Gleam (The Plated Prisoner 3)

I back up, keeping to the shadowed corner of the mezzanine.

Armed with their various cups, Midas announces, “Raise your glasses!” From up here, I can see everyone lift their arms up, drinks held aloft. “We toast tonight to the unity of our kingdoms!” he calls out with a proud smile. “To Orea!”

“To Orea!” everyone else chants on cue, and then glasses are lifted to lips and wine gulped back before cheers and applause roam through the room.

If it weren’t for the fact that my attention has stayed locked on Slade the whole time, I might have missed what happens next. Because of my homed gaze, I see the way Slade’s brow furrows right before he turns his head to look at Prince Niven. I follow his gaze, frown gathering between my own brows before I really even register that something is wrong.

One moment, everyone is drinking and cheering, but then, the goblet slips from Niven’s hand and crashes to the ground.

The people nearest him startle, but it becomes apparent very quickly that there’s more wrong than just a dropped cup.

Prince Niven locks his hands around his throat, eyes gone wide in fear, just as someone in the crowd screams.

The prince stumbles, and purple-cloaked Ranhold guards come rushing forward. With pure pa

nic, his fingers claw down his neck—a neck that’s now lined with black veins spreading up toward his cheeks.

“Oh no...” My whisper is swallowed up by the eruption of shouts from below, as dark froth starts to bubble out from the young prince’s lips.

“Poison! The prince has been poisoned!” someone screeches.

I watch in horror as the prince falls to his knees too quick for the guards to catch him.

“Mender! Where’s the royal mender?” Midas booms out.

A gray-haired man in purple robes surges forward and falls to his knees in front of the prince, a red band tied around his arm. From up here, I have the perfect vantage point to see the mender’s hands skate shakily over Niven’s chest, head tilted against his mouth.

Midas pushes past his own guards to kneel beside the mender too. Queen Kaila hangs back, her brother standing in front of her like a shield, while more men stand behind her.

A frenzy of quieted confusion vibrates in the room, the crowd on edge between wanting to back away and wanting to get a closer look. But I see it the moment that Prince Niven’s body goes unnaturally still.

Dismay knots in my shoulders and twists in my gut as the mender’s face goes grim, his head shaking up at Midas from behind the wall of Ranhold guards.

When Midas stands up again, making the huddling guards part, the crowd gasps at the sight of Niven where he lays, and I don’t blame them. There’s gray skin now where the youth of vibrancy just was, his chest puffed up and unmoving, a foamed mouth like whipped mud. But worst of all are the veins, black as night, bleeding up from the skin of his neck.

My hands shake where they grip the railing, dread filling the air like thick fog, and I know what the mender is going to say before he even gets to his feet.

“The prince is dead!”

Chapter 47

AUREN

The mender’s announcement makes the entire crowd gasp at the same moment. Ranhold guards hurry to pick up their prince carefully, his prone body gone stiff, his color unnatural, pain still laced through his unblinking eyes.

My stomach heaves, bile rising in my throat.

“Poison!” another person shouts as Niven’s body is carried away.

“No, look at him!” a man in a bright purple dress suit calls out, shaky finger pointing. “Look at his veins! This is the work of King Rot!”

Everyone seems to jerk their gazes toward his dark countenance at the same time. Eyes bouncing from the lines on Niven’s neck to the lines that always reside on Slade’s.

My chest goes tight, breath stolen between the uproar that punches out through the people as their shock quickly turns to blame.

I’m not sure when his Wrath arrived, but aside from an absent Fake Rip, they’re all circling Slade, their formation tightening around him. Slade’s face is grim, hands hanging down at his sides, the mood in the room gone from celebratory to accusatory in the blink of an eye.

“People, people!” Midas calls out, palms held up to gesture that they listen. “That is a very serious allegation!”