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Now Halbertwassitting up straight, suddenly, smooth and sophisticated and handsome in a way that made my skin crawl.His smile at me was about as genuine as his non-existent fae gold, and just as fleeting. Around us, the audience had abruptly gone silent – a few hundred excited humans, all realising at the exact same time thatsomethingwas about to happen.
If only I had the faintest idea what it was.
‘Yes, Halbert?’ Norris said, looking like the only person in the room blissfully unaware of the tension. The look Rosalind and Delwin exchanged did not escape me; the latter’s hand suddenly lay a few inches closer to the sword at his hip.
‘I was just wondering …’ Halbertsavouredthe words, this frozen moment in which everyone’s breathless attention lay focused on him and him alone. Slow. Theatrical. Full of honey-sweet venom. ‘Could you tell us a little more about your exact relationship with the Silent Death, perhaps, Emelin?’
A sharp, collective intake of breath around me.
‘I don’t see how that would be related to the matter at hand,’ Rosalind said, with the sharp impatience of a woman dealing with a nagging toddler. ‘He’s not the one asking for help, is he?’
‘No,’ Halbert admitted, still with that ominous sweetness lacing his words as he smiled at her and then back at me. ‘No, he isn’t. But we are basing our decision on the assumption that the young lady here is of sound mind and a trustworthy messenger in general, and the … well, let’s say,rumours’ – he gave an amused little wiggle of his head – ‘coming in from the Crimson Court do admittedly cast some doubt on that point. So if you don’t mind, Emelin?’
Rumours. My act as Creon’s witless little pet. The meal I’d spent in his lap. The ball where he’d all but torn my dress off me in the bone hall, right under the nose of the Mother herself. How much of it had made its way north – how much of it could this smirking man before me possibly have heard?
How much, I wondered with a stutter of panic in my chest, could Valter and Editta possibly have heard?
Best to play it safe. ‘Do I correctly understand that you’re asking me what reasons I have to trust Creon Hytherion?’
Judging by his smug expression, that was not what he was asking at all, but he said, ‘That would be a good start, yes.’
‘In that case,’ I said slowly, ‘do you know what demons are?’
The hall remained icily quiet. Judging by the infinitesimal faltering of Halbert’s smirk, the answer to that question was negative.
Good.
‘They’re creatures capable of affecting the feelings of others,’ I continued, voice deliberately flat. ‘Whatever a demon makes you feel, he will feel the opposite. Alternatively, if a demonstopsyou from feeling something, he will feel the sensation instead.’
On the left, Rosalind’s eyes widened abruptly – of course she had realised where I was going long before I actually arrived there. But she remained silent, did not interrupt my monologue or the breathless anticipation surrounding it.
‘Creon is half demon,’ I said.
More than a few people gasped behind me.
‘I know all the same stories you do – I hated him as much as you do, at the start. Until he returned from one of his assignments on the brink of death and I realised – I finally understood – why no one ever screams under his knives. They don’t feel the pain. He is the one feeling it all, instead – the one who has felt it all for almost a century and a half.’
It had become impossible to separate the gasping from the urgent mutters behind me, the shock rippling across the galleries on either side of the hall. The corners of Halbert’s lips had not so much sagged as stiffened – the look of a man holding on to his plans and composure by his fingertips.
‘So when I realised he’d done all that tohimself,’ I said with a shrug, ‘that he stuck the burning pokers into his own eyes and flayed the skin off his own back, for the simple reason thathe was the only one at her gods-damned court who would ever show such mercy to the people she wanted dead … Well, after that I couldn’t really go back to hating him, could I?’
Rosalind had clasped a hand over her mouth, as if that physical barrier of flesh and bones was all that could stop her from blurting out words she desperately wanted to speak. Norris muttered something beside her, looking a little nauseous.
‘I see,’ Halbert said, and something about his tone told me the fight wasn’t over yet. Like an archer taking aim. Like a poisoner counting the drops falling into an innocent drink. ‘So that is why you jumped into his bed – to comfort him?’
The hall erupted in outraged cries.
‘Halbert!’ Rosalind snapped, eyes shooting back and forth between the spectators and me with disconcerting urgency. ‘This is not—’
‘But itisrelevant, esteemed colleague.’ Oh, the unholy glee in his eyes – I wondered if the war even mattered to him at all, if this wasn’t just a game between him and Rosalind to his mind. ‘It’s relevant to everyone in this room. We’ve all lost friends to that monster, haven’t we? We’ve lost family to that monster?’
Her expression was just shy of an eyeroll.Did you really?that look suggested.You, city-born to affluent parents?
But all she said was, ‘And as Emelin clearly explained a minute ago, there’s a little more to those executions than—’
‘Emelin is suspiciously silent, though, isn’t she?’ He turned to me, grinning like a man who’s just scored the winning point in a particularly exciting game of hearts and bells. ‘Almost as if she’s trying to hide something. Tell us, Emelin – are they true, the rumours? Did you fuck him?’
There was one split second to deny it.
