“No!” shouted Lord Orfion, as Isyllt and Phaedra faced each other across the room. Isyllt’s diamond
crackled with witchlight and Phaedra’s rubies glowed sullen scarlet. They ignored him, rings flaring bright and brighter still. Neither woman moved, but Isyllt hissed in pain and Phaedra gasped. Then a wall of white light blazed between them and both stumbled back.
“I said no,” Kiril said, deathly calm.
“You won’t stop me again,” Phaedra said. A shadow that smelled of rust and cinnamon filled the room; Nikos cursed and Ashlin’s hand tightened on Savedra’s arm like a vise.
Heartbeats later the shadow passed, revealing the garden door open to the night, and Phaedra vanished.
“Father!” Nikos knelt beside Mathiros. The king was grey and trembling, his coat unbuttoned. “Are you all right?”
“I—She was—” Mathiros scrubbed a hand over his face.
Kurgoth moaned and stirred, and Ashlin turned to help him. Blood streaked his face, but he seemed to have stopped coughing it up. Isyllt’s nose was bleeding as well; she wiped at it absently and scowled. The look she shot Kiril was cold and harsh.
“Father,” Nikos said, helping Mathiros to his feet, “I saw her. It was—”
“You saw nothing!” Mathiros snarled, jerking away. “An assassin. A demon.” His eyes narrowed, training on Ashlin and her bleeding arm “What’s happened?”
She flexed her shoulder absently and winced. “An assassin in the ballroom. Not a demon, though—he died easily enough.”
He nodded. “Mikhael, are you hurt?”
The captain spat blood on the expensive carpet. “I’m standing.”
“Good enough. Find me Adrastos. I want the palace sealed and searched immediately. Kiril—” He had the grace to look abashed, at least.
Kiril tugged his mask off. “I am at your disposal, Majesty.”
“Help Adrastos, then. I want to know where these bastards came from.”
“Of course.” His eyes sagged shut as he turned away, and Savedra fought to keep the naked sympathy from her face.
And with that Mathiros, Kurgoth, and Kiril all left the room, leaving the others standing in the draft. Ashlin, ever practical, closed and latched the garden door.
Nikos sat down hard on the chair his father had vacated. He was the one trembling now, his face ashen. Savedra abandoned propriety and went to him, clasping his shaking hand between hers.
“What is it?”
“I saw her,” he whispered, his voice scraped dry and hoarse. “I saw her face. It was my mother.”
T
he Solstice ball was meant to last throughout the longest night. But while none of the guests had expected to see their beds before dawn, this wasn’t how they’d imagined the party would end.
Savedra helped calm the guests now sequestered in the ballroom while Isyllt and the palace mages questioned them: Had anyone spoken to the assassin, or the woman in white? Had anyone seen them arrive? No one had, of course, though several courtiers began to second-guess themselves and others developed acute cases of hindsight.
“I knew something was wrong with her from the moment I saw her,” said an Aravind matron, fanning herself excessively. “My aunt is a mage, you know, and I have a bit of a shiver myself. But no one else paid her any mind….”
Nikos handled the whole thing gracefully, sending for more refreshments, issuing polite orders and reassurances,
and never letting Ashlin out of arm’s reach. The princess clearly wanted to snap at him, but the courtiers were already responding to his concern. If she’d known the good a public assassination attempt would do, Savedra thought wryly, she could have saved herself long hours skulking in gardens.
Mathiros led the search patrol himself, despite arguments from Nikos, Kurgoth, and Adrastos. It looked very brave, of course, but Savedra could feel the court clinging tighter to Nikos in the absence of his father.
Good
, she thought, and resisted the urge to smirk at Thea Jsutien.
Tempers and nerves began to fray when a young dandy from House Hadrian stopped complaining about his headache and began to shake and cough instead. Within the hour he was limp and feverish, propped in a corner while his erstwhile bosom companions edged away and breathed through handkerchiefs. Soon half the hall was arguing for fresh air, or braziers for warmth, or incense to keep the illness at bay—the other half demanded to leave, or to call their personal physicians. No one wanted to say
influenza
, which was an illness for the poor or unlucky, but everyone knew the signs.
During an especially loud argument over the virtues of incense versus fresh-sliced onions to ward off the ill vapors, Isyllt appeared at Savedra’s side.
“We won’t get anything useful from them now,” she muttered, “not even silence. I need your help.”
Savedra followed her down the side hall, and eventually onto a porch leading into the gardens. “Where are we going?” she asked. “And can I fetch a cloak first?”
“To the temple, and no. We need to be there and out
again before we’re noticed.” By lantern-light Isyllt’s face was grim and pale. “I kept your secrets—now I need you to keep one for me.”
Savedra nodded and followed Isyllt across the lawn, tucking her hands beneath her folded arms.
Isyllt held onto her as they entered the temple; the sleepy acolyte didn’t look up as they started down the black mouth of the stairs. Savedra wanted to question, to protest, but wasn’t sure how far a whisper would carry—the slither of their skirts over timeworn stone was unnerving enough. She tested each step carefully and tried not to imagine all the things that might be waiting for them at the bottom.
At the foot of the steps Isyllt conjured a light, which Savedra took as a sign that they were safe to speak.
“Where are we going?” she asked, and winced at the broken weight of silence.
“The Alexios crypt.” A muscle worked in Isyllt’s square jaw. The light turned her eyes into cold mirrors. Savedra withheld the rest of her questions, at least until they reached the door.
“Do you have a key?” she ventured then.
“Always.” She laid a hand on the lock plate, and Savedra’s nape prickled with the same sensation she’d felt earlier.
“What is that?”
“Entropomancy. The essence of death and decay.” Isyllt’s voice cracked. “I don’t like to use it. It hurts.”
It also worked. She set her shoulder against the door and pushed, and it scraped inward. Savedra touched the ruin of the lock and her fingers came away red with rust.
Isyllt turned her attention to the queen’s coffin and
Savedra’s stomach twisted. “I thought Nikos said the seal on the sarcophagus was intact.” Her skin crawled, ears straining for the sound of footsteps. Mathiros would send them to the headsman for this.
“It is.” Isyllt’s eyes met hers across the carven lid, cold and pale as the marble. “Whatever we find here, swear to me you won’t speak of it until I do.”
“All right. I swear.”
Isyllt laid her hands on the queen’s stone breast and frowned. She stood like that for long moments. Finally blue sparks crackled from her fingers and she straightened. “Help me move the lid.”
Savedra thought she would be sick. She fought it down, forcing herself to take the last steps across the room and set her hands on the coffin.
On the count of three she and Isyllt pushed. Muscles corded and her still-healing arm burned fiercely from the effort. Stone gave way with a terrible scrape, inch by inch until the head of the sarcophagus was open. Wan and sweating, Isyllt summoned the light closer, filling the interior with its opalescent glow.
Empty.
False dawn lit the sky when Isyllt finally left the palace, chasing the Hounds into the west; the Dragon’s breath did nothing against the cold. The palace guards had found nothing, and had finally released the guests. Dancing away the longest night was one thing, but no one wanted to face the dawn of the demon days.
Isyllt imagined she would be seeing all too much of the demons this year.
Kiril joined her in front of the palace gates as she
waited through the line of angry and frightened courtiers. More of them had already begun to cough and sniffle, which might merely be chill and fatigue, or the influenza’s touch.
She didn’t look at him for several moments, though she didn’t pull away from the line of warmth he offered, either. A scream coiled in her throat and she feared to let it loose.
“Let me see you home,” he said.
“Afraid your blood witch will come for me?”
“Yes.”
The honesty of it knocked the acerbity out of her. She let him help her into a carriage, and didn’t speak again. The things she had to say couldn’t be spoken in the open. She wasn’t sure she could speak them at all.
When they stepped onto the frost-rimed stones of Calderon Court, she knew she had to try. “Come inside.”
She didn’t take his cloak when she shot the bolt behind them, or offer tea. Familiar ritual was no comfort now, and he knew where she kept the cups. She went straight to that cupboard and poured herself a shot of ouzo. Its anise-and-coriander fire numbed her throat enough to let the words free.
“I checked the wards on the queen’s coffin, when first we investigated the stolen jewels. They were intact, as strong as if they’d just been cast. Too strong, though of course I never thought of it. You opened the coffin, stole her body for a demon, and sealed it again.”
“You see why I didn’t want you investigating this.” His humor was fleeting. “Yes. That was the act that broke my oath, and my power. Listening to conspirators is one thing—that was more than Mathiros would ever forgive.”
She poured herself another shot and downed it. “Why? What possibly justifies such a violation?”
Kiril sighed, and moved past her to pour himself a drink. Cradling it, he sank into a chair. “Had you ever heard of Phaedra Severos, before you found that girl’s body?”
She shook her head, sitting opposite him.
“You should have. You would have, if not for Mathiros and me. She was a powerful mage and a brilliant scholar. The things she could do with haematurgy were a marvel.” He sipped his drink, grimacing as he always did at the taste. “She was also mad. Not like she is now, but bad enough—she spent days in frenzies of research, creating wondrous things, only to burn her notes in black despair because nothing she wrought was as flawless as it should be. She went from mania to despair without warning. And more rarely and worse yet, she fell into a sort of fierce nihilism, like a phoenix who meant to take the whole world with her when she burned. That fire, I think, is what drew Mathiros.”
“They were lovers?”
Kiril knocked back the rest of his drink. “There was nothing of love between them, no matter how loosely one defines the term. But yes. She was already married. I met her husband once, before all that began. He reminded me of Mathiros, actually, but older and wiser and far calmer. Ferenz weathered Phaedra’s moods like a mountain. Mathiros couldn’t offer that—he was little more than a boy when they met, cocky with his rank and the strength of youth. He wanted her because she was beautiful, and because—” He stared into the bottom of his empty glass. “Because he has always been searching for that fire that
will consume him, ever since he was a child. And in each other, they found the means to destroy themselves.
“I couldn’t stop it. I was already Mathiros’s closest advisor, but nothing would keep him from Phaedra. It was ugly and brutal—not the brutality of fists, though possibly that too, but of words and heart. And eventually it went too far. Perhaps he struck her, or merely said the wrong hurtful thing. Whatever it was, she responded with magic, and drew his blood. And then it was treason.
“That might have been the end of it. She fled the palace and returned to Sarkany, and without her presence to goad him I think I could have calmed him. But the palace maids thought Phaedra was pregnant, and the rumor reached Mathiros. I silenced it, but too late.” His mouth was a grim line, and Isyllt didn’t ask what measures he’d taken for that silence.
“Now we had a royal bastard to deal with, who would be raised by a Severos blood mage and a Sarken noble. The possibilities were… unpleasant. Mathiros was determined to deal with it, and I couldn’t dissuade him from doing so personally. We rode to Carnavas in all the stealth my magic and lies could give us. I still hoped that we could solve this reasonably.” His smile was humorless. “The folly of youth.
“It began with discussion, but quickly degenerated. Mathiros and Ferenz fought, while I pursued Phaedra to her tower. Then Ferenz fell, and all the fight went out of her. She threw herself off the tower.” His eyes closed, fingers tightening on the arm of the chair.
“But she didn’t die,” Isyllt said. “Not permanently.” Her jaw ached from the effort of keeping her teeth from chattering. She hadn’t lit a fire, and the room was nearly as cold as the dawn.
“No. Though I didn’t know that at the time. And so we were left with a castle full of corpses and the makings of an international incident.”
“What did you do?”
“I killed all the castle servants, to start, and used their deaths to cover our tracks at Carnavas. But that did nothing about the city full of people who knew and would miss Phaedra. Hushing up a bastard is one thing, but murdering a scion of a great house would mean open revolt from the Octagon Court. So I erased her.”