Betrayal? Her throat felt dry again. “Majesty?”
He cut a gaze her way and forcibly relaxed. “Not you, my flame. A thane—a terror-maker. That was the cause of the destruction, both Below and Above. The palace was bombed.”
“Bombed?” She raised her damp hand toward her throat.
Heat rose in her veins, as it always did when she was disturbed, and made the water steam from her skin.
For once, he didn’t seem to notice. “A man with the usual complaints. The leader of the Red Hands. They were operating when you were Above, weren’t they?”
Slowly, so slowly, she lowered her hand again. “I…believe so. Majesty.”Say nothing. Say nothing. Say nothing.
The leader when she’d been young couldn’t possibly still be the same. Bjorn was over sixty back then. And thanes rarely lived past seventy. He must have passed into the Beyond long ago. Even so.
Even so.
“He was cleverer than most—clearly, to have bypassed my security to plant his explosives in the residential wing of the palace. He gloated about it in our meeting moments beforehand and then took his own life.”
She winced. No need to wonder how this Red Hand leader had accomplished it. The servants in the palace were all thanes. Loyal first and foremost to whatever dome their family originally hailed from. Bjorn had mused, all those years ago, about how easy it would be, on the one hand, to sneak into the palace.
But then what? The question that had always stymied that old man with his kind heart. A question this new leader must have answered very differently. But how? How could someone go so far? Did they not realize how precious life was? “Were there casualties?”
The king gave one brisk nod. “Twenty-two dead, a hundred seventeen wounded. This is of course why I couldn’t respond to your alert more quickly.”
When he sent the message, he called it a summons. When she did, it was only an alert?
Hardly new information. “Understandable, Majesty. I am sorry to hear of the tragedy. I hope your family is unharmed.”
“My eldest two children were both killed. As well as my consort.”
Elianne sucked in a sharp breath. Stared at him. He delivered it so coolly, so calmly, with nary a flinch nor tremor nor hint of sorrow. “Andresa is dead?”
Horror pooled in her veins. She reached out again to steady herself against the wall, calculations storming through her mind.
She could run, but he would throw an ice wall into her path, and her reflexes weren’t good enough—she’d slam into it rather than melting it as quickly as he created it. Dae would have a hope of escaping, even Ember or Logi or Eldrid, but her?
Useless. Her only hope was to postpone the inevitable, buy enough time to make a plan.
She was no good at plans. Had never been good at plans. That’s how she’d gotten herself in this mess to begin with.
Isidor came a step closer. “Her funeral is tomorrow, and I will of course observe the requisite forty days of mourning. Then I must see to the punishment of the terror-maker’s accomplice. But after that, I will announce my search for a new consort. I will need a new heir as quickly as possible.”
He radiated cold. She let her anxiety warm her.
Let—ha. As if she could stop it. But she enjoyed the consequences of it this time, anyway.
Perhaps she could distract him. “Shall I warn the others that we should expect a sacrifice? Or will you let him freeze in the prison?”
Yes, she chose Dae’s word just to see if it would get a reaction. And it did. Isidor’s eye twitched, his nostrils flared. “It is an execution. Not a sacrifice. I am not trying to appease the volcano nor your invisible deity. But if it excites your daemon friends to think of it as such, then call it what you like.”
The fire inside her blazed hotter, resisting all her efforts to bank it. “I am one of them, Majesty. If they are daemons, I am too.”
“You are not. You are different.” He stepped closer still and lifted a hand, rested it against her cheek.
A normal man would have cried out at the heat, jerked away. But not him, of course. He was so much stronger in his ice than she was in her flame. He cooled her rather than being heated by her.
“As I told you then, Elianne, you did not stand condemned. What has worked for evil in those others is a gift in you. You have been down here only to train, to learn. So that when you take your place at my side, you can do the work of those daemons for our people, and they can be obliterated once and for all.”
If she pulled away, it would only enrage him. If she argued, he would dismiss her concerns. If she tried to convince him that Dae and Eldrid, Logi and Ember were far from evil, he would accuse her of blasphemy.
