“I’ll call my guards,” the king blubbered. “They won’t let you hurt me.”
“Your guards?” Toris scoffed. “You pay them a few measly coppers and throw them a few scraps and think you can call them yours? If it weren’t for my plentiful gold, they’d have long defected and you’d have had none. They are mine, and they have been for a very long time. They obey you only because I ordered them to. No one is here to help you, Domhnall. And quite frankly, you’ve worn on my patience long enough.”
Domhnall tried to escape, but despite his size advantage, his fear made him clumsy. Toris had him quickly cornered. “Nihil nunc salvet te,” he said as he drew his knife—?Dedrick’s luneocite knife—?and deftly sliced Domhnall’s fleshy neck from one ear to the other. Then he shoved Domhnall over the edge of the wall and the king fell down, down, down through the mist, trailing blood, until he landed, splayed flat, against the water. It held him there on the surface, his eyes empty and staring, as the blood poured out around him in thin tendrils that grew and grew, lashing out across the water, turning it a milky, jewel-toned red, visible even in the dark.
With a cry, I tore my hands from Domhnall’s grasp and ran to the beachside edge. The inky, midnight-blue fjord was gone. Instead, scarlet waves were lapping the rocky shore.
The first seal of King’s Gate was broken. The king was dead, and where once was water, there was now only blood.
Part Three
The Wall
and
the Tower
31
The tree I used to first communicate with Conrad was now little more than a mess of naked, thorny branches; it was still dark, so the black ribbon from my dress parcel hardly stood out against the dreary grays of the garden’s squalid remains. I cast a sideways prayer to the Empyrea that my brother would see it anyway.
When I first heard the rustle nearby, I whirled around, expecting to find Aren. But it wasn’t the Harbinger. It was Lisette.
“I thought it was you,” she said. She was holding a pair of lace gloves in her hands, wringing them nervously.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to leave Conrad alone. Stop taunting him. Scaring him with your messages. He is a little boy, Aurelia. Just a little boy who doesn’t deserve to be dragged into your conspiracies, your treachery—?”
“My treachery?”
“I
know you killed Kellan,” she said, eyes shining. “I know everything. And it won’t be long, mark my words, before you pay for what you’ve done. Father says we’re very close to uncovering the entire thing and then this nightmare can finally be over.”
She was scared; I could see that. She was scared of me, and she had come here to confront me because . . . she was trying to protect my brother.
“You have no idea,” I muttered. “All this time . . . and you have no idea.”
“No idea about what?”
“What has really been happening here. I didn’t kill Kellan. He was my truest friend.” I didn’t dare give voice to the idea that he might still be alive; I’d been keeping that possibility safely tucked away in my mind. “Your father threatened that if I didn’t give him the invitations to cross the wall, he’d kill him. I did what he asked,” I said through my teeth, “and he killed him anyway.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“You and that Achlevan, Simon Silvis . . . you’re in this together. You’re trying to sabotage Achleva and Renalt. Your own mother—?”
“Is being held hostage by the Tribunal under your father’s direction!” Toris must have met Dedrick Corvalis through trade at the de Lena ports, just as Simon had been investigating. Toris recruited Dedrick, and then King Domhnall, into his plans. But even as the how was becoming clearer, the why was still a mystery. “All of this, every last detail, has been orchestrated by him, not me. Did you know, in the forest, he tried to kill me, too?”
“No. No. My father is a righteous man. None of this makes any sense—?”
I grabbed her by her shoulders and looked directly into her pretty face. “We were friends once, you and I. You could have sent me to the gallows years ago, but you didn’t. I think you knew, deep down inside, that I didn’t deserve it. That I’m a good person, despite being born with magic in my veins.”
She opened her mouth and then closed it again. I’d struck a nerve. “Think, Lisette. Think. If our friendship meant anything to you when we were little, I beg of you to listen to me now. Has there been nothing that your father has done over the last months . . . years! . . . that has given you pause? That has made you stop and question yourself, even just for a moment?” I let her go. “There has been, hasn’t there?”
“No,” she said quickly. “It’s just me. I have a very active imagination, and Father says—?”