Silas hasn't moved. That's been bothering me the whole way across the floor, somewhere under the cold. He hasn't drawn.He's just stood there in the wreckage with his hands in his pockets, watching me carve a path to him, and he'ssmiling, and Silas doesn't smile at a fight he's losing.
Then he takes his right hand out of his pocket, and he reaches down to his side, and he pulls a child out from behind him into the light.
Maeve.
The world stops being a room.
She's in her pajamas. The yellow ones, with the cloud on the front. Her hair's a mess from sleep, and her face is white and wet, and her eyes find me across the floor, and she opens her mouth, and nothing comes out.She's supposed to be at the compound. She's supposed to be behind forty men and three walls and a bunker. She was asleep an hour ago, Maria checked, I had the report —”
He took her from the house. He walked into my house, took her out of her bed, and brought her here in her pajamas, and I had her counted as safe the entire time.
Silas turns her so she's in front of him, his hand flat on her small shoulder, his body behind hers. He tips his head, almost gentle, and rests his other hand — and the gun in it — along the side of her neck. Same height. Same angle. He's standing exactly where her mother stood.
And my body stops.
My mind doesn't. That's the part nobody sees from the outside. My mind is working faster than it's worked all night —the angle is bad but it's there, two feet of clearance over her head if she drops, Kieran has the flank, Echo could take the side if I gave the word, if I move left he has to track me and his arm comes off her neck for half a second— I can see all of it, every option, laid out clean. My mind is screaming the order down to my arm.
My arm will not lift the gun.
Because I have done this before. I have stood in a room with a man behind my daughter and a blade at her throat, and I have made the calculation, raised the gun, and fired, and it worked. The price of it working was Elara on the tile, her hair going dark, her hand twitching, and Maeve's eyes that I covered too late, that I will never know if I covered in time. I hear the sound a silenced round makes as it enters a body. I hear it now, in a ballroom full of screaming, clear as if it's the only sound in the world. My hands remember the kick. My hands remember the warmth.
I am standing in the middle of my own trap, in front of every man I command and every rival who has ever feared me, and I cannot move.
“There he is,” Silas says. His voice carries. He wants it to. “There's the king. Look at you.”
“Let her go.” My voice comes out wrong. Low, cracked, not mine. “Silas. She's six.”
“So was she that age once. My sister.” He doesn't stop smiling. “You remember how steady your hand was that night? I do. I was on the floor. I watched you do it. I've thought about your face every day for five years, and here it is again, except it's not so steady now, is it? Look at it shake.”
It's shaking. I can see it at the edge of my vision, my own hand, the gun pointed at the floor where it's useless, and I cannot make it come up.Lift it. Lift the gun. She's right there, she's looking at you, lift the gun and end him —and nothing happens. Twenty years of a body that has never once failed me, and it has chosen this, of every moment in my life, to stop.
“Daddy?” Maeve says.
It's so small. It goes through me like the round did that night, the one I didn't feel until after. She's not crying anymore. She's just looking at me, waiting, the way she waits for me to fix everything, because I have always fixed everything, and I am standing twenty feet away from her doing absolutely nothing at all.
Silas watches me not move, and his smile widens, because this is what he came for. Not the routes. Not the war. This. Me, frozen, broken open in front of the whole room, paying again.
My men are watching. I can feel it. Kieran's gone still at the doors, Echo's gone still at the flank, all of them waiting for the word from the man who always has it, and the word won't come. I have never in my life given them nothing. I am giving them nothing now.
“Go on,” Silas says softly, almost kind. “Do the math again. I'll wait. You're good at the math. It's the doing you can't manage anymore.”
And then I hear her.
Behind me. Not my name, she doesn't call my name. Not a question, not asking me what to do, not waiting for the king to come back into his body.
Just Atara, low and certain, already moving.
She's already decided.
29
Atara
I figure out what's happening to him before anyone else in the room does.
From down here, crouched behind the table that used to hold the seafood tower, my knees in something warm I am not going to look at, I can see the back of Lorcan and the side of Silas and the small white shape between them that I am absolutely not going to let myself think about as Maeve. Not yet. Not if I want my hands to keep working. My ears are ringing from the chandelier. There's a smell over everything, copper and cordite and somebody's spilled perfume, and somewhere behind me a woman is making a sound that I've decided isn't my problem right now because I only get to have one problem at a time.
And I can see Lorcan's gun hand. It's pointed at the floor. It's shaking. It hasn't come up.
