Just like I was responsible for the carnage at Carnith.
Then there’s Midas’s voice. Tinged with the timbre of his plea.“Auren.”
I can feel it—how the crowd turns on me. The pity they feel for King Midas. I’m already the villain in their eyes. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that being the villain isn’t always a bad thing.
“Thank you, Queen Kaila,” the king announces. “But one must ask,wereyou in the room while King Midas was killed? Did you witness it firsthand?”
Kaila pauses before answering, “No, King Merewen. I had to flee.”
“Flee? Why is that?”
“Because Lady Auren didn’t just trick and kill the king,” Kaila states. “She also holds a dark power that none of us knew.”
“What power?”
Her sharp eyes look straight ahead, like a performer delivering her perfected lines to the audience. “I witnessed Lady Auren stealing Midas’s gold-touch. And she killed him with it, just as she tried to kill me.”
The crowd erupts into gasps and whispers.
King Merewen looks at me. “How does the accused respond?”
“I didn’t steal anything,” I grit out.
I don’t trust these monarchs. What if they want to keep me in here and force me to gild things just like Midas? They have a goal in mind for this Conflux, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to kidnap me. If I defend myself, will they only use it against me?
“No?”
“No,” I reply through gritted teeth. “I didn’t steal Midas’s magic.”
In the worst timing imaginable, all the gold that’s been gathering beneath my grip starts to dribble down the poles in thick streams.
The gathered throng erupts with exclamations, fingers pointed, eyes widened.
“It’s true!”
“She’s got King Midas’s power!”
I glare at the crowd, trying to scream back. “It’s not his power! It never was!” My voice is inconsequential. Drowned out by a sea come to wash me away.
“She’s a thief, a cheat!”
“Guilty! Guilty!”
I yank my hands away from the thin pillars, but all that does is ensure that gravity is not on my side. Now, gold no longer drips slowly from my hands. It floods out of my skin, streaming from my fingers to puddle on the floor. It soaks the bottoms of my burnt feet, staining the hem of my dress, gathering higher, but being contained by some invisible barrier that doesn’t allow it to pass the poles.
“Guilty!”
It’s like being cut open at the wrists and watching myself bleed. I can’t stop the flow, but I can feel its deluge draining out of me, weakening me even more.
That’s when I notice threads of black appear inside the gold.
At first, it’s just a single line of it that drips down in a heavy, dense drop and splashes at my feet. Then there’s more, until it’s streaking through every single rivulet, like someone has dumped black ink and swirled it around.
What is that?
The gold ispouringout of me now, and I know the monarchs are speaking, know the throng is shouting, but my ears are ringing, heart pounding, because these dark lines...they look like—
“Great Divine.”
