Merciless

by Jacqueline Pawl

  Mercy, run!

  “That’s her!” Elise yells. “She tried to assassinate the prince!”

  “What—” is all Mercy manages to spit out before the guards swarm her. Two grab her wrists and twist her arms behind her back hard enough to make her cry out in pain, her eyes watering. They wrench her arms to the verge of snapping, and she drops her dagger. It clatters to the ground and another guard scoops it up. Someone locks shackles around her wrists and another clamps them around her ankles. Anger and fear fill her veins.

  “Elise, what the hell are you doing?” Mercy shouts. She bucks and fights against the guards holding her in place, but their grips don’t waver.

  Elise doesn’t respond. She watches the healer as he opens his case and pulls out disinfectant, bandages, and a needle and thread. Her worried expression immediately shifts to relief as the healer positions himself at Tamriel’s back and pierces his skin with the needle, instructing another guard to hold the gash shut. Tamriel moans again.

  “Let’s go, filth,” one of the guards hisses into her ear. He and the others drag her past Elise and toward the front door, fighting them the entire way.

  “What are you doing?” she hisses when they pass Elise. “You know I didn’t attack him.”

  “I found you standing over him with a dagger out and his blood on your hands. How can there be any doubt of your guilt?”

  Mercy glares at her but says nothing. Just as the guards drag her out the door, she turns her head and looks back over her shoulder, and—for one second—Tamriel’s eyes open and lock onto hers. They’re wide and terrified, the light in his eyes hazy with pain, and then he winces and falls unconscious again.

  The guards pull her from the house and back to the castle, dragging her when she moves too slowly, kicking her heels when she trips. They sneer and regard her with hatred and disdain, fury burning in their eyes. They lift her and pull her up the stairs to the castle by her underarms, not caring when she cries out in pain. The soldiers carry her down the several flights of stairs to the dungeon, and one fumbles for his keys to the door. His hands are shaking with so much anger that he drops them twice before finding the right key. He pushes the door open and leads them inside, then unlocks the door to the cell in the farthest corner of the dungeon.

  They toss her inside and she flies forward, her knees cracking on the stone floor when she trips over the heavy iron chain of her shackles. Her hands are still clasped behind her back, useless.

  She pulls her knees in close to her chest and braces her back against the wall, lifting her butt off the ground enough to bring her arms and the chain connecting her wrists from behind her, under her, to her front. She grits her teeth when the heavy iron cuffs dig into her wrists and pinch the skin, then sighs with relief when she works her feet around the chain, and her arms are free in front of her—well, as free as they can be while cuffed together, but at least her shoulders no longer ache from being locked in the strange position behind her back.

  She scrambles upright and whirls around as the cell door clangs shut. The senior guard pulls out his keys and snaps the lock shut, the sound of it echoing in the dank room. As they file through the door, Mercy screams at them. After they shut the door and entomb her in the pitch black, she kicks at the strong iron bars of her cell until her foot throbs.

  Mercy sits against the back wall of her cell, her legs stretched out in front of her. Time seems to have slowed to a stop in the pitch black of the dungeon; the only way she can tell the passing of the hours is by her growing hunger, which starts small, but soon sends pangs which ebb and flow through her entire body in jolting waves. Somewhere, there’s a crack in the ceiling through which droplets of water form, swell, and fall, and she counts the seconds by the pattering of the droplets on the ground. It begins as a way to take her mind off everything—her hunger, Elise’s betrayal, and her terror over Tamriel’s fate—but the constant drip, drip, drip soon becomes maddening.

  Her worry for Tamriel gnaws at her while she sits in the utter darkness, waiting—for the second time in her life—to be called for execution. The unanswered question brings more pain than anything else: were they too late? She has no idea if Tamriel survived. He could be a few floors above her right now, lying cold and dead on his bed as a priestess mutters prayers and reads the last rites for his burial. The second Mercy thinks it, the world seems to slide out from under her.

  If he’s alive, what will they tell him when he wakes up? What will he remember? He was attacked from behind, that much is certain, so chances are he never saw his would-be assassin. They’ll tell him Mercy tried to kill him. Elise will smile sympathetically and lie through her teeth. Will he believe it? Will he remember everything about the night before, in the library, and think it was all a part of an elaborate game?

  She groans, shaking her head to clear it, but the thoughts don’t go away. She stretches out on her side as comfortably as possible with her legs and arms shackled. The stone floor is filthy, emanating a wet-cold which seeps through her clothes and chills her to the bone. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

  She’s afraid.

  She’s not afraid for herself, but for Tamriel’s safety, because she knows exactly who had tried to kill him. It’s not a surprise, is it? Calum had been plotting his cousin’s death since long before Mercy had arrived in the capital. It’s not a stretch to think he’d decided to take matters into his own hands. But . . . the way he had done it is odd. Why go through the effort of taking off the prince’s breastplate only to cut him, when he could have stabbed him in the heart?

  “Oh,” Mercy says to herself, chuckling. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t stand there and plunge his dagger into his cousin’s chest, couldn’t watch the light fade from his eyes. Instead, like a coward, he had left him there, alone, bleeding. He had been planning on Mercy finding him but hadn’t known when. For him, either result was positive: Mercy would find Tamriel before he died and be executed for attempted murder, leaving Calum or another Daughter free to strike when everyone else has let down their guards, or Tamriel would have died and Mercy been executed for murder.

  The only thing which does not make sense is Elise. What could Calum have offered her to convince her to betray Tamriel? Her family has been in the royal family’s service for generations, as she had proudly explained. What did Calum offer her which Tamriel could not?

  Mercy frowns. With all the questions, anger, and worry clouding her head, she imagines it will be impossible for sleep to reach her. Soon, however, exhaustion forces her eyes to drift shut of their own accord.

  Men’s voices in the hallway wake her hours later. Mercy jerks upright, scuttling to the back corner of her cell. They’re here for me.

  Something thuds against the door and Mercy jumps. She stands, the metal links jangling as she tests the length of the chain connecting her arms. It’s not terribly long, but strong. If she can lure a guard inside and loop it around his throat . . . well, they’ve already arrested her for one murder, what are a few more? They’re here to take her away—and they’ll succeed—but she doesn’t have to make it easy for them.

  The door opens and someone walks in carrying a torch, the flame bobbing with each step as she crosses the room. Mercy shields her eyes against the light, watching through her fingers as the woman starts toward her, then abruptly turns to the right and unlocks one of the cells on the opposite wall. She ignores Mercy completely.

  “Haul her in,” she says, and two guards walk through the door, each with a hand clamped around one of Elvira’s upper arms. Her dress is sleeveless, and Mercy can see a dark inky bruise forming on her shoulder and part of her collarbone. Her face, although pale, is strangely void of emotion—almost serene—and she doesn’t look Mercy’s way as the soldiers throw her into the open cell.

  The cell door clangs shut and the lock snaps into place, the sound reverberating off the stone walls. The commander pockets the keys and nods to her men, and the three of them leave the room and shut the door, tak
ing the torch with them. The dungeon is blanketed in blackness once again, and Mercy is surprised Elvira is not crying.

  Elvira wears no chains, so it’s only by the swishing of her dress that Mercy can tell when she moves to the back of her cell and sits. After a moment, Mercy does the same. She closes her eyes, but this time, sleep refuses to come.

  48

  Tamriel wakes facedown in a pile of pillows, his head fuzzy and throbbing somewhere behind his temple. Out of one eye, he can see over the swell of the monstrous downy pillow on which he rests to the balcony and the twinkling stars beyond. The balcony doors stand open and crack against the wall with each gust of wind off the lake, the curtains dancing in the air.

  He lies atop the silk blankets in nothing but his underclothes and the thick, scratchy bandages wrapped around his bare torso. When a breeze drift in and sends goosebumps rippling across his skin, he frowns and begins to push off the bed, until a flash of white-hot agony shoots across his back. He cries out in pain and falls back onto the bed, trembling, as a sheen of perspiration beads on his brow.

  “Don’t try to move. You’ll start bleeding again.”

  Tamriel goes rigid. He’s facing away from the man sitting beside his bed—it’s too painful to turn his head—but he knows that voice, thick with sleep. “What happened?” He fights to keep his voice steady, to conceal his fear. “Who did this to me?”

  Ghyslain stands and rounds the bed. He moves to the balcony doors and pulls them shut, one final gust of wind blowing the curls of dark hair from his face. He clicks the lock into place and then returns to the bed, leaning over Tamriel and peering down at him with concern in his eyes. “Do you remember nothing?”

  “I was . . . inside Mother’s house,” he says hesitantly. No doubt his father is going to have plenty of questions for him about that later, but from the look on the king’s face, it’s the farthest thing from his mind right now. “Someone struck me from behind. I never saw him.”

  Ghyslain takes a shuddering breath. “Some . . . someone tried to murder you, Tam.” His face is pale and terrifyingly grave, his eyes more somber and lucid than Tamriel’s ever seen. “If Serenna Elise hadn’t found you when she did, you wouldn’t be alive.”

  “She found me?”

  He nods. “She caught the . . . assassin red-handed.” He grimaces.

  Tamriel lifts his head from the pillow, gritting his teeth against the pain. “Who? Who did this to me?”

  Ghyslain doesn’t respond. Dark shadows hang under his eyes and his expression is haggard. “You can’t possibly know what it was like to watch them carry you in here, Tam. Your face was so pale . . . I thought you weren’t going to last the hour, let alone the night.”

  “H-Have you been sitting here this whole time?”

  The answer is plain on his father’s face. “You’re all I have left. What else am I supposed to do when the person I love most in the world is on his deathbed?”

  Tamriel wants to laugh at that. Love. What a strange way to describe their relationship. “Father. Who did this to me?”

  Does he look guilty?

  “Your foreign friend,” he finally says. “Lady Marieve.”

  Tamriel’s heart stops. He stares at his father for a long time. “You’re lying.”

  “I wish I were.”

  “It wasn’t her. It couldn’t have been her.”

  “She’s in the dungeon right now. You can see for yourself when you’re better.”

  “Why would Queen Cerelia sends her granddaughter here to murder me?” Tamriel scoffs. As he speaks, his father begins rifling through his pockets. “Why send her all the way from—”

  He stops. Pinched between Ghyslain’s fingers is a gold coin—a very distinctive gold coin—with a teardrop in the center.

  “You recognize this, don’t you?”

  Tamriel doesn’t say a word. He stares at it.

  Of course he recognizes it.

  “She’s an Assassin. A Daughter. This fell out of her pocket when she was struggling with the guards.”

  Tamriel’s body goes numb, his face slack with shock.

  “She’s not Marieve. We didn’t realize it because none of the Queen’s family has ever visited Beltharos.” Although his suspicions and warnings about trusting Marieve—whatever her real name is—were right, Ghyslain, to his credit, doesn’t look smug or victorious. In fact, he looks heartbroken for his son.

  Tamriel closes his eyes. “She’s still alive?”

  “For now.”

  “Make sure she stays that way. I want to speak to her. I want to see her punished.”

  “Are you sure? You don’t have to be there—”

  “I’m certain. Now please leave.”

  Ghyslain hesitates. “I don’t think I should leave you alone—”

  “Leave! Now! Go!” Tamriel shouts. His father falls back a step, shocked. After a second, he nods and leaves, shutting the door behind him. The sound of the latch clicking into place echoes with a strange sense of finality.

  Tamriel lets out a long breath, then inhales so deeply his stitches pull and he winces. Could it be true? All this time, had he really failed to see Marieve’s true intentions? After so many years in his father’s court, he had thought himself a good judge of character, so how . . . how had he failed to read the guilt on her traitorous face?

  He remembers the humorous glint in her eyes as she had teased him the day before, the way she had always spoken to him—bluntly and without remorse—which had felt so refreshing compared to the forced politeness of his father’s courtiers and advisors. He had dismissed it as her being Feyndaran—the politics of that elven-ruled queendom will always be a mystery to him—but now he remembers the tales of the infamous Assassins’ Guild from his mother’s storybooks. The Daughters are ruthless, emotionless, vicious to the core, and he cannot help but see a glimmer of that in her.

  In the library, her skin had glowed gold in the firelight, the points of her ears peeking out from her beautiful mane of black curls. He remembers the smile slipping off her face as she had approached. He remembers pulling her into his arms, her hands tracing the line of his jaw and the way she had moaned against his lips. Then, later, she had slipped out of his grasp and run.

  Had—Had she planned to kill him then?

  She must have. If her true identity is as Ghyslain says, she must have. So why did she not kill him when she had had the chance? Why decide not to kill him then, only to change her mind the next day? And why—why—had he allowed himself to fall for her?

  49

  “Your Highness! I’m glad to see you are well!”

  Calum’s voice precedes him as he enters the throne room, a charming smile on his face as he saunters toward the dais on which Tamriel and Ghyslain sit. They look up from the documents they had been reviewing, Tamriel rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand.

  Over the past five days, Tamriel’s back has healed well enough that he was cleared from bed rest and given permission to move freely about the castle. As tightly bandaged and heavily medicated as he is, however, that freedom has been limited to walking from his room to his father’s council room or study, then sitting beside the king until the pain in his back demands another dose of medication. Today, though, bored of the monotony and eager for a change of scenery, Tamriel had walked all the way to the throne room, where he has sat with his father for the past few hours.

  Ghyslain has refused to let Tamriel out of his sight since the attack. On the rare occasion he does, he leaves at least two soldiers to guard the prince, and three while he sleeps.

  It’s maddening.

  Calum doesn’t acknowledge either of the guards flanking the throne as he bounds up the steps and stops before his cousin, his smile giving way to concern. “How do you feel?”

  “About as well as you’d imagine,” Tamriel responds, frowning, “but Healer Tabris’s medicines are pretty strong, so . . .” he trails off, shrugging. Yet another troubling issue—since the castle infirmary had been locked
up a week ago, no one has been brave enough to check on the priestesses or Alyss. The sounds of life heard through the door by the guards are enough to convince them there is no need to intervene yet.

  “Have you gone to see her yet? The assassin?”

  Ghyslain’s head snaps up. “Calum . . .”

  Tamriel ignores his father. “Not yet. I want to, but I could hardly manage walking all the way down here. I don’t know if I could make it to the dungeon on my own.”

  “I’ll go with you, if you wish.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Ghyslain says. He turns to his son. “You’re not well enough, and I don’t think it would be good for your mental health to speak to her at all.” His expression darkens. “She tried to murder you, Tamriel. I should have had her executed the night they brought her in, but I wanted to hear what you would say. Now that you’re better, she shall be executed tonight, right in front of the castle, so you can witness her punishment.”

  “I agree,” Calum says. “We know she’s guilty. We shouldn’t wait any longer or people will begin to talk. Have her escorted to the gardens tonight—allow enough time for word to spread to the citizens—and execute her then, in front of everyone. Show them the consequences of crossing you.”

  The Daughters will soon arrive to complete the contract, and they will leave with or without Mercy. What does he care if she is killed, as long as the prince is dead before he can ascend the throne? Then Calum can use the forged contract to dethrone Ghyslain and bring power back to his family. Only a little longer, Father, he thinks. Soon.

  Tamriel slowly nods. “Okay,” he finally says, “but not today. Two days from now, have her brought in during my birthday feast, in front of all the nobility. I want them to see the price this assassination attempt has cost her.” A devilish smile spreads across his face. “We’ll never have to question their loyalty again.”