Chapter 14
Magdala awoke to find the prince’s bed empty, the blankets rumpled. Pale, pink sunlight fell upon a heap of books on the floor, next to a burned-out candle. Asherton hadn’t slept well, apparently.
Anton snarled at Magdala from the nightstand. He’d grown overnight and was the size of a housecat now, his teeth like ivory nails. The teapot lay beneath him in shards; his roots curled around the side table, leaving long scratches in the paint.
Swearing, Magdala scrambled out of bed and tripped over the pile of books.
“Curse you, you messy little … agh …” She stripped off her sleeping clothes and scrambled into her tight black trousers and a black shirt.
If Zephyr caught her asleep while Asherton roamed the island alone, he would be furious, and Magdala admitted to herself that the immortal frightened her.
She didn’t want to be the victim of another of his withering scowls.
The door creaked on its hinges as Magdala eased it open and peered out. The corridor was dark, not a mouse stirring, so she padded through the quiet house to the kitchen.
She found her boots by the open door, a chicken roosting atop them.
“SHOO!” Magdala cried, waving it away. It clucked indignantly and flapped its wings, then strutted into the pantry.
“Noooo,” Magdala groaned. Her instinct to get the hen out of the house overcame her duty to Asherton, and she chased after it. Squawking, it clattered into a corner, where she managed to scoop it into her arms.
As she tossed the chicken outside, she glimpsed Asherton striding toward the greenhouse. Magdala jogged after him. She suspected that, however long she worked for the prince, she was going to spend most of her time running.
“Your Highness! Wait!” she called.
Asherton didn’t slow or even acknowledge Magdala’s existence. She noticed that he was barefoot again, his shirt untucked and unbuttoned.
“You are a monster,” Magdala panted. “Expecting a woman to sprint across the yard after you when she hasn’t even drunk her camfe yet. Slow down!”
With a persecuted sigh, Asherton stopped and looked over his shoulder at her.
He started, raking his eyes over her disheveled clothes and rumpled curls.
His expression shifted, but Magdala couldn’t parse it.
If she didn’t know better, she would have said he liked what he saw, but she knew better.
Self-conscious, Magdala smoothed her hand over her hair, only for it to bounce back as disordered as before.
“Don’t judge me,” Magdala said crossly. “You aren’t even wearing shoes. I’ve only been awake five minutes because you snuck out while I was sleeping, which you know you’re not supposed to do.”
Asherton let out a cold laugh. “Despite what Zephyr might think, I am a grown man, and I’m going to be a king in four weeks. I don’t have to listen to you.”
Magdala moved closer to him, so she was looking up into his face. “If you don’t listen to me, I will quit. And if I quit, my replacement will put a knife right here …” She stabbed her finger into his chest. “…the first day he arrives.”
“I think I might prefer that to these games.”
“What games?” Magdala smiled.
Asherton let out a long breath, turned, and strode away, faster this time. He didn’t slow until he reached a towering hedge maze behind the greenhouse.
Magdala remembered the maze from her childhood, but it had been only hip-high then. Now, it grew taller than her head, thick and untrimmed, the pathways narrow and irregular.
“You shouldn’t be out this early,” Asherton said as he wandered down the path. “Algie is still about.”
Magdala pushed a springy branch aside. “Who is Algie?”
“The ghost, if you will.” So there was a ghost at Elegy after all. Magdala wished her father was here to see her vindicated. “He’s a nix,” Asherton added.
Magdala had read about nixes and nixies before—vicious aquatic faeries that dragged swimmers under water and drowned them. Elegy Island seemed a logical place for one, though her father had never mentioned it. She shuddered. “What are you doing out here, then?”
“I’m collecting eggs for our breakfast. The chickens like to roost in the hedgemaze, and I spent half the night dreaming of bloody jackets and battlefields and needed to clear my head.”
“I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight.”
He spun on her suddenly, and she stumbled back a step, startled. “Do you think I am stupid, Miss Devney?” he asked.
Magdala blinked rapidly. The air had grown thin around them. “Yes,” she whispered.
A smile flashed across Asherton’s face, and he closed the space between them, his head tilted to the side, like she was a scientific puzzle. He was so close, his loose shirt brushed her chest.
“Do you want to know what else I think about you?” Magdala asked.
“Everything,” he replied. A tremble ran through him. Was he trying to seduce her? The thought both inflamed and revolted her. To want this man would be the ultimate betrayal, the farthest fall. She moved her hand to her knife, and his smile flickered but didn’t fade.
“I think you’re a slovenly, indolent princeling living in a house that doesn’t belong to you, raised by a man who isn’t your father, and set to inherit a throne that is not your birthright,” she said.
Asherton raised his eyebrows. “Right on all counts.”
“Now back away.” She shoved him. Inhaling sharply, he looked down at his body like he expected to find a knife in his stomach. With a jolt, Magdala recognized his game.
“Are you … are you goading me?” she cried. “Are you trying to make me put my knife to your throat again?”
Asherton dusted his shirt sleeves, assiduously avoiding her eyes. “That would be insane.”
“And you’re the picture of sense.”
Asherton cut a quick glance at her, then spun on his heel and waded deeper into the maze.
“You flatter yourself,” Magdala said to his back.
“My only reason for being here is so I can rise in my career as bodyguard to the king. That is how careers work, you know. For those of us who do actually work. We start at the bottom and move upward, and the higher we rise, the more money we make. You’ve heard about money, I assume?
Those lovely shiny coins that make the jingly sound when you shake them? ”
Asherton let a branch spring back and slap her in the face. “You’re not amusing, Miss Devney.”
“I am amusing.” She smirked. “But you have a bad sense of humor. I don’t find you interesting,” It was a lie, but she executed it with skill. “And I don’t care what happens to you as long as I get paid.”
“I don’t believe that. You have this …” Stopping, he turned and considered her, his eyes sharp and skeptical.
“... this heat under your dutiful facade. I don’t think there’s a single mercenary nerve in your body.
You value loyalty, Devney, but you want something else.
Something that the royal guard can’t give you. ”
Magdala wanted to bite back with a witty riposte, but before she could reply, he cut to the right, veering down an overgrown path. Magdala regretted her moment of weakness the night before and wished she’d given him the amenite when she had the chance.
Asherton turned, walking backward. With every step, Magdala expected him to trip and fall, but he kept his feet. His mood was manic, but his eyes were sad. He had the strange energy of a man about to throw himself off a bridge.
“What do you do for fun?” he asked abruptly.
Hunt, dance, sing, run barefoot over the fells chasing a kestrel, wade naked in the loch, daring the dragons in the black water to snatch me up.
“Nothing,” Magdala said. “I work.”
“But when you’re not working?”
“I’m always working.”
“I like to grow mushrooms, propagate frogs, and I have a waterlily garden coming along nicely.”
Magdala’s frown deepened. “What do you do in winter?”
“I read scientific books on growing mushrooms, propagating frogs, and planting waterlily gardens. And sometimes I indulge in a novel.”
Magdala adored novels. Her father, Julian, the other guards—they all mocked her for reading them, so she hid them under her mattress. Maybe at Elegy, she could read a good romance, undisturbed. “And when you are king?”
“I’ll never be king,” he said with a ringing laugh that sent a chill down her spine. “Haven’t you heard? I’m cursed. I’ll die young.”
“You don’t believe in the curse.”
“Neither did my brother.” A twig snapped, and she turned toward it, but it was only a rabbit moving in the hedge. “Curse that jacket,” he said, walking faster. “Curse the war, curse Marwenna and her cruelty and Madelaine and her cowardice.”
His shifting moods left Magdala reeling. He was sunshine one moment, storms the next. It was dizzying.
“My brother was five years my elder,” Asherton went on.
It came out in a rush, like a confession.
“When he was in trouble a few years ago, he stayed with me here for a summer. We made plans—plans to rule the kingdom together someday. To end the dragon trade and the wars, and he would be my royal dragon master and I would be king, but now…” His voice trailed off.
“And he was ill back then, so I should have known it would end in tragedy.”
Magdala’s heart squeezed. This task had seemed so easy when Huxley presented it to her.
Asherton was one of a cloud of faceless royals, too insipid and immoral to love anyone but themselves.
She wondered what she would tell Huxley if Asherton was right, and she wasn’t mercenary enough to do this after all.
She forced herself to think of her father.
Of his big shoulders filling that tiny cottage.
She forced herself to remember the way the muscles in his arms had atrophied when they ate nothing but turnips and potatoes for a month and a half because they could not afford meat.
She recalled Julian’s staring eyes in the moonlight.
Asherton had killed him. Driven a knife into his chest.
Everyone is sad when their brother dies, even murderers.
Lost in her own thoughts, Magdala didn’t notice when the prince disappeared down a new pathway. When she looked up, Asherton had vanished.
“Your Highness,” she called, alarmed.
“Keep up, Mags!” His voice carried through the thick hedge. She rushed toward it, but the passage dead-ended.
“I need to stay with you!”
“Then catch up!”
With a growl of frustration, Magdala took her knife and cut at the shrubbery.
“None of that, Mags,” Asherton sang. “These are ancient hedges. I’ll stand right here and wait for you. Go to your right, then your left, then left again, and you’ll reach me.”
Throwing up her hands in frustration, Magdala followed his directions, but reached another dead end.
“You Highness!” she bellowed. “You’re not here!”
“Oh, sorry, two rights then a left,” Asherton called. “I’m terrible with directions. Double back and try again.”
Clenching her fists, Magdala retraced her steps and tried again, but before she turned the first corner, a set of boots crunched on the gravel.
“Your Highness?” she called. The boots fell silent. She peered through the branches and made out a blue eye gazing back at her.
Magdala’s heart leaped into her throat and she jumped, her back scratching on the shrubs. No one on the island had blue eyes, so either it was a ghost … or an assassin.
The boots crunched away, toward the place where she’d last heard the prince.
Magdala paused, her heart in her throat. She should call out to him, warn him. She should tear through the hedge and chase the assassin down. But her feet remained rooted to the ground.
Or she could tell everyone how the prince, stubborn and wild in his habits, had wandered away into the maze.
She had done her best, but the assassin was too quick for her.
She’d inflict a few mild cuts and bruises on her arms and face, so she could pretend she put up a fight.
No amenite and no confessions necessary.
It made sense to leave the assassin alone and let the prince fend for himself.
Maybe it was because she believed the Only watched her from above, frowning at her heartlessness.
Maybe it was because she wanted to look at herself in the mirror.
And maybe it was curiosity—Asherton was himself a labyrinth unsolved, but she hardly recognized her own voice when she screamed, “YOUR HIGHNESS, LOOK OUT!” Ignoring Asherton’s warning not to cut the shrubs, Magdala tore through the hedge, her hair and clothes scraping.
Scratched and bleeding, she broke through to the path and ran after the crunch of retreating boots on gravel.
She skidded around the bend. She’d reached the center of the maze. A marble statue of a faerie woman with a melancholy face frowned down at her, its eyes glowing faintly. Asherton stood beside it, his back to her.
“Your Highness!” she cried. She expected him to turn with a knife in his chest, or his throat slashed. But he was unharmed.
He fixed his eyes on her knife and lifted his hands. “Now? Before breakfast?”
Bewildered, Magdala scanned the surroundings. “There was someone in the bushes. A pair of boots and …”
“I’m sure there was,” he said sarcastically. “If you’re going to do it, just do it. This is as good a place as any.”
Magdala caught a flash of movement in the corner of her eye. A tiny green snake slithered over the gravel, its body as thin as her pinky finger. It coiled inches from Asherton’s bare foot, its tongue testing the air.