She clenched her fist. Her magic rose and collided with mine. I loosened my grip. She swallowed, found her breath, and steadied herself.
Then she met my eyes with knives. “Magister Corvo has become a liability and must be dealt with. I will not let her ruin what we worked so hard for.”
I stepped closer until I towered over her. She was suddenly small, a rat under my boot. “If that is a threat, be sure not to do anything you will regret, or I will do to you exactly what we did to those poor souls at Drachenfels.”
I had shaken her to the bone. She winced, flinching beneath the shadow of my breath.
I walked back slowly, scorn hot in my veins.
“If you or your chancellor touch a single hair on Evangelina’s head, I will hang you at the gallows myself and watch you burn under my storm. Lionel will forgive me. He always does.”
A smile, cruel as a scar, split my face. Her color drained. I left her in the hollow dark of the castle and went to the armory to choose a weapon. If I were to burn an army to ash, I wanted a bit of fun first with blade and blood.
Chapter 26
Evie
Iknew it was neither the place nor the time, but I had to say something. I had to tell His Majesty that I knew, and if I knew, it was only a matter of time before someone else would know too. I knew it was foolish. I knew the king, least of all the magisters, would want to keep this secret buried for eternity and let it rot. Whether they were ready to face what they had done was a fight I could not win. But I had to say something.
The groans hadn’t left my mind since we’d fled Drachenfels. Since we’d returned to Befest on Kael’s horse, silent as stones. I felt these poor souls scratching at my thoughts, aching to be heard, acknowledged, thanked. Their presence surrounded me like walls no force could break.
And Kael had no idea how much it ate at me. So much so that the threat of an imminent siege felt almost benign. He told me to head to the lower halls for shelter, but all I wanted was to return to that mountain and make it right. Somehow.
The souls needed peace. I had no idea how to give it to them, but I felt I could if they only let me.
Let it lie, he had said. I could not.
I saw the storm in his eyes, the one I had grown to know deeply, the one I had even learned to tame. It looked like pure blue fire, like the fires of hell. He was going to leave no survivors.
Just like at Drachenfels Keep.
Did Dereck Thorne deserve it?
Because of this man, this earl, the kingdom had fractured, and many had turned to violence in desperation. Part of his propaganda was to claim the cure was a curse, and many perished even after it had spread across the kingdom. Because of him, feeding on fearful hearts, countless lives that could have been saved were lost.
But who were we to say that death by lightning was proper punishment?
It was the same story again.
Drachenfels had taught me that nothing was simple. No one was wholly guilty or wholly innocent, not even the ones who died screaming in those tainted halls. The echoes there had shown me pieces of lives twisted by fear, by duty, by the kind of choices people only make when the world is already burning. Good men did terrible things. Monsters wept. And I kept wanting to believe that if someone suffered enough, there should be a line drawn somewhere, a point where punishment turned into cruelty. But if I looked at it honestly, most of us crossed that line long before we realized it.
Dereck Thorne had been cruel, yes. He had fed the fire until it swallowed half the kingdom. Yet even now, when I pictured Kael’s lightning catching in the air, I wondered if any mortal deserved that kind of end. The echoes that haunted me whispered otherwise. They whispered that justice was never clean, that vengeance only ever wore feigned righteousness.
Maybe that was why Drachenfels had become the source of the blight. The souls trapped there had not been wicked. Not all of them. Some had followed orders. Some had believed lies. Some had been too afraid to run. Some had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And in the end, they had all suffered and burned the same.
Secrets this dark didn’t come undone because one small magister dared to speak.
And still… Saying nothing felt worse.
There were no right choices. Only the ones that hurt less. Only the ones you could live with in the morning.
Maybe Dereck Thorne deserved lightning. Maybe he didn’t. But in the end, Kael would make the choice no one else wanted to make. Just as he had in Drachenfels. Just as he would again.
And I was finally starting to understand something I had fought for weeks.
Having no choice… was still a choice.
One the living made.
