Chapter 4
Kaed
a beast unleashed, unchained, uncaged,
still shackled in denial.
This room is too small for my frame. It wasn’t built for someone like me.
Yet today the air feels less suffocating.
For the first time in months, my thoughts march in order.
I am unfamiliar with failure. It has rotted my discipline and dulled the sharpness I was shaped for.
But this morning, there is a change in the current.
Something I cannot touch or see. Hope. A strange word.
It sits uneasily on the tongue of a soldier, as foreign as peace or forgiveness. Yet I taste it all the same.
Rolling my shoulders, I condition myself to ignore the knots in my arms and legs.
My body aches from head to toe after training, and now, I replay the same thoughts in my mind.
I need to work backwards from the wound.
For two hundred and forty-six days, I have retraced the palace corridors.
The turns of my lieutenants, the timings of my commanders, even the routes the Volker guard in the city.
How did I miss it? How did they get past me?
Now I know for sure that rebels have infiltrated the palace under my watch.
Plotted under my nose. Tricked me with their misdirection.
My heart is full of venom. I now know that I must be careful with whom I trust in the palace, and if the King still trusts me after all this time.
My strength. My instinct. After eight months of failure?
It’ll be a miracle. Not that I believe in them anymore, miracles died when she did.
Some time ago, I debated whether I would attend fruitless meetings again, let them say what they want about me; it is no business of mine.
I serve only my King. I walk the length of the narrow room, head high, hands clasped behind my back.
My eyes pass over my maps, seeking the line they must have taken, the crack in the plan I have overlooked.
I will find it. I can only assume there are entrances and exits I am unaware of.
Though I don’t see how that is possible, I’ve spent my entire life at the palace, scaled it from spire to dungeon.
When Nyk and I were boys, we tested its bones with childish pranks.
Learning holes and hollows the King himself overlooked.
I know it well. My home. I halt in front of the map of the barracks, leaning in close, urging it to whisper its secrets to me.
They think solitude frays a soul, and that it may.
But I will never forget who I am and what I was shaped for.
Captain of the King’s Volker. A title earned in blood and demanded by The Creed.
Footsteps echo. I freeze. Praying to nothing and no one that my muttering went unheard. The door groans.
“Captain,”
I tilt my head, catching him in my peripheral. Theron and his keen, blue eyes dart around the room.
“I’m sorry to interrupt whatever it is you are doing, but we must go.
” The smile leaks from his words. I didn’t welcome his appointment, but he gets the job done, and he is a good fighter, so I kept my mouth shut despite the struggle to do so.
But now, he shows his colours. Worming into councils, using any opportunity to undermine me, no doubt making sure his voice is the loudest in the room.
But I didn’t claw my way up the ranks by giving a damn, so he can shove his ambition up his narrow ass.
“I met with the King today. Do you want to know what he said about you?”
I exhale, bleeding tension from my muscles. We both know I could snap his measly neck with one hand, chainmail or no. Instead, I remain composed. Discipline is the greater weapon. Perhaps my refusal to play his games will drive him from the room so I can begin again. There it is once more. Hope.
“No. I do not.”
“You should’ve been there when I gave him your updates. Nothing, of course.”
“I have no interest in your commentary.” Heat pricks my bones.
“You bore me.” My scowl turns into a dangerous smile, baring my elongated canines.
A small courtesy to remind him who and what I am.
And that nothing, and no one, can take it from me.
It seems he has forgotten in these months the face I have worn for the last two hundred years.
He takes a small step back and his throat bobs, before he studies me with the caution I deserve. “Captain, we are waiting.”