The guard beside me jerked me upright. He spun me toward the platform where Dorian and Cirevan knelt. The two of them came into sudden view, and a wrenching premonition overcame me. Something terrible was about to be done, and I was going to be made to watch.
The king’s armor clinked as he stood. He stepped off the dais and his boots struck the cobblestones of the square. “After all she has done this day, the runt queen refuses to plead. She refuses to beg for forgiveness, or even for the lives of her closest.”
The crowd’s shouting pressed in like a physical thing, like my ears were being prodded by a hundred fingers. And all I could do was stare at Dorian.
Was it only last night we’d made love?
I turned my face aside. Rough hands clamped my cheeks, forcing me to look. Dorian wrenched at his manacles, and a wild desire to escape this nightmare surged through me. This wasn’t us. It wasn’t our reality.
But those fingers on my face were real. Sobering and real.
“Savagery only begets savagery, Queen Carys,” the king said from somewhere behind me. “Today, you will learn that.”
A gesture must have followed, because the guards standing beside Dorian and Cirevan stepped behind them. Their hands went around their prisoners’ heads, one below the jaw and one flat over the skullcap.
Then they angled their heads up. Up, up, up, until they stared into the sky.
Not just the sky.
The sun.
The sun that sat directly above us.
They couldn’t blink. Their eyes were clamped open by sunlit iron.
“No,” I breathed. I thrashed, but another guard seized my arms. He was twice as big as me, but still I fought.
I had to get to them. How long did they have before their eyes were forever gone? Thirty seconds? How long could a man stare into the sun before he went blind?
A minute, maybe. Perhaps a little longer for a fae.
This was a cruelty I had never conceived of. A fate I couldn’t fathom.
It obliterated pride. It moved my lips before I knew what I was saying.
“Stop, Rhodric.” My voice was ragged, pitiful. “I bend the knee. I bend.”
My words were half lost beneath someone’s screaming. Cirevan. It was Cirevan.
“What is that? She bends?” came the king’s voice. “Louder, please, for all to hear.”
I squeezed my good eye shut and swallowed a sob. I gathered a breath and lifted my chin. “I bend.For gods’ sake, I bend.”
A second passed. Then a chuckle. “She bends. Should we then spare the queen’s lover and her second-in-command?” I heard the clinking of armor as the king turned a half circle. “Will the people show benevolence to the fae murderers?”
Please. Please.
“No,” came the return from the throng. No, and no, and no, again and again like a cacophonous chorus to a badly composed ballad.
Cirevan went on screaming, mouth wide.
But Dorian didn’t move. He didn’t make a noise. He remained like a kneeling statue up there, his perfect throat a column toward the sun.
“The people say no,” King Rhodric said. “And so it is decided.”
No. The answer was no.
No benevolence, no mercy.
