“Come on,” I challenged, “give me your best.”
I thought it would plummet all the way to the ground, but it jerked up almost as soon as I spoke, and tried once again to roll into a spin. I increased my compulsion once more, preventing it from turning all the way, and as it straightened out again, I drew back the compulsion. This happened a number of times until finally, the bird gave up trying to spin me off, and plummeted headfirst for the ground. We were over the river now, having cleared the mountain peaks, and I could see the castle growing nearer. The ever-twinkling lights of Castle Nest were greeting me in horrible, taunting invitation. The river—now seen from above—seemed to be even more immense than it appeared from the castle walls. It, too, shimmered its dark greeting, welcoming me home, back into the fold of monsters.
I lifted my compulsion completely, getting ready to pull my glamor back into place. The hawk must have sensed this, for it became almost vertical, wings pressed right up against my legs, falling so fast that I had to close my eyes against the rush of wind. It didn’t try rolling again, but a second later, I found myself completely submerged in the freezing water of the river. I released the bird, which buffeted me away, claws scraping along my stomach, and then took off into the sky again. I kicked for the surface, feeling the temperature of the water seeping into my very core, turning my insides to ice. Pulling my glamor back into place was easy, as my throat was now burning with river water instead of hunger. I swam to the bank and hauled myself out of the water, crown once again clutched tightly in my fist. My shirt had been torn, and I had two gouges running along my stomach. They were both shallow, and I suspected they wouldn’t even need stitching, which was good, because Harbringer wasn’t here anymore to heal me.
The arena was a long way to walk and I didn’t feel like trudging back through Castle Nest, soaked to the skin and bleeding. Instead, I struggled back to the bridge and began the struggle back to the castle. Once I reached the top of the hill, I could hear the rush of noise from below. They were cheering, shouting unintelligible things, and I wondered what the mirrors showed them. A bedraggled, lost girl, most likely.
I felt like crying then, and turned away from the noise, just as a figure mounted the crest of the hill and jogged toward me.
“My Lady!” It was Grenlow.
I paused, and noticed that the rest of my advisors had followed him.
“Am I finished?” I asked Grenlow, my voice flat.
He looked confused, but he nodded.
“How do I get the tracking device out?”
He stepped up to me and held a hand out for my arm, his expression solemn, as if to match my own. I gave him my hand, and he pulled out a strange instrument with a glass tube at the end. As soon as the ends touched my skin, a blade slid down and made a small, precise incision, less than an inch above where the needle mark still showed. I bit my lip to keep from crying out, and then had to turn my eyes away as a sudden suction began pulling beads of blood up the sides of the tube. After about a minute, the pressure disappeared, and Grenlow cleaned the area with his handkerchief before binding it tightly in a fresh bandage.
Everyone had been silent until this stage, but now Isolde stepped forward, so that the light from one of the bracketed torches along the outside of the castle wall cast a flickering reflection over her face.
“I guess congratulations are in order,” she said cautiously.
“Are they?” I countered.
Nobody answered, and I looked at each one of them carefully. I didn’t like Ashen, and I was suspicious of Grenlow, but they were the only two who showed any emotion at all. The others were completely blank, too blank. They weren’t disappointed that I had passed their impossible test; they weren’t excited that their kingdom had a new ruler. They were nothing. Their move had been made, their hand dealt in this game that they played with my life, and now they were determined not to give anything away. It was my move.
“Grenlow, can you find Sweet, Quick and Teddy and send them to my room?”
“Yes, Lady Queen.”
“Thank you.” I turned on my heel, and strode away from them.
I needed to get Ashen away from the rest of them somehow, but there was no use trying to communicate with him while the others watched on, so I trudged up to my room, my sore limbs protesting the whole way. I first checked Gretal’s chambers and then my own, but she was nowhere to be found, so I started a bath and gingerly stripped off my clothing. It was only ten minutes later when a knock on the sitting room door echoed through to me. I pulled myself from the bath gingerly, grabbing a robe and wrapping myself into it, not bothering with my wet hair.
I padded to the sitting room and opened the door, feeling some of the tension drain from me at the sight of my Guard.
“Teddy,” I said, as they noticed me, “I need to see Ashen, and Leif—if possible—but I don’t want the others to know.”
“Leave it to me, Lady Queen.” He grinned, apparently pleased with the task, and then slipped from the room. The other two sat down without invitation, which pleased me, though their grim expressions didn’t.
“What is it?” I asked, as there was another knock on the door.
Gretal appeared, carrying a tray. When she saw me, she set it down and ran to me, enfolding me in her arms. Surprised, I hugged her back, though it caused me a small amount of pain. She pulled back after a moment, and didn’t say a word, though I could see that there were tears in her eyes.
“Gretal?” I glanced from her to my grim-faced Guard. “What the hell is wrong with everybody?”
She disappeared for a moment and then reappeared with a comb in her hand, a small basket of medical supplies tucked under her arm.
“That whole ordeal…” she said, pushing me down onto one of the chaises. “I don’t think you were even supposed to survive the first round.”
She started to comb the tangles out of my wet hair, and I winced, the movement pulling on my tender scalp.
“So it wasn’t just me then?” I asked, directing the question to Quick and Sweet. “That was unnecessarily hard? That test?”
“We’ve never seen one so brutal,” Sweet admitted. “Compulsion is supposed to be banned, and those beasts… I think someone might be trying to kill you, Lady Queen.”
“Enough of the Lady Queen nonsense. You’ll call me Bea, or Beatrice, and you’ll tell Teddy to do the same. Do you think I made the right choice, asking Ashen here? He seems to not have it in for me as much as the others… though it would make sense if he wanted me dead. He should be on the throne, in my opinion.”
“Ashen has never wanted to be King. He and Nareon conquered the throne together, but Ashen gave it over without a fight, asking to be given an advisor spot instead.”
I frowned, biting my lip. “What about the other brother? Elias?”
Sweet shrugged. “Nobody has seen Elias for… well, a long time.”
Gretal finished combing my hair, and then tapped my shoulder. “Go and put something on beneath that so I can treat you properly. I can’t have the Queen disrobing in front of these two rapscallions.”
“Rapscallions?” I laughed, the sound alien to my sore ears.
I stood and moved to the door of my bedchamber. “Really, people don’t have much of an opinion of my Guard.”
I changed into a sleeveless undershirt and a fresh pair of leggings before returning to Gretal, who made me lie on my back on the chaise so that she could prod and scowl at my stomach.
“You really should call for a healer,” Quick said, eyeing the patch of purplish blue that was beginning to spread wider, up over my ribcage and down to my hip bone, the hawk’s markings spearing two red lines diagonally across.
“Nareon ordered a woman to heal me once, she almost fainted.”
“Healing is hard, but it’s their job.”
“It’s not fair to transfer your pain to another. Besides, it’s nothing I can’t handle.”
Gretal made an agitated sound, and I glanced at her face, see
ing that her eyes flicked up to the bandage Harbringer had dressed my shoulder with. I hadn’t taken it off in the bath, because I suspected that I had probably ripped out his stitches during the Throne Test.
“Alright,” I conceded, “that one might be a little worse than the others.”
The door opened again, saving me from a response. From behind Gretal’s torso, I saw several people slipping into the room.
“Can we do this later?” I asked Gretal, half raising myself as Ashen’s face came into view, his mysterious violet scrutiny touching upon everything at once, before settling on me.
“No.” She pushed me back down, and bent to fish around for something in her medical bag.
I chuckled and sat up again, much to Gretal’s chagrin. “I’ll let you fuss later, I promise.”
She huffed and allowed me to sit up, but then moved to the side of the chaise and began to cut away my shoulder bandage. I sighed, deciding this was probably as good a compromise as I was going to get, and then gestured for Ashen to have a seat.
He lowered himself into an armchair beside my chaise, propping his ankle over his knee and surveying Teddy, who moved to stand beside the door, before swinging his eyes back to me. I wondered what Teddy had said to get him here, and whether Leif was already in the room, hiding in a closet or something.
“You’ve been very forthcoming with me so far,” I told Ashen, as the bandage finally fell away from my arm, and Sweet winced out of the corner of my eye.
“No nice deed goes unpunished,” he quipped, taking in my shoulder and raising an eyebrow. “You should really get a healer for that.”
I ignored both comments. “I want to ask you something.”
“I am at liberty to answer.”
“Is someone trying to kill me?”
“Without a doubt,” he replied, no trace of amusement or duality in his voice. He was simply stating the obvious, it seemed.
“Do you know who it is?”
“You mean, apart from yourself, Lady Queen?”
“My own death-wish aside, yes.”
His smile quirked a little. “Did you know that feeding from a powerful synfee is taboo, in this kingdom?”
“I do now.”
“I am sure it irks Ayleth, to know that her lover shared something so primitive with you.”
“Ayleth is trying to kill me?”
“Not on her own.”
“So who else, then?”
“Tell me about that charming blade you always seem to be carrying around.”
“It’s the knife that killed my father. I intend to return it to its owner.”
He held up his hand, two fingers extended. “And who caused that gash on your head?”
“Some student at the Academy, a member of the Tainted Resistance.”
“The Tainted Resistance?”
“A new movement in the human kingdom, actively trying to eradicate the Tainted Creatures from their land, because of my supposed actions. Except that there aren’t Tainted Creatures in their land. Just me.”
He held up another finger. “Why didn’t you invite Grenlow to this charming little meeting?”
I had to stop and think about that one, because I hadn’t consciously decided to leave him out of it. “Leave Grenlow off your list, for my own sanity.”
“Is there anyone else on your council that I should leave off?”
“No.”
He put up five more fingers. Cereen, Rohan, Dain, Isolde and…
“Wait,” I looked around, “where’s Leif?”
Ashen grinned then, and lowered one of his fingers. “He’s in the corner, and I think you almost insulted him just then.”
I craned my neck to look over my uninjured shoulder and found Leif standing on the opposite side of the door to Teddy, lurking in the shadows, and showing no sign of life, let alone offense at my forgetting about him.
“I have something of yours,” I said to him.
From the silence about the room, I was sure that people didn’t usually speak to Leif.
“I’m not sure how that is possible, Lady Queen,” he replied in that deep, sandpapery voice.
I waited for Gretal to finish re-binding my shoulder, glad that it had not needed stitching again, and then I rose, moving into the other room and grabbing the needle that I had set on the vanity. I stalked right up to the hooded man and held it out, biting back the unnecessary fear I felt, looking at the lower half of his leather mask.
“Do you have anyone to add to my list, Leif?”
He reached out, taking the needle from me. “I don’t make guesses.”
The needle disappeared somewhere into the folds of his cloak, and I stared up into his face, trying to distinguish the colour of his eyes beneath the hood.
“You are both masters of disguise,” I found myself saying, “in your own ways.”
Ashen scoffed. “I face the same challenges that any shape-changer does; I’m no more a master of disguise than Teddy over there.”
I was surprised that Ashen even knew Teddy’s name, but I didn’t say so.
“How many people have a mind-ability as advanced as yours?” I asked Leif, an idea beginning to form in my mind.
“It is rare,” Ashen answered for Leif, so that I turned to him instead. “Mind abilities are infrequent in their own right in the human kingdom, though they are more common here. An ability to read thoughts and sift through memories… We know of only two others who share that ability. You are quite close to both of them. A penchant of yours perhaps, Lady Queen?”
I ignored the jibe, as something was clicking into place in my mind. I directed my next question to both Leif and Ashen, unsure who would answer. “Do you wear your cloak and hood when you move about the human kingdom?”
Ashen scowled and Leif strode past me, grabbing the door handle and yanking it open. He didn’t say anything out loud, but Teddy, Quick and Sweet jumped to their feet almost immediately and walked out of the room, so I assumed he spoke in their minds. Gretal was more stubborn. I could see her folding her arms, looking as if she would protest, even though her face had turned white.
“Gretal,” I tried to sound soothing, “I’ll come to you when I’m finished here.”
Her eyes slid to mine, measuring, and then she nodded, relaxing only slightly as she left the room with a clenched mouth. Leif closed the door after her, and Ashen stood, looking agitated.
“How did you know about that?” he asked, rounding on me.
I glanced at him, and then sat myself back on the chaise.
“Hazen mentioned that they were trying to hunt down a man with abilities like his.”
“Why?” Ashen asked, though almost at the same time, Leif started to laugh.
I guessed that he had found the memory in my head.
“It does seem rather convenient,” I said to Ashen, “but they want Leif to examine my mind at the trial, to determine whether I am innocent of killing the king or not.”
Ashen’s brows arched, and he fell back into his seat. “No kidding.”
“Will you do it?” I asked Leif, who hadn’t yet returned to his shadowy corner.
“Consider your exile ended, Lady Queen.”
“Thank you, Leif.”
He nodded and opened the door again. A few minutes later, my guard returned and Leif moved back to his corner.
Chapter Eleven
Misbehavior of the Saviour
I had planned to go to Ravenport the next day, but when I blinked awake, it was to encounter Cale dozing in the chair by my bed. I jumped up and gave him a shake.
“What?” He jerked upright and then seemed to remember where he was, grinning and sweeping me into a one-armed hug that almost had me tumbling over.
I laughed, pushed away from him and skipped into the bathing chamber to knock on the connecting door.
“Gretal!”
I didn’t wait for her to answer, but ran back into the other room, and appraised Cale’s worn-down appearance.
“What�
��s going on? I love that you’re here, but why are you here?”
“I have good news. The man that Hazen has been searching for turned up in the dead of night last night. We’ve been working non-stop to get your trial ready for this morning.”
“Why?” My heart leapt at the statement, but I couldn’t help but feel guilty that they had rushed it. “I would have survived one more day, you know.”
“Your father’s funeral service is today, Bea.”
I felt as if he had punched me in the gut, and I stumbled back a step, the idea of my rushed trial no longer seeming like such a blessing.
“I… I’m not ready,” I stuttered.
Gretal touched my back, and I jumped, not even realising that she had come into the room.
“We’ll get you ready, sweetheart.”
At least she’s stopped calling me Miss Harrow.
I watched her walk to the dressing room and begin sorting through stacks of clothing that someone, somewhere, had picked out for me.
“How can I say goodbye?” I asked, my voice flat.
She returned with a pale blue dress, which looked like nothing I would ever consent to wear, but as she laid it out on the bed, a flash of black managed to capture my attention. There was a design sewn into the neckline with silken black thread, catching and gathering the soft material as it spread several inches lower. It stood out in stark contrast to the airy material, bold and entrancing all at the same time, and I found myself moving toward it, my fingers trailing across the thread, drawn in by something in the design.
“You’ll say goodbye the only way you can.” Gretal’s voice was oddly soft. “And it will be enough.”
“I know that mark.” Cale abruptly spoke, eyes narrowed on my fingers, where they still caressed the dress.
He moved over to me, and pointed with a finger, outlining what I had missed. It was the death mark, camouflaged in a net of black thread.
The Soulstoy Inheritance Page 12
