Page 7

Before I can react, his hand closes around my wrist. The other closes around my jaw. Something bitter floods my mouth before I understand what is happening. I jerk backward. Too late. It burns going down, metal and wrong and tasting like something I cannot name.

I stare at him.

The grief is gone. I watch it leave his face the way a mask comes off, cleanly, completely, all at once. What replaces it is nothing I recognize. Cold and certain and utterly still, belonging to someone I have never truly known.

Every conversation. Every kindness. Every moment I had believed was real. "In your next life," he says quietly, "if you have one, trust no one."

My knees go.

I go down slowly, one hand bracing against the floor, and the light I had been holding flickers at the edges. I reach for it and find almost nothing. The poison is already moving through me faster than I can track, touching everything it reaches, finding the lightcraft and pressing against it until it gutters.

I think of Petunis. Frequency, not force.

It does not answer.

He stares down at me with a smirk. I note his fingers. They are not gray. There was no training for this. He is no deathmage. No, he is simply a traitor. I want to demand answers, to kill him, but I cannot speak and he has already calmly turned around and walked out of the room, as though nothing significant has happened at all.

Somewhere beyond these walls the palace continues. Voices in corridors. Guards at their posts. The ordinary machinery of a place that does not yet understand what has happened in this room. Colsar is running back. I know that the way I know everything about him, without being told, without needing confirmation. He will come and he will find this and whatever comes next will happen because he is here and he does not leave.

Love made cowards of people in the most inconvenient ways. There are things I wanted to say and never found the right moment for. Things I assumed I would have time to say later, when the children were asleep and there was nothing pressing in from every direction. I had believed in later the way you believe in something you cannot see. Confidently. Without examining it too closely.

My hand finds my palm.

The marking is there, faint beneath my fingers, the same tracing Kentan showed me on the mountain road when he opened my hand and let me look. Colsar had opened his too, without being asked. I had thought about that afterward.

I close my fingers around it.

Urasal.

The word does not fully form. My mind is too slow for it now. But I hold the thought of it the way I held it that first time on horseback with the mountains around me, and what comes back is not whispers or silver light or the smell of pine.

It is the children.

Kentan has them. He will take them there if he has to, a place where nothing can reach what is mine.

Whatever happens to me, they are safe.

The candles above me dissolve into gold and shadow. My fingers stay closed around the marking on my palm. My children live.

For now, that is enough.

Seven Twenty-One

COLSAR

The last deathmage does not see him coming.

That is the difference between the ones that were disguised and the ones that are not. The disguised ones had been patient, positioned, waiting in corridors they had no business being in. These later ones are simply present, as though whoever sent them ran out of time for subtlety. They move with the coordination of things being instructed rather than thinking, their bodies carrying them forward without the hesitation that belongs to anything still alive.

He has killed four between the Queen Dowager's estate and the palace gates. He kills this one the same way he killed the others — quickly, completely, without pausing to examine what he has done. The body drops in the outer corridor and he steps over it and keeps moving.

The palace is wrong.

He has known it since he turned onto the main road and felt the quality of the air change the way it changes when something has been disturbed. He could not name it precisely. He knows Asharin the way he knows his own breathing, the frequency of her, and something in that frequency has gone quiet in a way that makes the back of his neck pull tight.

He takes the children's corridor first.

He does not slow as he pushes through the door, scanning the room in a single pass, taking in Saurin and Cambra at the far wall and Kentan already turning toward him, one child against each shoulder.