“If you’re trying to protect me, I don’t have the patience for it today.”
Asherton turned to Huxley. “Please restrain Miss Devney.”
Huxley grabbed Magdala’s arms and pulled her back.
“I thought we were doing this together!” she cried, straining against Huxley as his fingers dug into her arms. “I thought our blood spilled together!"
Asherton cast her one last longing glance and turned away. Slowly, he mounted the steps.
Magdala’s blood boiled. “Alright, alright,” she snapped, yanking her arms from Huxley. She moved along the side of the staircase, looking up at Asherton as he ascended. This was madness. He was on display, like an actor on a stage, his body exposed to the crowd below, to the rows of shrubbery and the palace and the lake.
But she had disabled the shotfire, hadn’t she?
She pictured it, leaning against the wall in her father’s cottage. Then the powder spilling into the garden—strange and clumped, unusual. Like soil.
The barrel was as thick as a man’s arm; what kind of shotfire ball could fire from such a thing? Where had the money come from to purchase it?
Unless, all along, that powder had been dirt from the garden, that barrel just a hollow dragon bone stolen from the dracorium. Unless she was meant to be on her guard against a shotfire instead of something else.
Magdala’s mind whirred, frantic and tilting. Asherton had reached the top of the steps and was turning to face the crowd. Everyone hushed—the only sound was the rain ticking on leaves and rattling on marble. He held the torch over the basin of oil.
And Magdala’s lungs emptied of air.
The basin.
“Don’t!” she screamed. She launched onto the steps and ran toward him. The torch slipped from his grasp and plunged down, down, into the glimmering oil. A pillar of flame burst up and then blossomed out in a blast so powerful, it shuddered in Magdala’s chest. She tackled him, and both she and Asherton toppled over the side of the dais. As they plunged down through open air, Asherton twisted, pulling her against his chest. Magdala curled around him, forcing his head against her shoulder, trying to shield him. Heat and debris pattered her back, burned through her shirt, and then Asherton’s body slammed into the groundand Magdala crashed on top of him. Her forehead cracked on the muddy earth.
Magdala’s vision snapped out like a snuffed candle. Voices grated and shrilled, boots splashed on puddled stone. Hands grasped her shoulders, but she arched her body over Asherton, refusing to be pulled away. Cold hands cupped her face. Someone was screaming her name.
Her eyelids fluttered. Someone was shaking her, their voice a frantic shriek. “MAGDALA! LOOK AT ME!”
But her eyelids weighed a thousand pounds, her head cycloned. She sagged back into a heavy darkness.
Chapter 38
Ahigh whine shrilled in Magdala’s ears. Her forehead pounded like someone was cracking a sledgehammer into her skull.
She couldn’t remember where she was, or why her head hurt, but she knew that she had lost something very precious and desperately needed to drag her body up and go searching for it. Whatever it was. She couldn’t remember.
Magdala was being shifted onto a hard mattress. Something warm and wet dripped over her eyes. She lifted her hand to her forehead, and when she glanced at her fingers, they were smeared with blood. Magdala let out a cry of alarm and struggled against the hands holding her, lurching off the mattress and onto the floor.
“Where is the prince?” she rasped.
She was in the servants’ quarters, near the kitchen. A woman in a white apron stood over her. “They took him to his apartment. You’re injured …”
The memory of the dais and the explosion washed over Magdala like a drowning wave, and she stumbled to her feet, reeled, and reached out to steady herself. Her hand closed on the back of a chair, and she paused, clinging to it, until her vision steadied.
Her voice came out as a raw scratch. “Was he killed?”
“He was taken to his room,” a woman replied. “It’s only been half an hour.”
Half an hour? It felt like years. Magdala made out the door and staggered drunkenly toward it. “The curse is real,” she muttered. “It was real this whole time.”
“Please lie down so I can see to your head …” the woman said.
“I need to go to him,” Magdala panted. She reached the door, but, her knees weak, she sagged against the frame.
“The physicians will take care of him. You’re not needed.” The woman wrapped her arms around Magdala, but she lunged against her, panic rising like bile.
