Windswept (The Airborne Saga) (33 page)

Twenty Five

              Inside the capitol building was dark. It resembled nothing of the grandeur that Avery had seen before. It only took her a few minutes to realize why. Beyond the cracked marble décor and walls splintered and covered in soot, the remaining windows had been boarded up. Shadows owned the hallways and the only illumination slipped in through the way they had come.

             
“Be careful,” Mason warned. “We are not alone in here.”

             
The place appeared silent, but the ugly feeling plaguing Avery had her believing him completely. They stepped by the rubble cautiously and Mason led them tiny step by tiny step towards the throne room. Avery had only seen it once and kept the picture in her mind. Massive gold seating surrounded by the extravagant seats of the council. Her expectations to see the throne room the same way now was foolish. The place would likely be in ruins. The council would likely be dead.

             
They reached the massive wooden doors without trouble, but it was much darker here. Avery listened carefully for any danger to follow. On the doors, just faintly visible, were markings around the handles. It looked as if someone had clamped these doors shut, but whatever the obstruction had been was also long gone. Mason pulled until the door gave. The springs cried out deafeningly, and the room inside smacked them with a wave of dull and dusty air.

             
Inside, the overhead fluorescents remained partially on to reveal the people inside. Avery snuck by Mason’s wing to steal a desperate glance around. Seeing no bodies on the floor, she let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. The council members she didn’t know had stacked up against a corner, their eyes as wide as a deer caught in headlights. Stern stood away from the group, hunched in the corner, and met their eyes. Across from the group stood several Guard. Mason’s hands snaked out and met her abdomen, stopping her from going any farther. The room remained quiet until Mason opened his mouth.

             
“Councilmen, please come with me.” He held his hand out in a pleading gesture, but no one budged or spoke. “Come with me now.”

             
Mason’s commands fell upon deaf ears. It appeared the old men in the corner had their eyes drilled on the Guard rather than on Mason. Avery wanted to speak, to tell them that the loyalists held the outside, and they’d be safe from the rebels. But something about the tension in the air kept her quiet. She couldn’t lay her finger on it, but her gut twisted into knots and she knew something else was going on here.

             
“Please,” Mason pleaded one last time before his hand dropped out of the air. Avery resisted the urge to grab his hand and instead stayed put like a proper soldier. The loyalists who had tagged along stood behind her, but they were few in numbers. It’d have been inappropriate to have the entire cavalry when the rebels needed to be held outside, but Avery suddenly wished that they had brought along more recruits. The seven loyalist men would do little to barricade intruders coming from behind. Avery scanned the darkness behind them, but found nothing about the rubble and ash clearer now than she had before.

             
“I know what’s going on.” Mason abruptly hissed and stole her attention back to the room. Except he wasn’t looking at the council anymore. His eyes trained on the Guard. “I didn’t understand it at first, not until Patrick attacked me. But I know you were in on it. Traitors of the highest  degree.”

             
“Mason?” Avery cued. The air in the room had thickened considerably and left them with a thin layer of sweat. Heart beginning to pound, she looked towards him for some explanation.

             
“Don’t you think it was odd that the most skilled fighters in the world would fail against a rebel army? A weak one at that? And to Patrick, a man they’ve known and studied for so long?”

             
“Mason, what’s going on?” Avery parroted louder. They stood in the middle of the Guard, the council, and the loyalists behind them. But that didn’t make them safe.

             
“The Guard. Traitors. They let Patrick in,” Mason said again.             

             
This time, the poker face of a Guard member broke. The one in the front, responsible for beating Leon to a bloody pulp, smirked.

             
“Your Majesty,” the Guard member said, as if it would answer the world.

             
Avery caught on then. It made too much sense. Leon, the only loyalist among them, had been thrown to the curb. And beaten down when he attempted to check the Guard’s set up during commencement day. Leon might have known, possibly even told Mason at Turnasile. But the realization hit her like a ton of bricks. The entire Guard was their enemy. The most deadly harpies on Earth were their enemies. Mason must have known this too. She could feel the stiff anxiety roll off of him in waves. But not knowing how to fight this one, she waited for his direction. Mason kept talking, as if the words would buy him precious time to think of a plan. The Guard hadn’t moved yet, still statues from before.

             
“I don’t know how much of this you’re a part of. But I suspect now that you’re in on all of it. There was no lock on the outside of these doors. It wasn’t the rebels keeping the council in, it was you all forbidding to let them out. You wouldn’t let them shun the rebels from the island or rally our forces to come help me. You left the harpies leaderless. And then I suppose, when I was dead, you would control the council and force them to elect any one of you as monarch. On the threat of death.”

             
The Guard’s faces remained stone. Avery let out a quiet squeak. She would have begged for a single reaction. A twitch. A facial acknowledgment. The waiting actually physically hurt. Her adrenaline couldn’t pound through her exhausted veins much longer. The standoff couldn’t go on forever.

             
“They worked with that traitor Patrick! Ai! Should never have let him go!”

             
Avery flinched violently when one of the loyalists behind her screamed out. He pumped a fist in the air and the others mimicked him. Mason shifted, taking more solace in this apparently, and then he took a few daring steps into the room. He now stood directly between the Guard and the council. She followed in suit, her head spinning to take in the massive chambers. The place had held up perfectly upon closer inspection. No dirt even marred the floor, except where Avery and Mason now stood. She swept over the old men behind her. Stern stood out from them, nearly on the other side of the room. She glanced back towards the Guard. One of them had to be the ringleader. But neither of them truly stepped forward to take command.

             
“Mason,” she whispered but her voice threatened to break. “Mason, stop.”

             
“Shush, Avery,” he hissed back at her. “You’re not going to survive this. There are a hundred loyalists outside and word will travel before you can stop it. You can’t be ousted from your own kind. So I’m asking you now to give up peacefully. We don’t need any more lives lost.”

             
The Guard’s eyes flickered from Mason, to Avery, and to the council behind them. But no one voiced an answer or a decision. That was because nobody could.

             
“Mason, we need to get out of this room. Go outside. Do this outside, please.”

             
He swung his hand back and sealed her mouth. Avery tore free roughly enough so that his hand dropped.

             
“I’m not stupid!” She yelled out. Her voice returned to her even in the giant grandeur of the room. “I saw it all along. I see it now!”

             
Mason actually whirled to face her. The loyalists in the doorway hovered there. But certain it was too late, certain she couldn’t get them to move subtly now, she let her mouth do the running.

             
“Patrick didn’t want to do this. He was happy in his life. But he was an expert, a killer, a scapegoat. You needed someone to blame this all on, didn’t you?” Avery didn’t ask this of the Guard. “You needed Mason dead and his throne clear. But no Guard member was going to take it. That’d be too impossible to flip the monarch on its head, wouldn’t it?”

             
“Avery, what are you saying?”

             
This time it was Avery’s chance to silence Mason.

             
“I’m sorry but I didn’t realize this until you pointed out the Guard. But now I get it. They were taking orders from the harpie who was going to take your place. The man they socialized well with even when the Guard is supposed to be impersonal. The harpie who knew where Patrick was all along but did nothing to seize him. The one that’s been sizing us up since your official heritage was announced.”             

             
She felt possessed when saying the words, but knowing they were absolutely correct, she didn’t stop them. Though Avery had left out details—so many coincidences she had noticed that took her to this same position—what she had said was more than enough. Mason whirled, this time on Stern. If the man was shocked with the quickness or slowness of their revelation, he didn’t let on.

             
“Your Majesty.” He mocked a bow. Suddenly the old harpie’s posture and slowness dissipated. Stern now stood his full, intimidating height and glowered down upon them.

             
“Why?” Mason’s one coherent question slipped out. He didn’t hold the readiness or posture he had with the Guard. His face brutally white, he just repeated the question. “Why?”

             
“I really wish you to know that it wasn’t personal. This goes back before your time. Back before your bloodline came into power.” Stern began to pace, but his stroll was casual and brisk. The council members remaining in the corner shifted away slightly, but no fear showed in their gestures. It was bigger than Avery thought. They all knew. Even if they didn’t act, they all knew.

             
“Our society has been going to dark places. When we have left the traditional, we have left the safe. We’ve survived thousands of years in this world because we are safe. And now the new monarch purports to change that. Understand that you didn’t start this change. We understand that. But then Jericho was so immensely popular, so immensely untouchable, that we couldn’t do anything at the time. But when he died—a miracle onto its own—and both his children had been banished we realized we could do something about it. We could take back our world....

             
“Or at least we thought. Head councilman Samuel held you as the legitimate heir. And he was right. We couldn’t deny it, and we had to announce you eventually. But to kill you in the beginning of your monarch would have been easy.”

             
Stern’s words left Avery cold. Even above the agony the decaying Willow magic wrecked on her body or the exhaustion pulling on every cell in her being, she felt the cold. Because she knew now just how long this plan had been going on. She had stumbled upon Samuel, months ago now, when he had been speaking with the council and revealing Mason as the next Prince. Everything made sense now. And it hurt.

             
“You can’t kill royalty.” Mason’s voice had been raw with pain. Avery knew then these were the friends that Mason had clung to, his only real family-like figures since his father had passed. Stern clearly didn’t feel the same though as his grin actually grew.

             
“You can’t. We can’t. It’s a treason worse than no other. But how could we help it if Patrick snuck in and murdered you in front of all your loyalists? We could only react and throw the rebels out. Then, after mourning you, I would have to take charge of the kingdom. And I would.”