Edmund dropped the sword. His mouth fell open, every muscle in his body suddenly going slack. My sword was already in position as I spun, ready to face the oncoming attack.
But it was not an attack at all. A knot of men clambered into the courtyard. The thick piles of snow had deadened the sound of their approach.
I recognized faces. Two guardsmen. A fae trapper who sometimes passed a night or two in the castle’s kitchen after selling game to the cooks. The lithe body strung between them was more than familiar. I knew it as well as my own.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded as my mind tried to make sense of what I saw.
Alair’s arms were bound, as were his legs. The guardsman dragged him, but he wasn’t making it easy on them. He thrashed violently back and forth, and his skin was coated with thick black fluid. The guards were coated with it, too.
“Edmund, go,” I ordered over my shoulder. Whatever this was, he did not need to see it. But I did not look over my shoulder to check that he’d actually listened, and I didn’t spare the energy to compel him.
A wave of putrid decay assaulted my senses as the cold wind shifted. Gods, was that coming from Alair?
I reached for him, trying to catch his shoulder, but he thrashed away.
“Alair? Alair, hold still.” I shoved my sword into my belt, trying to catch his face between my hands. But he twisted, his entire body contorting. The guard on his left stumbled, the trapper catching him and pulling them both up. “What is happening?”
“He went feral. He killed one of the stallions.”
I wasn’t sure who spoke. I wasn’t sure I could believe his words. Alair would never… not for a hundred different reasons. He loved his posting in the stables. He was proud of the work he did, caring for the horseflesh, the only beasts of their kind left in Velora. He understood that his position here in Balar Shan was predicated on his usefulness.
“Alair,” I said again.
But he did not seem to hear me. He did not respond to the pressure of the men holding him, or their words of threat. Hethrashed and fought, his hair falling forward over his eyes. The black bile that coated his body leaked from his mouth. Was it coming from his eyes, too, or had it smeared all over him? He was sick; he had to be sick.
I checked his body for wounds as best I could, but found nothing. “What is wrong with him?”
“I don’t know. We heard the horse squealing,” the trapper said. The guards were too busy restraining him to speak. I did not know the man well, but it didn’t take much skill to read the grimness in his heavily lined face. “He was eating it alive.”
It couldn’t be true.
I finally caught his face between my hands.
“Alair,” I said. His eyes were black. That was wrong. The laughing light was subsumed by darkness. The black bile was leaking from his eyes. His nose, too. This was not an illness. This was… I did not even have the words for it. Fear uncoiled itself in my stomach. “Alair, please.”
But his eyes did not see me. I was not sure they saw anything.
I tried to suck in a breath, only to choke on the thick, vile scent of the bile that poured from Alair’s orifices. I had to step back, pounding my own fist against my chest. By the time I straightened, out of breath, panic had shifted to something sharper.
The king had arrived.
My father stood with arms crossed over his chest, a pose so similar to the one I’d taken earlier that my stomach revolted for a wholly new reason. The arch of Balar Shan’s central tower framed him, adding a gravitas that was not necessary.
We all understood that his power here was absolute.
“Killing one of the king’s horses is tantamount to thievery,” he said. He looked over Alair and the men holding him, but he came no closer. Another guard stood panting at his side. Hemust have run ahead to apprise the king of what had happened. “What is the punishment for stealing from the Crown?”
No one spoke. They all knew the question was for me.
I had tried so hard to keep Alair to myself. To protect him. But Balar Shan was too small to keep anything secret for long. I straightened to my full height, the equal of my father. Alair was in my keeping.
“He is not well,” I said. There was no point in arguing the law.
There was no point in arguing at all. There was a commotion behind the king, in the base of the tower. He stepped aside to reveal my mother, a guard dragging her upward from her room in the bowels of Balar Shan.
She did not fight the guard, but he still dragged her. Her human legs did not move fast enough to suit him. I was halfway to her when one of the guards holding Alair screamed. He’d bitten the guardsman’s shoulder.
I stood in the middle of the courtyard as my heart began to shred.
