Chapter Thirty-Four
THIRTY-FOUR
The castle halls are thronged with bodies as the three of us storm inside—the copper tang of blood is everywhere.
Cash pushes through the crowds of nobles. Some of them draw their weapons on one another, but enough turn them on the gardai that Talon snatches a sable cloak off a corpse and heaves it over their shoulders, pulling the hems close over their chest.
The blood-soaked gray conceals the crimson and black of their uniform, and the sword in their hand glints with a savage gleam in the torchlight.
Cash throws one arm out, holding me back as we round a blind corner. A noble with a slash across their stomach stumbles around it, clutching at his guts in his hands. Intestines spill out, tangling in the noble’s jeweled hands, but the gems and gold and silver do him no good now.
Without a word, Cash watches the man collapse, then steps over him.
“Fifth floor. Southwest corridor,” I pant.
He nods to the hall at our right. “This way.”
Talon never takes their eyes off the prince—the soon-to-be king.
Every one of the gardai we pass acknowledges Cash with a quick, firm nod. With him, no guard even tries to stop us.
The staircase he leads us to climbs up and up, and my legs burn.
Finally, we step out into a long hallway.
Massive blocks of black marble, inlaid with tiny flecks of glittering gems, line the walls.
Aquamarine, sapphire, something else? I can’t tell the difference.
They catch the torchlight glowing from sconces on the wall, flickering violently as the castle shakes beneath the shriek of caoranach blows and whatever the mages and Whisperers are doing outside.
At the end of the hall, a curving, dark wood door inlaid with golden spirals gleams.
One lone guard stands at the door. No king would be left alone with a single guard, not now. This can’t be right.
The guard startles, reaching for the short sword at her waist, when she sees us. “Your Highness?” Her brows knot as she looks from me to Talon and back to Cash.
“I’m here to see my father,” Cash says calmy. He looks the guard up and down, and frowns as if finding her wanting. “The mages are attacking. Or hadn’t you heard?”
“I heard, but I thought…” She swallows, looking between us. “Someone needed to protect the king.”
“He’s in good hands now, I assure you.” Cash reaches for the elaborate iron knob on the door, surrounded by golden filigree. “What the king needs now is to know his castle is secure. Go. Do your duty and defend us.” His cold glare narrows on her in challenge. “Or do you fear the beasts outside?”
Her glare flashes. “Not the ones outside, no.” The guard’s bright hair is pulled back in a tight bun, and when a lightning flash explodes past the window, I see it—the single twist of a tiny Cymrean braid woven through it.
“Cash,” I whisper, a tremor of dread twisting up my spine.
Talon steps closer to my side, but Cash… he takes a half step forward and arcs his sword up at the guard. Her own sword sweeps up to meet it in an ear-shattering clang.
“You dare to challenge me?” Cash’s voice is a deadly, vicious tone I’ve never heard from him before. His free arm slams into the guard’s ribs.
Steel flashes, quick and sharp—the hand wasn’t free at all but clutching a small blade.
She stumbles, a choking gasp sputtering from her lips.
The short sword falls from her hand, but Cash wrenches the narrow hilt he’s just slammed between her ribs up in a brutal twisting motion.
The guard’s eyes bulge, blood trickling finally out from her mouth.
Cash heaves a shoulder against his father’s gleaming door, and it cracks open.
“Get her inside,” he barks at Talon, and holds the door open long enough for us to slip in quickly after him.
The guard, now in Talon’s arms, chokes on thick streams of crimson, her fingers clawing uselessly on the hilt still buried in her side.
I peek through the doorway quickly and see that there’s not a spot of blood on the floor outside the door. No sign of what we’ve done. Yet.
When Cash slams the door shut, Talon dumps the guard on the floor, moving their own blade across her throat. She stops fighting then, the furious light in her eyes burned out.
Once we’re inside, every inch of my skin crawls. The room smells… wrong. Sour. Like soiled sheets and sweat and unwashed skin. The chamber is easily twice the size of Cash’s room, and there’s a table set up with vials and liquids and powders at the foot of the High King’s bed.
A faint ringing fills my ears. This is not what a king’s bed-chamber should be like. This is a smell of… I shudder.
Of death, and rotting things.
Cash walks up to the table and runs a hand along the delicate glass vials and bowls. One look is enough to chill my blood—I know the flecks of silverish shards from even a brief glance.
Cinnabar.
Nothing else causes the psychosis and paranoia that it can in the right dose. The trick is keeping it low enough not to kill your victim—but the High Queen is Cymrean.
They poison as easily as they breathe.
Keeva made a name for herself by being one of the few to stock that particular substance.
I slip one vial into my pocket, just in case I need proof later.
“Poison,” Cash realizes aloud, looking to the bed. His father lies there, licking his lips in sleep and wheezing like a wounded animal under a mountain of blankets. “I suspected, but there was no way to prove it. She just kept saying he was…” His jaw grits, venom bright in his cold eyes.
“Indisposed,” I say softly, thinking back to the High Queen’s words at the masked ball.
Darkness pulls down around Cash’s moonlit features. Whatever he plans to do with this proof now that he’s got it, I don’t intend to wait around here to find out.
I have to be quick—then I have to get out.
I step to the edge of the bed, to where the man who’s haunted my nightmares for as long as I can remember sleeps restlessly.
This is the man who tore my family apart, who was behind every single terrible thing that’s ever been done to us.
Old Ones, how is this what power looks like up close?
The High King’s skin is thin, almost like parchment worn at the edges.
Thick streaks of gray shoot through his hair and line the thick eyebrows over the two eyes clenched tightly shut against the terrors of his own mind.
He may be the High King.
He may be the one stealing magic from us, keeping this conspiracy of silence as the nobles continue to drain every last drop from the Seven Wells. And he may be the one who banished the Martyr and the mages, and who has made our isle so damn weak.
He is all of those things, but he’s still just a man—a man made of only flesh and bone and blood.
And he can die just as easily as the rest of us can.
The steel of Saraid’s narrow blade reflects the darkness. The High King shifts in his sleep. I draw in a deep breath and will my shaking hands to steady as I position the needle point of the blade just below his left nostril.
I’m not sure what I expected this moment to be like.
At first, when Wolf told me what he wanted me to do, I thought I’d feel guilt, somehow. That I’d have to wrestle with myself to do this.
There’s no whisper of guilt in my heart now.
This feels like justice.
And I feel like… a Whisperer.
I tilt the blade up into the dark crevice of the High King’s nose and risk one last glance back at Cash where he stands at the other side of his father’s bed.
If he’s going to go back on his word, if he’s going to betray me, this is his moment. Talon knows it too—their hand clenches on the hilt of their blade, eyes flickering between Cash and me.
But there’s no blue in Cash’s eyes now—only the cold, stark black of a bottomless, hungry sea, a well so deep there might be no end at all.
He nods.
I turn, draw in a breath, and steady my fingers around the hilt.
One thrust is all it takes—the blade slices cleanly right into the High King’s brain.
He jerks under my hands. The sound that slips from his lips is almost a sigh.
A single trickle of blood oozes out of his nose. I pull the blade back; it comes free easily, and there’s no cut or wound visible on his face.
He could’ve had a stroke in his sleep, for all anyone will be able to tell.
I glance to Talon, now standing guard beside the door. Hovering next to the dead body of the guard as if they expect her to surge back to life, or for someone to come storming in. Talon tilts their head toward Cash, one hand tightening on their sword.
My heart drums, and I look for his sapphire eyes. But Cash is as silent and as still as stone, staring at the corpse that was his father seconds ago.
“Cash?” Old Ones, my heart is racing.
We have to get out of here.
He rips his eyes away from the body.
“I’m fine.” Cash makes a strangled sort of noise in the back of his throat and rubs a hand over his face. “This is what had to happen.”
It is. I know it is, in my bones.
“We have to move.” Talon glances down to the dead guard. “Before the gardai realize she’s not outside anymore.”
“You go,” Cash says. “If they come back and find you here, you’re dead.” His eyes sweep over me, lingering. “I can’t save you if I haven’t taken the crown yet. So I need to…” A glimmer sparks in his eyes, cold and bright. “I need to go do that.”
Cash is going to be king.
And with the caoranachs soaring over the city, everyone will soon learn the truth.
That there’s still magic left in the Seven Wells.
That there’s still hope for all of us.
Something dangerously close to—is it longing?—flickers across Cash’s midnight gaze as he looks at me.
I shiver at the brush of his eyes along my skin.
“Go,” he urges softly. “I can’t afford to wait to make my claim.
As long as the gardai think my father still lives, they’ll keep fighting you.
I can make them stop.” Cash picks up a vial of silver flecks, the cinnabar, and turns it over between his fingers.
“If anyone suspects me of…” Cash’s eyes dart to his father’s corpse.
“At least now I have proof of what she was doing to him. And if this goes badly… I know the tunnels almost as well as Kav—”
Talon hisses.
Cash swallows, eyes narrowing on them. “As Wolf does.”
There’s wariness in Talon’s brown eyes. They reach for my arm, and Cash pushes us toward the door. “I can hide the guard’s body under the bed for now. But I can’t seal the room off until I have the crown, so go!”
We step over the body of the slain guard, the door creaking faintly as Talon pulls it open. The last thing I see before we slip through is Cash, slipping the onyx and ruby ring of state from his father’s thumb and sliding it onto his own.
We run—fly—through the halls.
A numb weight settles into my bones, fighting to slow me down. Even if it’s just the nerve pain in my hands, or the burn of muscles from climbing down the turret, I should feel something—shouldn’t I? Every step we take past the carnage feels like cutting into frozen flesh.
Somewhere near the bottom of a staircase, everything blurs.
The crowds are dense with the clang of weapons and the cries of battle in the halls when I hurtle into a soft mass of purple velvet and sandy-blond hair.
The breath slams out of me, every thought fleeing my mind.
“Aoife?”
She stumbles back, eyes flying wide. There’s no crimson across her faded cloak, but the gray hue to her cheeks is pure blood shock—it’s the same haunted, distant stare she wore as we walked back from the Black Quay after Eavan’s execution.
In the days since, with me in my room avoiding attacks from the noble daughters and Wolf’s request for me not to go searching for the High King’s room, I haven’t seen her.
She’s kept the curtains of her room drawn tight.
“Aoife?” I ask again, reaching out a hand for her.
She flinches at my touch, but I let my hand linger just at the hem of her faded cloak.
I’ve seen enough carnage in the streets of Quayside to understand how one trigger can bring a flood of other memories crashing over you at once.
If I don’t help her now, she’ll get herself killed.
“You’re covered in blood,” she says, and there’s something off about her tone.
“Just mine,” I lie. It comes out as easy as breathing. “From the Test of Strength. Weren’t you watching?”
“I couldn’t…” Aoife’s words die, her eyes flickering over me, before dropping down to my neck. I reach a hand up—the triple knot charm hangs outside my tunic, but I tuck it back underneath and look back at her. “I couldn’t watch anyone else die.”
“Maeve.” Talon’s voice drops in warning.
Old Ones, I’ve caused so much bloodshed. So much death.
Maybe I can prevent just one.
I don’t need to trust Aoife to recognize she’s a big part of how I’ve managed to survive here. I don’t need to trust her to not want her to die alone in the bloody filth of these halls.
“Listen to me.” I lock my eyes on hers. “Go back to your room.” For the first time I think that’s fear slivering through the haze of her stare. “Don’t come out. Not until this is all over.”
There’s a flicker of lucidity in her gaze.
We hear a crash and there’s a blast of… are those green flames erupting against the wall in the distance? No, there’s no way. Just a trick of the light.
But in the bright flash… fuck. Aoife’s eyes look exactly the same shade of blue as Cash’s.
The breath slams out of me.
Aoife told me herself she’s Cash’s second cousin. And in the baths, when she told me about the uprising five years ago, she had hinted…
House Doran was the noble family behind the uprising. They were… Wiped out. Another family was disinherited but allowed to prove their loyalty.
Aoife is Cash’s second cousin on his father’s side.
She told me that, back in the garden between our rooms weeks ago.
Surely, only a serious crime would make her ineligible to compete in the Assay—like a family history of treason.
And as a traitor, she would be an easy target for the High Queen to blame for what I just did if Cash fails to claim the crown.
Guilt twists my stomach at the thought of her suffering more because of me.
“Cash will do it, right?” I turn to Talon. “He’ll take the crown before she does?”
Their brown eyes become a glower in a second, jerking to Aoife.
Her blue eyes darken on mine, clear and shrewd.
I bring my hand to hers, squeezing softly. “Go hide,” I whisper. “Keep yourself safe.”
Aoife’s gaze hardens. “I will,” she murmurs.
I grab Talon’s arm and run.