their spot in the crowd.
The drums beat faster. Hoofbeats follow, quick and light on the stone road, followed by six enormous black horses pulling a pure-black carriage with glossy paneling, the first in a procession arriving into the city from beyond the walls.
No one around us makes a sound; the only noise beyond the crunch of carriage wheels on dirt and the bells on trotting horses is the pulsing beat of the war drums. Still, the scent of blood stubbornly clings to the mist.
“It’s the Assay,” I murmur to Keeva.
She nods, grim worry tightening the line of her dark brow. “They’re here.”
It’s fitting, I guess, that Berach the Cunning, the first High King centuries ago, named the contest to marry his heir after the blacksmiths’ process to test the strength of their metal for swords and axes and blades.
They wield nothing but death, just like the war that ripped power from the Old Ones and gave it to Berach instead.
I might not know much, but even children here learn those stories. We learn to walk with one hand balanced on the rusted cages they craft for us. We hear the laments for wasted blood before we’re out of our cradles.
The carriages rattle, turning the pure loathing sour in my mouth. Only one of the noble daughters arriving here today will survive. There’s no mercy in the fight for power—there’s only steel and blood and ambition as deadly as the fires of a forge.
My mother told us that during the Assay when this High King chose his first queen, the noble daughters had targeted the single peasant woman selected to take part as a token, to dash the hope of the people.
No one stopped them when they strung her up in the banquet hall before the second challenge, bleeding her dry in front of the entire court.
The drums rise into a wild beat, the gardai shoving harder back at the crowds, jostling out forced cheers and applause until the night air rings with it.
After a time, the window in one of the carriages rocking past us stretches wide enough for me to see one of the girls inside. Gems woven through her hair catch in the dim light, and stunning cut roses in red with painted black stems twine around the window.
A shiver rips through me at the white carriage behind hers.
Drawn by large horses with ruby-studded halters, it’s entirely covered in braids of white rose and precious stones the color of the sea.
A dangerous hush falls over the crowd as the white carriage rattles past. We can glimpse the noble daughter inside glaring at us through the window, holding a cloth to her nose.
Tension ripples through the crowd, and my blood chills—because red and black are the colors of the High King and his royal line.
White and blue are the colors of the High Queen and of Cymrea.
My hand finds Keeva’s arm. She hooks hers through my elbow, both of us tensing as the crowd roils and the gardai reach for the swords at their sides.
More carriage wheels roll past us, and the paneling is… golden?
No.
This one is amber and black, but that flicker of gold…
It’s the unmistakable flash of coins, flying from the carriage. A wrist draped in brown silk stitched with gold tosses handfuls of precious golden coins from the amber-and-black carriage. Bodies jump to catch them, or duck to scoop whatever hits the ground.
And just like that, the tension in the air evaporates.
I watch the white carriage that coiled so much anger in the crowd roll up toward the merchant quarter and hear the growing cheers ahead.
As it disappears in the mist, the amber carriage ambles past us, a seemingly impossible amounts of coins still flying from the noble daughter inside to the crowds.
Anger makes my skin prickle.
No wonder the uprising failed if the crowds are this fickle.
“We’re running out of time,” I say finally, so low I almost think Keeva doesn’t hear me at first.
And honestly? I’m not sure I’m only talking about Finn.
Keeva’s dark eyes sweep out over the crowd. “Yeah,” she admits. “I think we are.”