“Elex—” he said, his voice hoarse. “Elex, we must tell the Overseer. And we must find somewhere…” his voice trailed off, and I realized what he was saying.
The apartment we lived in was the King’s gift to Mitera. With her gone, we would have to find someplace in the slave quarters to live. I stared numbly as my twin rose and went to theother room. I could hear him packing hastily, throwing clothes and food into a few rucksacks.
I couldn’t seem to draw away from Mitera. I couldn’t imagine a world without her in it. She had loved us with everything in her and was always the one rock we could rely on. Now she was gone and I couldn’t seem to make sense of this new reality.
A few moments later, Erix was in the doorway, the bags at his feet.
“Elex, we have to go,” he said.
“We can’t just leave her,” I said.
His gaze softened and he nodded.
“I know. She wouldn’t want us to lose everything, though,” he said.
He strode forward and shoved a ball of leather into my hands. I unrolled it and found a small woven bag attached to a leather thong.
“Here,” he said, tying the bag around my neck. “I split some of the diamonds up between us. If they get taken from one of us, maybe the other can hide theirs.”
I ran my fingers over the bag mutely.
Erix picked up a knife from the tray that had been sent the night before and approached Mitera.
“What are you doing?” I hissed as he turned the dagger toward her.
He looked at me calmly then turned back to our mother. He reached out and gently touched her head, turning it gently to reach her braids. With a swift movement he drew the knife through her hair and came away with two of her braids. He took one and opened the matching bag around his own neck and tucked the braid inside. Then came to me and did the same.
“We need to go,” he said.
The next few weeks passed in a blur. As expected, we had immediately been turned out of the apartment.
When the King found out about Mitera’s death, we heard he was furious and he had the Overseer question us about the events of the evening. Margarite was questioned and it didn’t take long to discover that the King hadn’t sent the food and wine to our rooms, but rather Agnes had. The wine had been liberally spiked with a sedative and an abortifacient. One drug made her sleep while the other caused her to lose the child she carried.
Agnes insisted she hadn’t intended to kill her, but the King hadn’t cared. Under torture, Agnes admitted to supplying the same mixture to any of the King’s slaves who became pregnant in the hopes she could prevent any competitors from being born and challenging Maalik’s place. Agnes claimed Maalik didn’t know about her actions, even under the worst of tortures. He sentenced Agnes to be flayed alive in front of the household slaves.
The day of her execution we were all gathered in the courtyard to witness her sentence. I thought at first that I would gladly watch her die after what she did to Mitera, but soon lost all thoughts of vengeance as the King’s executioners did their work. Normally the King meted out his own punishments, but a poisoner of slaves was beneath him.
They began with her chest, peeling her skin away from her breasts and arms until she lost her voice and could only let out a high keening sound that seemed to bore into my ears.
Maalik stood opposite us in the square. I thought at first he was watching his mother, but realized it was Erix and I that he had fixed his furious glare on. Without thought, I moved closer to my twin, bumping his shoulder. He glanced down at me. His face was pale, a thin coating of sweat on his upper lip.
On the balcony above us I saw the King standing in mute witness to the horror below.
I swallowed hard as the executioners threw a piece of Agnes’ skin to the ground, and the wind shifted, bringing the same sickening coppery scent to my nose that had filled Mitera’s room.
I couldn’t hold it in anymore, and I vomited on the ground. I wasn’t the first one, nor the last one to lose the contents of their stomach, but I noticed neither Erix nor Maalik did, they just continued their staring contest until Agnes’ cries finally ended.
When we were finally dismissed, I turned to head to the slave quarters, but Erix grabbed my arm.
“We can’t go there,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked. “Where else would we go?”
“Maalik has a group ready to jump us as soon as we do,” Erix said, leading me to a relatively unused portion of the castle.
I followed him in silence, still in shock over what we had witnessed. It didn’t register at first where we were going until Erix tugged me into a small storeroom on the third sub floor.
The front part of the room held numerous boxes and piles of unused furniture. He led me to the back of the room to an area shielded from view from the entrance. A piece of dirty canvas hung across a small entry way. We passed under it, only to find a small room near a fireplace, two pallets made up nearby. The room held our two rucksacks, some food, and a few bottles of what looked like wine.
