When I looked back at Tyrn, he was stalking toward the hallway. I jumped to my feet, ready to follow him, but he wasn’t leaving. Merely retrieving something.
It was a bird cage. He swung it around with a flourish, sending the bird crashing against the cage bars. It squawked angrily and flapped its wings in a bird-like tirade, sending black feathers flying all over the floor.
A raven.
My uncle had trapped a raven in a gilded cage.
“Here is how I know,” Tyrn raged. “Here is her spy, come to finish what he started.” Tyrn threw the cage on the ground. It landed upright but skidded across the polished marble until it banged against the leg of the couch I had just occupied.
The bird screeched again, incensed and annoyed. Black feathers whirled around it as it waved its wings and hopped back and forth on its scaley feet.
“Don’t you see?” Tyrn screamed, more at the bird than at me. He was losing his grasp on sanity again, slipping beneath the madness. “Don’t you see what I see? Here is the leader of your assassins, Tessana. Here is the man who tried to kill you twice!”
I blinked at the bird, both knowing what he was saying was impossible and that he was right. But it couldn’t be.
“They’d follow Tabby and me around the halls as if they were watching us. Their little claws clicked on the floor in a sort of warning. And they wouldn’t let the guards near your rooms. Old Curtis nearly lost an eye when he tried to stand guard near your door.”
“There were so many. And they were downright... vicious.”
And then I thought about the spells Ravanna had. Her grimoire.How to make an army... of ravens.
The Bog Witch’s accusation—The Raven Queen.
Caspian squatted in front of the bird, meeting its beady eyes. “I don’t understand. You’re saying that this creature tried to kill Tessana?”
“That is no creature,” my uncle swore through heaving breaths. “That is a man who sold his soul to evil. He lied to me. Lied about his loyalty. And his origin. And she lied too. Spinning her web so I wouldn’t see what was right in front of me. Feeding me poison, just like she did to her husband. Just like her sister. Just like our parents. All of it lies and lies and lies. All of it poison and murder and death.”
Before we could calm my uncle down, he reached for the cage once more and tore open the door. The bird screamed shrieking protests and clawed and pecked at my uncle, turning his hand and arm bloody as he fought.
Caspian took to my side again, neither of us knowing what to expect next.
Then finally, Tyrn managed to wrap his hand around the bird's neck and yank it from the cage. The raven was much bigger up close than one would expect, and the muscles beneath its feathered exterior seemed particularly strong as it fought my uncle’s punishing grasp.
“Do you know why we couldn’t find the army of assassins that nearly killed you both? Or the guard who tried to murder you in your room, Tessana? Do you know why I have guards around the castle, ready with bows and arrows to shoot down anything that flies?”
“No, Uncle.” My reply was a choked whisper.
He had both hands gripping the raven’s throat now. It was struggling to breathe, and its fight was growing more desperate. “Because they’re not birds at all.” With a sudden, savage twist of his hands, Tyrn snapped the raven’s neck, and it stopped flapping and clawing altogether. From one moment to the next, the room was feral with fight and then hushed and stagnant where a void of movement now silently echoed from wall to wall.
Tyrn dropped the dead bird to the ground at his feet. I gasped a startled breath and clung to Caspian’s arm. He seemed as equally astonished as I was.
But then the impossible I could not wrap my mind around became possible in front of my eyes. For it was not a raven lying dead at my feet, but Crenshaw. He was wilder than I remembered him. Untamed and... more beastly looking. But there he was. Naked, and human, and dead.
“Dragon’s blood,” Caspian hissed as I gasped and fought to breathe again.
Tyrn looked from Crenshaw to me, his eyes as sober and intelligent as I had ever seen them. “I will coronate you tonight, Tessana. You will wear the Crown of Nine. And then you will get ready for war.”
ChapterNineteen
An hour later, I met my uncle in the throne room. I’d half expected him to have forgotten how crazed he’d been. And even though he was here, and the Crown of Nine was in his grasp, he still did not convince me that he knew exactly what he was doing.
There was something ghostly about him... something fading. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew it was due to his sudden need to crown me before my birthday and the elaborate celebrations still in the works.
Caspian was here too, looking nervous for the first time since I’d met him. He hadn't seemed worried even when he’d saved my life on the balcony and taken arrows for me. He’d brazenly pushed his way through that just like he did everything else. But across the room, standing with armed men and wearing his kingdom’s desert garb, he was pale and tight-lipped. The men with him stood protectively in a semicircle around him. They must be his guard detail.
What did he expect to happen? In the Elysian throne room of all places?
Katrinka was here too. I’d tried to explain what had happened in the library, leaving out the more gruesome details, but she’d been more interested in Caspian’s practical marriage proposal to me than the coronation ceremony.
