“Are you?” I snapped.
“I didn’t want it to be like this. There is honor in dying for the succession. But this… I loved my brother. For all his faults and all our disagreements, I did love him.”
Loved. To Ursa, Lark was already dead.
I held my breath as we stepped forward, leaving footprints in the snow as we made our way toward the platform erected in the center of the yard. I wondered absentmindedly if it had always been there or if they had placed it there the night before, or even so soon as this morning.
The crowd from the night before wasn’t here. The King himself was standing off to the side. Cass was beside him, her eyes staring into the snow in front of her, blank and unseeing. They were red rimmed and raw, much like my own. Her lips were cracked. I wasn’t even sure she was breathing.
Ursa pulled me to the opposite side, close to the platform. Too close. I tried to squirm away, to make some excuse about not being family, not needing to have a front-row seat to this, but she held me firmly at her side and the intention was clear. I wasn’t just a witness. I was still a hostage.
A few important men stood around, solemn faced and stoic. Some soldiers were scattered about the field behind them. Rook was at the back of the crowd, as pale as the snow beneath his boots, eyes just as cold, just as dead, as Cass’. He didn’t even glance at me.
Suddenly a loud groaning sounded from somewhere nearby and I looked over my shoulder to find a gate at the base of a tower I had assumed long abandoned was opening, rolling upward. Beyond it stood two men, one of them in chains. I flinched, digging my trembling hands further into my pockets, and waited, with everyone else, for the gate to open completely. It took some time and, in those few horrible moments, nothing could be heard but the ancient mechanisms that moved the iron. I closed my eyes and felt that sound grating against my very soul.
Then the gate was open and silence fell once more as the man without shackles dragged the other one forward. They strode together, leaving footprints of their own in the untouched snow behind them, as they made their way toward us. Cass let out a sob as I let my eyes fall, finally, on Lark.
He wore a cloak as black as night with the hood drawn up over his face so that only his smooth, pale neck and the uppermost part of his chest were visible. A small mercy to his friends, to his sister, that they wouldn’t have to look upon him yet. I waited for that wave of emotion to pass over me, to drown me in his sorrow, his desperation, his anger. But it did not come.
The lack of sensation caught me off guard. I had expected a flood and was getting only a trickle. Just an inkling of the deep sadness he was harboring within him. Had he cut me off? Could he even do that?
I wasn’t even certain how this connection worked. The King had said that my magic was accessible through emotion. It had been a small cognitive leap from there to realize that all these emotions I was feeling weren’t always mine. I had always been empathetic. My uncle had raised me, saying that I had the biggest heart of anyone he’d ever met, that I had some heightened awareness of other people’s feelings. But now I was beginning to suspect that it wasn’t just empathy that had me so tuned into the feelings of those around me. It was magic. I felt Cass’ sorrow, Rook’s anger, Ursa’s disgust. But Lark’s emotions, I had always felt those the most. They were always the strongest, overwhelming even my own from time to time.
And now, I couldn’t feel them at all.
The executioner was leading him onto the platform and I saw the noose for the first time. I hadn’t paid attention to it before but it hung above the platform, right at average height. He would have to stoop to loop his neck through.
The King said nothing. He just stood, his lips set in a firm, grim line, while the executioner led his son forward and slipped that rope around his neck.
My palms were sweating, itching. Something sharp was carving a hole in my chest, leaving it so hollow that I couldn’t tell what had been there before. I made a fist, relaxed it, made a fist again. I fidgeted, kicking the snow beneath my feet, swaying with the morning breeze, anything to distract myself from what was coming, what was going to happen any minute now.
And then it did.
There was no lever, no machinery, nothing like the ancient gate and the decrepit tower. The executioner simply stepped off of the platform and raised his hand. A moment later, the platform was gone and Lark was dangling from the rope around his neck, that dark hood still hanging limply, obscuring his face.
I heard the moment his neck snapped. Watched as his feet stopped twitching.
Cass fell to the snow, wailing. Ursa took a deep breath she thought no one heard. The King just stared at the body, at his son.
Rook was gone. I wasn’t sure when he had left. I hadn’t seen him go. The soldiers were leaving as well, their duty as witnesses completed. I couldn’t stop staring at that hood. Like if I stared hard enough, I could see through it to the face beneath. I didn’t want to see it, not really. I didn’t want to see him dead, his eyes opened in some macabre imitation of that intense stare he had always had, his lips parted in the shock of death, his neck bent at some unnatural angle.
But I did question that connection that had felt so raw, so real, the night before. I had felt every ounce of his grief then, every inkling of his sorrow, his fury. I had expected to feel the moment Canis Morningstar’s soul left this plane, the moment he died imprinted upon my heart forever, but I didn’t.
I felt nothing at all.
Nothing but an overwhelming sense of loss as a tear froze upon my cheek.
Chapter twenty-one
A Different Kind of Fae
“Ifit’sfearyouneed, then feel it, but block this one.”
Ursa flicked her wrist and another half dozen shards of hardened night materialized in thin air and shot toward me at high velocity. I focused on their approach, lifting my hand to block them, and hissed when I failed to produce an adequate shield and the black daggers pierced my skin, slicing me from wrist to elbow on my left arm and piercing my right shoulder. I staggered back a step, biting back the curse on my tongue.
“No,” Ursa barked. “Again.”
She waved her hand and the daggers from before disappeared, the skin of my arms healing itself, though the pain remained. I grit my teeth and faced her again, fighting back tears as another round of knives shot forth, one of which plunged deep into the tissue of my thigh. I roared in agony, falling to my knees.
