Page 46 of The Shattered King

Someone was shouting my name again.

I stood at the end of a long corridor in the castle. It had the same dark stone walls, though none of the castle’s halls stretched this long. No sconces or lamps here. No torches.

So very, very cold. Frost glued my bare feet to the floor.

“ Nym! ”

There it was again, coming from the end of the hallway. I couldn’t see who called me—too dark. Shadows swallowed the stone. Swallowed me.

I just needed to ... sit. To rest awhile. I leaned into the wall. Started sliding down to the floor.

“ Nym! ”

I paused. I knew that voice. I knew it from a story ... a story someone must have told me, because no one could hear books. I tilted my head, listening for it, wondering.

“Hello?” I asked, prying one frozen foot from the floor, then the other. My legs weighed a thousand pounds each; I leaned into the cold stone, dragging them forward.

Voices echoed up the hallway, too many and too quiet, talking over one another, confusing each other. I inched closer, shivering, trying to pick out their words. The corridor kept expanding, sucked into the shadows.

“— physician , now!” he screamed.

Pattering footsteps. I paused and turned around, but I saw no one, nothing. Just the hall expanding forever in the other direction, too.

Looking back, I saw the hallway had changed. A crenellated pattern of odd-shaped blocks, most of them gray, a few green. I knew this. I’d seen this before.

Some of the pieces had fallen off and hit the floor. I picked one up, surprised at its density. Turned it over in my hands.

“ Hold on, Nym, ” the voice said. I felt hands on my face, yet I stood alone, gripping that heavy block. “ Please hold on. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me, not now. ”

With all my strength I hoisted that block and set it with the others, and then the corridor vanished into the black, sucking me down with it.

I gasped in a lungful of air, like I’d swum up from the bottom of a lake and breached its surface only a second before drowning. Then I coughed, old blood flecking into my mouth. I turned onto my side, wheezing. Warm hands grasped my shoulders.

“Thank the gods,” Renn said. “Thank you. Thank you. ”

A new voice, low and masculine, said, “She’s still as she was before. Dark in there, and not only from this. Something’s wrong with her.”

I blinked, taking in my surroundings. I was on the floor in my room.

Late-morning sun filtered through the windows.

Renn crouched in front of me—his were the hands holding me.

Behind him stood Ard and the queen, chewing her nails in a show of fear I’d never seen her have.

I pushed myself upright, groaning at the stiffness in my joints.

Glimpsed a familiar face—Brekk, the healer who had mended me after I’d fallen to the rat plague. Behind him knelt Sten.

I looked down and shuddered. My entire torso was scarlet with blood, my dress soaked with it. The stones beneath me, bloodied. My hand brushed what I thought was glass, but as I picked it up, I recognized it as a shard of violet agate.

My necklace, shattered.

Gods above. “Someone tried to kill me,” I whispered.

The room grew very quiet, and I stared at that piece of agate, trying to comprehend why .

“Renn, I’m fine. You know how the healing works.

” I had lost a lot of blood, but the Rovian healer had done an adequate job of repairing me.

Lonnie had come to help me bathe and dress, and I had not yet left my room before Renn had returned to check on me.

I sat by the fire, on a chair now, warming through.

I was still cold from the experience, but it was nothing food and rest wouldn’t resolve.

Anger tightened his eyes and misery shined within them. “You don’t even know.” He paced from the mantel and returned again. “You were nearly dead, Nym. Your pulse was nothing. You ...” He pressed his lips together and swallowed. Turned away.

I drew my shawl closer and stared into the flames. “You’re right, I’m not fine. Physically, I am hale. I promise. But ...”

I’d recounted to him, and to the head of the castle guard, what I remembered from the night before. I guessed the attack happened near midnight. The man had been in black, short, fit. He’d come and left through the window. I hadn’t seen his face.

“Ursa was there,” I whispered, though for now we were alone in the room. I thought of the slickness of death across my skin. The twist of the knife. My assailant had intended for me to die. “She tried to warn me. She made me stay awake.” I rubbed my hands together. “You made me stay awake.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t find you until morning. Someone had broken into the keep and stabbed you, and I slept through it .”

“I heard you, Renn,” I murmured, meeting his gaze. “I was in this forever hallway, just like one in the keep but longer, stretching before me. And I heard you. I was able to move one more stone on my lumis. Were it not for you and my sister, I would have died.”

I wondered how many more times I could cheat death before it took me outright. Had the assassin poisoned his blade, I’d be a corpse.

Back with Ursa. With our parents. Yet I found little joy in that imagined reunion.

He sucked in a deep breath, perhaps taking some comfort in the description. After mulling over it a moment, he knelt in front of me and took my hands in his. “And you have no description of the assailant?”

“A couple inches taller than me, dressed in black. Male.” I squeezed his fingers back. “Nothing else I can think of. No one I might suspect. Especially not anyone that could scale to a fourth-story window.”

But that was the big question—who wanted me dead?

Renn wondered if they’d mistaken me for another noblewoman, perhaps the wife of Lord Barn, the one from the north who was staying at the castle, or perhaps Princess Eden, though why she would be a target, we couldn’t decide.

If Sesta had attempted the hit, me as a target wouldn’t make sense.

They wouldn’t even know who I was. The queen hardly favored me, though she needed me if she wanted her son to live.

She’d spent twenty years finding me. And I did not think the mortification on her face when I awoke was an act.

If so, she should have been on a stage, not in a keep.

But even then, Renn was not the heir. I didn’t think the attempted kill was meant to hurt him.

Renn stood and drew me up with him. “I want you with Sten and Ard in my rooms.”

“Where will you be?”

“With the search party.”

The assassin would be long gone by now, but pointing out the fact did not seem wise. Renn appeared very much like his lumis: fragile and cracked, ready to shatter at any point.

I gave in to him, for I was deeply indebted to him, so grateful he’d had the foresight to come to me instead of wait on me, grateful for his voice in the darkness to provide me an anchor.

I feared him—what he represented for me, his closeness to me, like we were braiding together so tightly I would never be able to separate from him before the inevitable knife cut our rope.

But as he led me away, an arm around my shoulders as though I’d only been bandaged, not healed by the craft, I felt warmer and safer than I had by the fire, and for the time being I allowed myself to feel safe.

I settled on the sofa in his salon. He had a too-large breakfast tray brought up and a bleary-eyed Bay to attend him while Ard and Sten stayed with me, per his command.

Before he left, he leaned down to me and murmured, “If you can bring yourself to do one more thing for me, please stay here. It’s worth nothing if I lose you. ”

His voice sent gooseflesh down my arms and made my heart squelch like a rag wrung of water.

He departed swiftly, and I did not see him again until the middle of the night.

I did as he asked and stayed guarded in his suite.

He returned sweaty and filthy, like he’d been mucking stalls, and tired.

When I rose to meet him and touched his jaw to dowse, he didn’t stop me.

I fixed him once again, then fell asleep on the sofa as he bathed in his private chamber.

I slept soundly and did not wake at dawn as I was trained to do. Instead Renn woke me, sitting beside me on the couch, and said, “We found him.”

The assassin had been arrested during the night.

How they could be sure they’d apprehended the right man, I didn’t know, but the castle guard was, and they’d secured him in the dungeon.

I was not permitted to see his face; the cells were closed off to everyone but the king until the interrogators learned who had hired the man, and Renn seemed very confident it would be soon.

The story spread quickly, and the castle buzzed with it, from the nobility to the stable hands.

As Renn had begged me not to leave his suite, Lonnie paid me a visit, delivering a lunch tray.

“I hear they do awful things, the interrogators. Break your fingers one by one, pluck your eyelashes, things like that.”

I winced. I did not believe in torture; there was enough evil and pain in the world already, and humankind needn’t inflict more upon itself. And yet I very much wanted this tale to be over. I very much did not want to be afraid.

Renn was gone most of that day, too. I insisted I attend to him, to be his safety net, but he bade me stay with the guards.

I was going mad in his suite, without even dowsing to occupy me.

I grew tired of books and danerin, especially because Ard and Sten were not practiced players.

I wrote another letter to Lissel, speaking of anything but the fact that someone might want me dead.

I wrote until my hand cramped and could hold a pen no more, then I paced, absently picking apart my curls as I did so.

Renn didn’t return until after dinner, slouching with exhaustion. I took his hand and pulled him to a chair. “This is pointless,” I snapped at him, then dowsed, seeing all his baubles and orbs set in place.

“It is not,” he countered with a grimace. “We found him.”

I pulled away from him. Sat on the edge of the table to face him, our knees nearly touching. “Him? The one who hired the kill? The assassin talked?”

“He didn’t need to.” Renn leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“We never actually caught the assassin, Nym. But I had my suspicions. His employer had to be someone at the castle; you’ve no interactions with anyone else.

I convinced the head of the castle guard to play along, to pretend we’d caught him to put the fear of Hem into whoever it might be.

And earlier today, Whitestone vanished.”

The name had the blood draining from my face. “Whitestone?”

Renn’s countenance darkened. “He quietly packed his things and went on his way, thinking to flee before his hireling revealed him. We caught up to him, arrested him. He admitted all of it. Begged for mercy. Said you had replaced him, ruined him.” He scoffed, then sobered. “He’ll hang at dawn.”

I leaned back onto my hands, suddenly lightheaded.

“I ... see.” It should not have surprised me, that the castle physician wanted me dead.

I had replaced him, when it came to Renn’s care, as well as anyone direly sick or injured.

I’d inadvertently made him feel small ..

. and for anyone who could not peer into a lumis, Renn would seem healed.

Perfect, at most times. Or, perhaps, his relapses made my work seem pointless.

Either way, the physician had painted me a disposable enemy and had nearly succeeded in eliminating me.

“Where ... is he now?” I asked.

“Dungeon. Nym.” He placed a knuckle under my chin. “Are you all right?”

I nodded, though a few tears moistened my eyes, and I blinked them away. Renn brushed back a lock of hair from my face, tucking it behind my ear.

“He won’t hurt you,” he promised. “No one will hurt you.” Withdrawing from me, he sighed.

“I’ve been thinking. That first time, when you fainted in my room .

.. it showed me how much I needed you. How much I liked your company, and all the ways I had failed you.

This time”—he swallowed, the apple of his throat bobbing—“it made me realize how selfish I’ve been. ”

“Renn . . .”

“It’s time for you to go home.”