A window had broken, but nothing had been thrown at it from outside.
The guards were helping Father and Mother up off the floor, and Balert rushed over to where I was still draped over Arlen.
I got up, leaving my brother to his valet, and crossed to the window. I crouched at the gap and looked at the broken edge of the frame.
The molding looked rotted. The wood where the casement had been fixed to the frame was dark and soft and crumbling, gone punky with dampness, so that the heavy old window had simply pulled itself loose under its own weight and fallen.
Or so it was made to look.
I wasn't a carpenter, but I had eyes, and the rot didn't fit the rest of the window assembly, which seemed intact. It was also too even, too contained, a neat band of decay exactly where the fixings sat and nowhere else, while the rest of the frame stillseemed perfectly sound. Dampness didn't cause rot in a neat, linear fashion.
The glass had come out clean of its bed, as though the putty that should have held it had been worked loose first. Someone had spent quiet hours on this window. Someone had known about the assessment and had made certain that Arlen didn't pass it by reproducing the circumstances that had put him in the wheeled chair and robbed him of his confidence.
The breaking glass mimicked the one thing guaranteed to break him.
Why?
Who benefited from my brother's misfortune? Or rather, who thought that he would benefit once Arlen was out of the picture.
Avren.
He was the most likely to do this. Perhaps not with his own hands, but he could have paid someone.
Balert?
The man seemed devoted to Arlen, but Avren could have bought his loyalty.
I wasn't sure about Balert, but I was pretty sure about Avren. Sitorians wouldn't have bothered with breaking Arlen psychologically, and neither would political rivals inside the Federation. The previous assassination attempt might have originated with either of those, but this was an inside job.
Avren dismissed Arlen as broken, and since he assumed the twins weren’t considered an option and didn’t know that I had been promised the throne, he believed that he was the next in line. He was motivated to see Arlen eliminated, believing that removing him would make him heir.
For Avren, it was a simple calculation.
I was grateful that he didn't know I'd been tapped, because Avren was dangerous. If he knew I was standing between himand the crown, he might do me a lot of damage, and hurting me physically was not even the worst of what he could do.
I stood and turned back to my family, but I wasn't going to tell them my suspicions. If it was indeed Avren, I would have to find a clever way to deal with him.
I went to Arlen.
Balert had gotten him back into the chair and was checking him for injuries, but somehow the shards seemed to have missed him.
That didn't mean he was all right, though.
He wasn't. His eyes were open, but they were not with us in this room. His pupils had blown wide and black, and his breath came in fast, shallow tearing pulls. His hands were shaking in his lap along with the rest of his body that could still move.
I knew what it was. I'd seen the edges of it and pulled him back from it. But this was worse than the edge. This was all the way under. It was the flood the healer had warned me about, the door we'd cracked open week after week, torn off its hinges by the one stimulus that matched exactly the thing that had broken him. Not an echo of it like a dropped tray or a wine glass breaking. A big window coming at him.
I knelt in front of him. "Arlen. The wheels. Put your hands on the wheels, feel the rubber. A window broke because of rot, and nothing is coming. It's over. Hear my voice. You're here. It's now."
None of it reached him. I repeated it time and again, low and even, providing a handrail and not pushing. He just stared through me at a gym five weeks gone and shook.
There was a devastating sort of helplessness in watching a discipline I'd staked everything on dissipate into thin air. I kept talking past the point of hope because stopping was unthinkable, but eventually I understood that the only thing left to do was wait for his body to exhaust the terror.
His mind had gone somewhere I couldn't follow and couldn't call him back from.
"How long has he been like this?" Father's voice was quiet, controlled, the frightened-soldier steadiness clamped back down over whatever was underneath.
"It will pass," I said, not turning. "It takes time. The shock was bad. It was an exact replay of what happened before, just without the grenade."
