“They’re wild beasts!” interjected Marquess Haskett. “Animals presenting human faces to lure in prey.”
“They are no such thing,” Aria said sharply. “Have you met them, Lord Haskett?”
“I have.” Earl Wycliff’s deep voice cut in with inarguable certainty. “Marcus was a good man who raised good sons, and those twins are both friends with my youngest. They’ve spent time at my estate. They’re not exactly the picture of manners, and perhaps that wildness can be attributed to magic, but I refuse to consider them a danger.”
Aria could have hugged him.
Her father glared daggers at Earl Wycliff. “You speak in defense of dark magic in my court, Wycliff?”
“I speak in defense of the innocent, Your Majesty.” He hesitated. “Someone has to.”
And Aria saw it—
She saw her father’s flinch.
Her palms grew sweaty. The moment had come.
“This is nonsense,” her father growled. “There is only one course of action regarding shapeshifters—”
Aria interrupted. “The Reeves boys aren’t the ones on trial here, Father.”
“No one is on trial,” he shot back. “You have called a council but presented no accused.”
“I present one now.” She took a deep breath and spoke thewords. “I accuse you, Father, of the unlawful murder of Charles Morton.”
There was no going back.
Stunned silence fell in the throne room as ten people attempted to process the unthinkable—a king accused of murder.
During Loegria’s founding, its first king had established a power balance within court. As Aria’s father so liked to remind everyone, a king’s word was law. Except in one area.
A king could not pardon himself.
“During my grandmother’s reign,” Aria said, speaking to them all, “a law existed to execute Affiliates upon discovery. There were no qualifications to the law, not for age, not for innocent intentions. Dorothy Ames, a ten-year-old girl, was discovered to be Fox-Affiliate. Tried and found guilty of nothing beyond existing, she was executed. The event haunted Queen Theresa to her deathbed, and, consumed by guilt, she finally revoked the law in perhaps the final action of her life.”
“There has been no such change to the law!” Lord Emmett sputtered.
“There was,” Aria said forcefully. “My father just didn’t tell you. He didn’t tell anyone.”
She snatched her grandmother’s journal, flipped it open to a marked page, and read: “Though I feel myself fading, I have spoken to Perry, and I can rest knowing my son will enact the change I have made. I leave behind a true reparation for mymistake. No longer will her little voice demand justice from the grave.”
Though the writing was too small for them to read at a distance, she turned the journal, showed the proof. Shocked expressions echoed back at her.
Except from her father.
Who sat as a statue on his throne.
“This is speculation!” protested Lord Emmett. When he looked for support, he received nods from a few of the others. “Queen Theresa, may she rest, grew unstable near the end, and that entry doesn’t even mention Dorothy by name much less state a change to the law.”
“Her name may not be in this specific entry, Lord Emmett, but it’s scattered throughout my grandmother’s journal, beginning with the day of Dorothy’s execution. I believe there was not a day that passed she didn’t think of her. Even on the day of my parents’ wedding, when she claims to be filled with hope for her son”—Aria flipped to the page quickly—“she writes about ‘little Dorothy, from whom has been stolen the opportunity for hope or happiness, from whom I have taken all but a voice in the grave.’”
“What does this have to do with Charles Morton?” Countess Redford asked.
Lord Philip answered, his voice haunted, “Charles Morton was an Affiliate.”
At the base of the stairs, Auden Huxley mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, looking like he regretted ever coming to the palace. The guards stood at rigid attention. No one seemed able to look at the king.
No one except Aria.
