Alanna lifted her chin. “Let her go. She hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“Oh, I beg to differ.” The king’s tone deepened to an ugly growl. “I think she let herself out of your rooms specifically to defy my orders. To collude with a traitor.”
He whirled back to Keely and leaned over her threateningly. “Didn’t you, little butterfly?”
Keely glared up at him, refusing to answer.
Ballanor spoke through a snarl. “Someone tried to take water to my prisoner; someone thought they could help him. Directly against my orders. And why would you do that, little butterfly, if not because he is conspiring with your mistress?”
“No. That’s not—” Alanna began desperately in her soft Verturian accent, but she was cut off by the king’s harsh voice.
“Let’s see, shall we?”
He gestured to Grendel, who gave a curt nod and then stepped up toward the thrones. Against the wall was a small pulley, and he wound the lever in a quick series of turns that briskly tugged the opulent brocade to one side.
From the front, it had appeared flat, but now she could see there was a hollow behind the curtain. And there, in that close, dark space, chained naked against the wall, was Val.
Nim remembered being a young girl out fishing with Tris and Val, following the gurgling, rushing snowmelt up into the hills one spring. She had grown bored of waiting for a fish to bite and decided to play along the bank instead. She was jumping from rock to rock when she landed awkwardly on a large boulder, slick with moss and spray, and slipped.
She had only been underwater for a few seconds before Val had hauled her back up, but she still remembered that feeling of sudden icy cold, burning as it sucked the breath from her lungs. How the world had gone instantly silent as her ears filled with frigid snowmelt, her body shocked to stillness.
That was how she felt.
Val was hanging, almost unconscious, arms chained to a rafter above his head, legs spread-eagled in vicious iron shackles that Nim knew would be slowly siphoning out his life. His beard was rough and dirty, while multiple angry red welts and weeping lacerations marred his pallid skin. Which she could see, even from halfway across the hall, was sheened with an unhealthy sweat.
Val was here. Her big brother. Gods. What had they done to him?
Across the hall, Alanna’s face went deathly pale beneath her bruises. Next to her, Tristan went from stiff to completely rigid, his tension pouring off him in dark waves, echoing her own, as his beast rattled menacingly just on the edge of hearing.
Even Tristan’s firm calloused fingers gripping hers no longer helped. There was a dull roaring in her ears along with an icy trickle of sweat slithering down her neck, and she took a small, unconscious step forward.
Tristan’s hand clamped onto her elbow, and she froze. What could she possibly do? What would flinging herself at him achieve other than her pointless death? Nothing.
“Get him up,” ordered Ballanor, and Grendel stepped forward and punched Val hard in his exposed abdomen, raking his fist into the long bloody gashes already there. Her brother let out a groan of agony as Grendel grabbed his hair and pulled his head up to face the king.
“Stop it!” The queen took a step forward, only to have her guards grab her arms and hold her still.
Ballanor turned his cold eyes toward her. “You would think, wife, that you would be less protective of the man that killed our father, the king.” Alanna stayed silent as Ballanor continued, “Unless his betrayal was at your bidding? Hmm?”
Ballanor jumped up onto the dais and prowled across to Val. Grendel still held her brother’s head up by his hair as the king clamped a brutal hand around his throat. “Come now, Lanval, we have a room full of witnesses here, all arranged just for you. Tell everyone the truth.”
The room was tomblike as Ballanor leaned even closer to Val’s swollen face. “Let’s start with how you’ve been fucking my wife.”
Gods. He sounded so certain. So adamant. She flicked her eyes to Tristan, to the appalled shock written over his face. And then back to the horror playing itself out on the dais.
Val’s voice was scratchy and rough, but his reply was easy to hear in the dead silence of the stunned hall. “I never… never touched her.”
Ballanor smirked. “Then what, pray tell, were you doing all alone with her?”
“I was her personal guard. I was bringing her back to the palace.” Val’s broken voice faded. “We were attacked….”
The king gripped Val’s throat tighter for a second and then thrust him backward, hard, smashing his head into the wall.
Ballanor spun and leaped off the dais down to the floor as guests scrambled to clear a space.
And then he smiled, looking out across the breathless crowd.
“The queen orchestrated the massacre at Ravenstone, and you helped her,” Ballanor said over his shoulder in a soft, smooth, infinitely terrifying voice, playing to his audience. “Only someone with military knowledge could have done it. Tomorrow you’ll be hanged for treason, but today… today you’re going to confess, in front of all these people, so that everyone will know the truth.”
