Page 20
Chapter twenty
At Death's Door
I had no desire for the King to know about my newfound ability but I hadn’t been given the choice. Ursa had entered my room moments after my screaming had stopped to ensure I hadn’t attempted to end my life in some way or I hadn’t screamed myself into oblivion and fell unconscious. She’d found the glass shards dug deep into the plush carpets, so deep that they couldn’t be removed. I hadn’t just shattered the glass; I had turned it into a million tiny projectiles. They had shredded the carpets so thoroughly that servants were now cutting it away for replacement. I watched them work, numb, tired, too exhausted and emotionally spent to do much of anything else.
I stood by my bed, arms crossed, and stared at a male servant I had never seen before as he used a blade to cut a circle around the coffee table, extricating the shredded fabric and carefully placing it into a nearby bin. Another servant paced around with a dustpan, cleaning up all the smaller fragments her companion missed, the ones she could remove, at least.
“Remarkable,” the King was muttering from where he stood in the threshold.
Ursa was by my side, watching me from the corner of her eye as though afraid I might shatter the entire room and take us all down with it at any moment.
“I told you to move it,” he told me, finally looking away from the mess to the one who had caused it.
“And I told you I didn’t know how,” I snarled.
But he only grinned.
“How?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“You must know something. What were you doing when it happened?”
I didn’t answer so Ursa did for me.
“Screaming,” Ursa told him. “She was screaming at the top of her lungs.”
The King’s gaze snapped to me.
“Emotion,” he said, thoughtfully. “Your power is tied to emotion. How interesting.”
“Don’t you have a son to execute?” I snapped.
The servants stopped. Even Ursa tensed. The King’s gaze narrowed to a glare. He pursed his lips, clenched his jaw, then snapped his fingers. All the tiny shards of glass that the servants hadn’t finished cleaning up rose as one from the ground, hovering in the air like some strange hesitating rain, glimmering in the light from the chandelier above.
“Control,” he said, striding toward me, “is power.”
I tensed as he drew nearer, those tiny puncturing projectiles still hovering in the air behind him.
“Simple control will always defeat raw power used recklessly. No matter how great that raw power might be. You made this mess. Now, clean it up.”
He snapped and all the glittering shards of glass fell back to the floor below. The servants turned away to avoid being struck by the deadly rain.
The King turned on his heel and stormed from the room, Ursa following in his wake. The servants exchanged wide-eyed glances before scurrying away themselves, leaving me to clean my own mess as the King had ordered. I let out a roar of frustration and kicked a nearby pillow that had been removed from the couch area while they cleaned. Then I threw myself onto the bed.
I didn’t clean up my mess. I didn’t even look at the little shards of glass for the rest of the night. I just laid in bed and stared at the ceiling, unable to even sleep.
I turned toward the window beside me and stared outside at the moon and stars, at the dark night sky that grew lighter and lighter as the day approached. I wondered if Lark had slept or if he had waited for the sun as well. If he had stared outside and thought about his exceedingly long life and his ultimate demise. I wondered if he had regrets and I wondered if I was one of them.
Before the sun crested the horizon, Ursa came to fetch me. There was no servant to dress me, no gown hung in the closet, no one to fashion my hair. Just a soft brown coat and matching pleated pants, just a quick brush through my tangled knots and simple brown flats. No glitz, no glamour. This was an execution, not a ball, not court.
I tried not to look at myself in the mirror, at the red rings under my eyes from a night spent without sleep, at the puffiness of my cheeks from the tears I shed all alone. My hands were shaking so I put them in my pockets as Ursa and I left my room and headed down the hall toward the courtyard.
I had never been outside at the Court of Blood and Bone. When we had arrived, Cass had shadowstepped us right into the royal dining room and I hadn’t been allowed the freedom to venture beyond the palace walls. So when we stepped outside, it was a shock to see a vast tundra set out before me. Snowcapped mountains in the distance, fresh billowing snow blowing around our ankles, frigid air freezing my face as I blinked against the rising sun. I took a deep breath and saw my exhale in the air before me.
“Are you ready?” Ursa asked quietly beside me as we stood in the threshold.
“Are you?” I snapped.
“I didn’t want it to be like this. There is honor in dying for the succession. But this… I loved my brother. For all his faults and all our disagreements, I did love him.”
Loved. To Ursa, Lark was already dead.
I held my breath as we stepped forward, leaving footprints in the snow as we made our way toward the platform erected in the center of the yard. I wondered absentmindedly if it had always been there or if they had placed it there the night before, or even so soon as this morning.
The crowd from the night before wasn’t here. The King himself was standing off to the side. Cass was beside him, her eyes staring into the snow in front of her, blank and unseeing. They were red rimmed and raw, much like my own. Her lips were cracked. I wasn’t even sure she was breathing.
Ursa pulled me to the opposite side, close to the platform. Too close. I tried to squirm away, to make some excuse about not being family, not needing to have a front-row seat to this, but she held me firmly at her side and the intention was clear. I wasn’t just a witness. I was still a hostage.
A few important men stood around, solemn faced and stoic. Some soldiers were scattered about the field behind them. Rook was at the back of the crowd, as pale as the snow beneath his boots, eyes just as cold, just as dead, as Cass’. He didn’t even glance at me.
Suddenly a loud groaning sounded from somewhere nearby and I looked over my shoulder to find a gate at the base of a tower I had assumed long abandoned was opening, rolling upward. Beyond it stood two men, one of them in chains. I flinched, digging my trembling hands further into my pockets, and waited, with everyone else, for the gate to open completely. It took some time and, in those few horrible moments, nothing could be heard but the ancient mechanisms that moved the iron. I closed my eyes and felt that sound grating against my very soul.
Then the gate was open and silence fell once more as the man without shackles dragged the other one forward. They strode together, leaving footprints of their own in the untouched snow behind them, as they made their way toward us. Cass let out a sob as I let my eyes fall, finally, on Lark.
He wore a cloak as black as night with the hood drawn up over his face so that only his smooth, pale neck and the uppermost part of his chest were visible. A small mercy to his friends, to his sister, that they wouldn’t have to look upon him yet. I waited for that wave of emotion to pass over me, to drown me in his sorrow, his desperation, his anger. But it did not come.
The lack of sensation caught me off guard. I had expected a flood and was getting only a trickle. Just an inkling of the deep sadness he was harboring within him. Had he cut me off? Could he even do that?
I wasn’t even certain how this connection worked. The King had said that my magic was accessible through emotion. It had been a small cognitive leap from there to realize that all these emotions I was feeling weren’t always mine. I had always been empathetic. My uncle had raised me, saying that I had the biggest heart of anyone he’d ever met, that I had some heightened awareness of other people’s feelings. But now I was beginning to suspect that it wasn’t just empathy that had me so tuned into the feelings of those around me. It was magic. I felt Cass’ sorrow, Rook’s anger, Ursa’s disgust. But Lark’s emotions, I had always felt those the most. They were always the strongest, overwhelming even my own from time to time.
And now, I couldn’t feel them at all.
The executioner was leading him onto the platform and I saw the noose for the first time. I hadn’t paid attention to it before but it hung above the platform, right at average height. He would have to stoop to loop his neck through.
The King said nothing. He just stood, his lips set in a firm, grim line, while the executioner led his son forward and slipped that rope around his neck.
My palms were sweating, itching. Something sharp was carving a hole in my chest, leaving it so hollow that I couldn’t tell what had been there before. I made a fist, relaxed it, made a fist again. I fidgeted, kicking the snow beneath my feet, swaying with the morning breeze, anything to distract myself from what was coming, what was going to happen any minute now.
And then it did.
There was no lever, no machinery, nothing like the ancient gate and the decrepit tower. The executioner simply stepped off of the platform and raised his hand. A moment later, the platform was gone and Lark was dangling from the rope around his neck, that dark hood still hanging limply, obscuring his face.
I heard the moment his neck snapped. Watched as his feet stopped twitching.
Cass fell to the snow, wailing. Ursa took a deep breath she thought no one heard. The King just stared at the body, at his son.
Rook was gone. I wasn’t sure when he had left. I hadn’t seen him go. The soldiers were leaving as well, their duty as witnesses completed. I couldn’t stop staring at that hood. Like if I stared hard enough, I could see through it to the face beneath. I didn’t want to see it, not really. I didn’t want to see him dead, his eyes opened in some macabre imitation of that intense stare he had always had, his lips parted in the shock of death, his neck bent at some unnatural angle.
But I did question that connection that had felt so raw, so real, the night before. I had felt every ounce of his grief then, every inkling of his sorrow, his fury. I had expected to feel the moment Canis Morningstar’s soul left this plane, the moment he died imprinted upon my heart forever, but I didn’t.
I felt nothing at all.
Nothing but an overwhelming sense of loss as a tear froze upon my cheek.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20 (Reading here)
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38