27
Jase
It felt good to be dressed in pants and a shirt again. It felt even better to hold a rifle in my hands. I loaded it and thought about swinging it to point at Willow. Just the vague notion of doing that caused pain to shoot through my head and my arms and legs to lock up.
Willow walked over to me and drew a rune on my forehead, unlocking my limbs and making the pain go away as if it had never existed.
“You thought about shooting me, didn’t you?” he asked me.
“For a split second, I wondered what would happen if I pointed it at you,” I admitted.
Willow chuckled. “I’d have been disappointed if you’d lost so much of your fire that the thought didn’t cross your mind. The rules won’t let you, though. When you became bound to me, it laid a geas so you can’t.”
He walked away from then, unconcerned. I stared after him. If I couldn’t kill him, I’d have to find some other way of breaking free. That was a problem for another day, though. Today was all about getting reacquainted with my rifle. I was sorry when it was over.
The next day brought more news, though. Willow had a reply from the guild. The Queen wanted a test. Willow accepted on my behalf and chose the target I was to kill. I had two days to do it, which wasn’t much time to prepare.
“You’re a sniper, so it has to be done using your skillset,” he told me. It was enough for me to be able to bend the rules and get away with it. My skills and training set me apart from the way fae assassins operated, so I was not bound by their restrictions. I just had to abide by human conventions that a sniper would follow. So, we sat and planned, him sweetening the pot with the promise that if I succeeded in this, he’d arrange for me to see my sister before the week was out. Then we had a guard take my rifle up ahead and leave it in the area we’d decided was best for me to set up in.
It went surprisingly smoothly. Disguises are standard in an assassin’s line of work, so Lord Willow glamored me to look like one of the palace’s Brownie servants. Armed with a broom and dustpan, that allowed me to walk unmolested to the balcony where my bag was hidden and set up quickly. My target was in a clear line of sight.
The Queen stood, gesturing Willow and his father forward. “I believe you put forth a request for professional recognition?” she tittered.
“I did,” Willow said, answering her with a serious expression.
“Well, I don’t see your human, and I haven’t had a kill confirmation.” She glanced over at the Assassin’s Guild representative, who shook their head, their eyes sliding over to the person I had the order for. Their eyes widened as they spotted the red dot on his forehead. That was the moment I was waiting for. I squeezed the trigger, and my target’s head exploded in a shower of gore. Screams erupted at the unexpected carnage. I took my rifle off of its stand, picked up my brass, and crawled backward, making my way down below where I slipped through the chaos of rushing guards and screaming courtiers. Only my master, the Queen, and the Assassin Guild master stayed rooted in the places they stood. The Queen was shrieking, though, looking ready to collapse. Sucked to be her, but business is business.
Once they’d carried her away ad covered the corpse, the guild mater turned to the captain of the Queen’s guard. “Kill confirmed.”
The captain of her guard looked at Willow incredulously, his hand dropping from the sword on his hip. “You chose the Prince Consort for the test subject?” he choked out.
He shrugged. “She’s the one insisted Ghost prove himself. He seemed as good a choice as any. The rules allow for choosing anyone of age for test purposes, under these specific circumstances.”
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” his father asked him, his face white.
“Eliminated one of the threats,” Willow replied.
The guild master approached me, handing me a medallion. “Keep this on you at all times. It shows you are a recognized assassin acting within recognized parameters of the rules. I wish you luck, you’re going to need it after this.”
I had a feeling he was right.
“Come on,” Willow said, “let’s go.”
I hurried alongside him, leaving his father and the rest of the court behind as they struggled to make sense of what just happened. They were going to want tog et even. As an assassin who acted within the rules, I was untouchable. They couldn’t kill Willow yet either, as, despite his age, he had not yet reached the recognized majority for culpability. I had no doubt the Queen would be getting creative, though. We’d just killed her husband.
As we rode closer to the house, Willow looked at me. “I bet you’re wondering why him.”
Oh, I most certainly was.
“It’s all about the rules. Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a boy. The boy loved the attention and ruckus that sharing other people’s secrets brought. He and his cousin would try to see who had the juiciest one, never once thinking anything serious would happen. Until it did. You see, he saw the crown prince couldn’t do magic without wearing the gaudy jewelry he always wore. So, he told his cousin his theory, that the prince’s magic had been locked away into the stones set in the jewelry. His cousin spread it about. A few days later, a handful of courtiers were having a picnic on the palace grounds, and the cousin told them what I’d said. They challenged my notions. Just how could a fae of such lineage end up with his magic locked away? One of the courtiers stated that maybe the prince was a changeling and that the gems were the source of his magic, rather than its prison.
The Queen happened to be strolling past just then and had her guards grab the man. “Who told you?” she demanded. But she had to let the cousins and courtiers go. It had been a lucky guess. The boy who’d started it all was blamed for spreading evil gossip, his family banished from court for thirty-three seasons. The courtiers who had been at the picnic all died shortly after, all in random accidents.”
“Assassins,” I whispered.
“Indeed. Even my youthful self quickly understood the import of what happened as the death toll piled up. The Crown prince was whisked away, off to foster in Valhalla as part of a good-will gesture. He never returned. Excuses were made, and to this day, the Queen insists he will come back when it is time for him take over. Yet, no fae visiting Valhalla has ever seen him, and the Queen never says who he is staying with.”
“But if the Crown prince was a changeling, then he was human.”
