Chapter Fifteen
FIFTEEN
The High Queen snaps her fingers, and the music begins, breaking the tension in the room.
The lilting notes of a pipe dance from the far corner behind the dais. The court seems to let out a collective sigh. My heart only races faster the more they all seem to relax.
Some of the younger nobles pair up, moving to the bloodless marble at the side of the dais to dance.
Prince Cashel is among them, flowing from one dance into the next, one partner to another.
Lingering with a young man, one hand sliding low on the courtier’s silken spine, before turning to a woman with rich copper skin.
The woman throws her head back, laughing, as the diamonds at her neck sparkle.
The idea of anyone laughing so close to him sets my every nerve on edge.
Reputations are earned. There’s no way his could be wrong.
Is there?
I shove the thought to the back of my mind and stick close to Talon.
Aoife hangs by the edges of the room along the wall. Hardly anyone speaks to her, but I watch her blue eyes take in one huddle of nobles after the next, tracking them as if she’s storing every detail away.
An unnerving possibility draws claws up the center of me—that she might know things I will need to know to have a chance at surviving long enough to kill the High King and making it through the tests of the Assay.
There are so many moving parts to this. I have to kill the High King and figure out how I’ll escape after I do it.
If I can’t kill him until the end, I need to have a plan for being the only survivor and not having to marry Prince Cashel.
Plus, I need to figure out which noble daughters support Cymrea, so I can try to take them down too.
Even if trusting Aoife would be rash, maybe there’s a middle ground.
The melody of the pipes shifts. Easing into a slow, sweet cadence that coaxes a strange, sudden ache that feels an awful lot like nostalgia deep in my chest.
My mother always told me pipes are the songs of the isle’s deepest heart. And even though I’ve never set foot outside of Dyfflin, the pipes stir something clinging to my soul the way a spirit lingers ever near to its bones.
The woman playing the lilting melody is only a few years older than me, alone in the corner behind the dais. Only Prince Cashel acknowledges her with a nod of his sandy head. The longing in his eyes as she plays steals my breath.
Each rise and fall of the pipes draws out a longing for a world I’ve never been part of, but that lives in my dreams with every waking moment—sweeping, craggy hills, seas crashing on ancient black cliffs, and coasts where wildflowers cling to the shores.
An isle I know in my bones is worth saving—worth protecting, even if our magic has been drained.
On the dais, the High Queen’s lips curl into a sneer at the melody.
I watch figures in white and pale blue draw close to the throne, clustering around her. All of them have the same pale hair, the same high cheeks and icy features as her.
My blood singes in my veins—
Cymreans.
None of them can keep their sharp eyes off the prince, who draws laughter and bows and curtsies like he is winter sunlight on ice, dangerously bright. He lets go of the young man he was dancing with and steps back from the thick of the dance floor, eyes moving to me.
My pulse quickens.
One of the Cymreans near the High Queen, a man with kohl-lined eyes and hair slicked back in a nearly white braid, leans down to whisper in her ear. Her cold eyes flash up to me.
Instinctively, I check over my shoulder, bracing for a serrated blade at my throat, for the swish of a dark cloak on marble that will mean the Lady of Shadows has come for me.
Then—
“Dance with me.”
The smell of crisp winter air and spice fills my nose as Prince Cashel offers out a ringed hand to me.
His sapphire eyes flash on mine. “Come on,” he says, and his smile tightens. “You threw the rose I gave you on the ground. The least you can do is dance with me.”
“Your rose made me bleed.” Keeping the fear out of my voice is a battle.
Old Ones, I can feel every eye in this court narrowing on me the longer he stands here, one hand still extended between us, waiting.
When I still don’t take it, the prince leans in close enough for me to count the dark lashes shadowing his eyes, and murmurs, low and deceptively soft, “Why do you think I had every one of them ripped out?”
My blood pulses in my veins.
Killer.
Monster.
Every warning I’ve ever heard about him races up the back of my neck as he watches me, navy eyes searching mine. The velvet of his midnight tunic doesn’t have so much as a crinkle, and the rubies in the silver crown he wears wink in the candlelight.
“I know what people say about me,” the prince says carefully, finally taking my hand and placing the other at the curve of my waist. He keeps his unsettling gaze locked on me, taking control of the dance and pulling me in as the piper plays faster and faster.
If he’s looking at you, he won’t be looking for me.
I stumble on my own feet.
A soft laugh tugs at the edge of the prince’s mouth, but he pulls me in closer so our bodies are flush. All it would take is one slip of a knife at the back of my ribs, and he could kill me without me seeing it coming.
“Do you?” I cover the words with a shy smile and the smooth mask every courtier expects from a girl dancing with a prince.
Even if Wolf won’t let me in, I can’t keep myself from wondering: If I succeed, will the Whisperers burn this court down, or put a new king—put Prince Cashel—in his father’s place?
The combination of strong wine and the spinning dance sets me off-kilter. “I’m surprised you’ve let them live.”
I wince as the words leave my mouth.
Shit.
If the stories are true, he had a childhood friend’s entire family slaughtered over an insult.
The prince’s blue eyes bear down into mine. “And do you believe the stories?”
Music and the hiss of gossip surround us, but this close, the only sound I hear is the brief catch of the breath in his throat as I let my gaze linger on his. One finger brushes precisely where the laces of my shimmering midnight gown end to expose the upper length of my spine.
A slender curl of danger unfurls in my stomach, almost drawing me in.
Keeva told me once that some poisons work through the air, twisting in fumes that can capture your will and cloud your judgment.
Others turn your nerves to fire, sinking like magic into a mage’s bones and eating away at you from within.
Some consume every rational thought until there’s nothing left but madness. Some can even stop your heart.
She never told me about this one, though.
How the scent of winter spice threatens to trick my better judgment. About how it might entangle me, brushing like chilled velvet in my mind, as he sweeps me away to dance in the pulsing music.
I never knew the whisper of danger—of what if, of maybe—could be a poison all its own.
What would this man be like as a king? If the Whisperers put him on the throne, how much could change for people like me?
He razed the temples with the gardai. He did as his father said.
But even as I think the words, a low, insistent part of me whispers, What if he was just surviving too?
I let myself imagine, for a single breath, a world where a king who’s kinder than the stories could rule an isle with mages and magic once more, a world where we might all be stronger together instead of tearing each other apart.
I let myself lean in closer. “Should I believe them?”
Hunger flares in the depths of his midnight eyes. His lips part.
But before he can say a word, a shriek splits the air and the music dies.
No one moves.
No one even breathes.
The room shifts on its axis. Then a surge of bodies rushes back away from the scream, from the growls at the corner of the room, from the terror.
Something wet spatters onto the floor, and my stomach roils as I follow horrified gazes to the far corner where the musician coaxed melodies from the pipes—and where the High King now pins her to the ground in a pool of crimson blood, and… green.
A frantic rhythm beats in my chest at the sight of the green shawl on the musician’s lap. The High King roars, a stream of curses indecipherable beneath the woman’s cries. His chest heaves, and he rams the knife he was picking his nails with only moments ago into her neck.
Blood. So damn much of it, spurting from the musician’s neck. Crimson sticks to his bejeweled fingers, and the High King turns to face the crowd—his court—eyes roaming over the hundreds of bodies and nose twitching like… he’s deciding which of us is next.
My blood chills.
Talon stands frozen where they watched me dance with the prince. Their face is the color of the white roses ripped from the earth. As their brown eyes fly to mine, I think we share the same bloodcurdling thought—Are we next?
Prince Cashel’s hand lifts from my waist in a shudder of velvet and barely disguised disgust. His navy eyes sharpen to steel as they flash to his father and he cries, “Gardai!”
The rest of us are still.
Prince Cashel is the only one daring to move, the only one willing to risk what might happen next.
Not even the High Queen shifts from her throne—but her pale eyes narrow on her stepson in what can only be described as pure, unfiltered hatred.
A rush of black and crimson floods in from the gilded doors behind the thrones. Metal clangs in sheaths, boots pad on the marble floor. One unit, then two.
But they all stop in front of the High King, hands hesitating over their hilts.
Prince Cashel moves to stand between the two units of gardai, nodding down toward his father with a sharp jerk of his chin. I can see the way his navy eyes darken from this side of the dais, the stiff set of his jaw.
He’s not just the crown prince right now. He’s a future king—their future commander.
“Take him,” he orders in a voice as sharp as his sword.
The gardai still hesitate.
It’s only for a moment, but it’s long enough for a cold fear to seize me by the throat.
Prince Cashel’s jaw, his whole body, stiffens.
And when his right hand goes for the broadsword at his side, I can’t help noticing that’s his only visible weapon.
He wears no knives, no daggers, nothing else that could give him an edge in close combat.
Nothing to let him adapt, or fight dirty, if that’s what it takes to survive.
His fingers hover over the hilt, eyes locking on the gardai.
The High King snarls at his son, a vicious sound, and everything in me rebels.
This is wrong. Not just the blood and the butchery but the fact that it’s happening at all. That none of us—not even the High King—can get the help that might save us.
Could magic have healed whatever’s broken inside him, before he became… this?
He’s always been cruel, but he’s a monster now. A monster no one here—except, maybe, his own son—is willing to stop.
We could be mere months from famine, if this coming harvest fails—months from an attempted annexation. This is not a king who will lead us through a crisis.
He’s a tyrant.
And tyrants must be torn down.
The thought sends white-hot certainty coursing through my bones as the guard closest to Prince Cashel nods to the others. Her thick muscles tighten as she and two others reach for the High King in the pool of blood and hold his arms behind his back.
The High King doesn’t fight back. His heavy head drops, eyes fluttering closed, and he almost seems to relax into the iron grip of the gardai as they lead him out, leaving a trail of bloody footsteps in their wake.
A figure in a long crimson cloak follows them.
I don’t miss the way the High Queen watches it all.
Steel armors my pounding heart, certainty surging anew.
I can feel it in my very soul, stirring with fresh resolve.
Justice isn’t clean. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t kind. But that doesn’t make it any less necessary. This man will destroy our isle, and every last stubborn hope that lingers here, because he’s afraid of what we might be capable of with magic, if we ever had the chance.
That we might look to the Martyr and the mages—maybe even to ourselves—instead of him.
That if we aren’t desperate, he won’t be able to control us.
The High King has shown us for years who he is, even before the madness.
He can’t be redeemed.
If our isle is going to survive—if I want to even dream of bringing back the mages and the Martyr and magic to our people again—then the High King must die.
Eireann is worth saving.
We are worth saving. Bright hope flares in my chest, a swell pressing so hard against my ribs that I nearly brace for a crack. The feeling is so strange, so utterly foreign, that for a second, I can’t breathe past it.
If I can pull this off, I can prove to the Whisperers that I can be an asset for their fight. And if they see me as useful, maybe they’ll help me escape by the time this is all over. When I’ve done what they want me to do.
Breath floods into my lungs as the courtiers around me clink their glasses and sip their wine over low whispers, as if nothing happened. For them, the High King’s monstrous cruelty is easy to turn away from because it isn’t their blood spattering the marble tiles—yet.
All my life, I’ve done whatever it takes to survive.
This will be no different.
I will kill the High King.
And not just because I made a bargain with Wolf.
But because I want to.