‘I certainly do not expect you to be capable of killing the Acolyte. That honor is to be bestowed upon someone else. Someone the Citadel can trust. To be quite frank … we hardly know you.’
‘And yet you have decided my fate,’ she said. ‘Like Lordach has done for the rest of us.’
His jaw twitched. ‘I don’t question the decisions of my father and his War Table. I certainly won’t question the gods.’
‘I suppose you wouldn’t, when you’ve spent your life protected. Knowing you’ll never have to go into war, never have to risk your ownneck when the rest of us will do it for you,’ she spat. ‘We die. So that you can live.’
‘Careful,’ Kinlear warned. ‘You don’t know what you’re speaking of.’
‘Don’t I, though? Who’s the one that spent the past many weeks in the cage, while you were …’ She waved a hand, searching for an answer.
‘While I was what?’ Kinlear asked, raising a dark brow.
The door opened again and a few Scribes entered. They bowed to him, and he inclined his head, the picture of respect.
Another spike of rage went through her. ‘While you were galivanting about the castle in your silly little outfits, all prim and proper, and?—’
‘We needn’t bring the outfits into this,’ Kinlear said, like she’d truly wounded him.
‘While you were reading books, lazing about in your plush quarters, drinking winterwine from your precious flask when it’s not even Absolution Day. While you were?—’
‘I’m dying, Ezer.’
The words left his lips so fast she almost didn’t catch them.
She paused.
‘What?’
He inclined his head towards a small window seat in a shadowed alcove, where few would overhear their conversation.
She sighed and followed him to it. He sat gingerly, wincing, and turned to face her.
She did not sit.
‘I’m dying,’ he said again.
She shook her head. ‘I’m not certain what you’re getting at.’
‘The truth,’ he said. He raised a brow, like he knew she wasn’t getting it. ‘Dying. You know, the way people do when the gods decide they are no longer worthy of spending time in this world. The kind of dying that ends with a freshly dug grave.’
It was outlandish.
He didn’t wield, so there was no reason why he’d be on hisdeathbed already. He was young, and he was theprince,and they lived in a world of magic.
But then he coughed, and the sound was wet, like he had water in his lungs. He reached for that vial around his throat and uncorked it, his hands shaking as he took a sip.
‘I was born sick, barely hanging onto life, while Arawn was born strong,’ Kinlear said, as he recorked the vial. He put his head back, letting the sickly-sweet liquid wash over him. And when he opened his eyes again, they were heavy with sadness. All the anger had fizzled out of her body, gone in a rogue wind. ‘The Masters, Alaris, all the best Ehvermage Healers we know in Touvre. They saved me at birth. But … they cannot fix me now.’ He looked at the cane in his lap and sighed. ‘There was no accident with the eagles that gave me my limp. Not as many would believe. No illness, that gave me my cough. My body, Ezer, is giving up on me.’
He removed his outer cloak, while she just stood there staring at him.
And when it fell from his shoulders, she nearly gasped at howthinhe was. How his shoulders and lithe frame seemed to have shrunk.
In a matter of weeks.
‘What is it?’ Ezer asked. ‘The illness.’
He leveled his gaze on her. ‘It is my fate. Many things have been eradicated from Lordach, thanks to magic. But some diseases still linger. I’ve spent my life serving the gods, praying to them, and … for whatever reason, magic can’t heal me.’
