Page 62 of Zenith Court

The first guard attacked high. Magnus caught the strike on a parry that drove both blades toward his shoulder. The impact bowed his arms and opened the cut he had taken on the bridge. Blood reached his cuff. He rolled his wrists before the guard could press the advantage and cut across the man’s forearm. The sword fell from numb fingers. Magnus kicked it behind him without looking away from the next guard.

The second man came from his left. Magnus turned into the shoulder check rather than giving the guard room to swing. They struck the side of the arch together. Magnus’s head snapped back against the stone. He lost half a step, recovered it, and drove the house hilt beneath the guard’s jaw. The man dropped, blocking the approach for the one behind him. Magnus held the opening long enough for Kieran and Jonah to drive Delphine and the front of Aldric’s line through. Beside me, Caspian’s breath broke rhythm. He took the next step anyway.

A third guard stepped over the fallen man and came in low while Magnus was still recovering from the turn. The house blade was too long for the angle. Magnus tried to bring the hilt down, but the guard was already inside his reach. Caspian saw it at the same moment I did. His hand closed on my sleeve and then let go.

The blade entered below Magnus’s ribs. His mouth opened, but I heard nothing over the blades and shouting. The guard pulled the weapon free and drew back for another thrust. Caspian broke from the line before it landed. He struck once across the guard’s throat and caught Magnus with his free arm as his knees folded. The weight took them both to the floor. Magnus landed on his side with one hand still closed around the house hilt. Blood spread beneath his coat and ran into the grout between the marble slabs.

Caspian rolled Magnus onto his back, opened the torn coat, and pressed both hands over the wound. Blood pushed between his fingers at once. I arrived half a step later with my knife raised. Two guards still held the near edge of the arch. I put myself between them and Caspian while Jonah and Kieran forced them backward. A blade scraped the wall beside my head. Delphine caught the attacker’s wrist from the side and pulled him off balance for me. Behind us, Caspian said his father’s name twice, low and close to his face.

Magnus opened his eyes. He found Caspian above him and worked one word past a breath that would not fill his lungs.

“Good.”

His fingers opened around the hilt. One breath moved shallowly through him, then failed to become another. His head shifted against the stone, and he was still.

Caspian made no sound. His hands stayed over the wound, red to the wrists, though the blood had already begun to slow. He looked at Magnus’s face and did not look away.

Aldric cleared the arch before the remaining guards could close it against us. He struck the nearest man with his shoulder and drove him backward with Jonah beside him. Delphine pulled two wounded fighters through while I guarded the narrowing gap. Kieran seized the inner door as soon as the last of ours cleared it. The bottom edge caught on a fallen scabbard. He kicked the obstruction free, dragged the door shut, and dropped the bolt into place with both hands. The guards hit the other side hard enough to shake dust from the lintel. A second impact bowed the wood but did not move the bolt. For several breaths, the only sounds in the antechamber were people trying to breathe and the water running below us.

I put one hand beneath Caspian’s arm. He did not move. Magnus’s ring sat loose on his right hand. Caspian saw it too, but he kept both palms pressed to his father’s side. Around us, the wounded were being moved away from the door. People stepped around father and son without asking Caspian to make room.

“Caspian.” I kept my voice low. “They’re not done. We have to go.”

He looked up at me. For a moment he seemed not to know which room held us. Then his eyes returned to Magnus. “You go.”

Delphine took his other arm, but Caspian planted one knee against the floor and pulled free of us both. “I’m staying with him.” He opened Magnus’s torn coat farther and folded one clean edge against the wound. Two defected stewards moved to either side of the bolted door. Aldric remained with them, one hand pressed to his injured thigh and the other still holding his stave.

Jonah called my name from the descending stair. Kieran had already taken the first lamp and was checking the turn below. Delphine joined them. I set my bloody hand on Caspian’s shoulder. He did not look up. I turned toward the stair.

The stair toward the founding basin opened ahead, dark and loud. The water’s vibration entered my knees on the first step. Kieran raised the lamp, Jonah moved ahead of its light, and Delphine followed at my shoulder. We went down. Behind us, Caspian stayed with Magnus.

41

Caspian

My hands stayed pressed to my father’s side after his blood stopped pushing between my fingers. The cloth beneath them was warm. His face was not yet changed by death, and some part of me kept waiting for him to open his eyes and push my hand away.

Astra had gone down the stair with Kieran, Jonah, and Delphine. Aldric and two defected stewards held the bolted door while the rite-guard struck it from the witness floor. The blows shuddered through the stone beneath my knees. I kept my hands over the wound until the impacts stopped. Then nothing.

Four guards lay near the arch where my father had held them. Because he had held it, the stair behind me remained clear. I could not look at it.

I had reached him in time to catch his weight and hear one word. Not in time to prevent the blade.

Good.

He had rationed the word through my childhood. A corrected stance at nine. A clean basin reading at fourteen. Never praise without another fault waiting behind it. On the floor, with his breath failing, he had given it to me without qualification. I did not know what to do with it.

I checked for breath, then the pulse at his throat, though I already knew what I would find. I opened his coat farther and looked once at the wound. After that there was nothing left for my hands to do.

I wiped them on the inside of my own coat and failed to get them clean. Blood remained in the creases of my knuckles and beneath every nail. My father had corrected those hands for years: thumb lower on the hilt, wrist straight over a basin, never let the body advertise the next movement. They had obeyed him through all of it. Now they shook where he could no longer see.

His right hand lay open beside the old house sword. The signet caught the nearest lamp: eleven generations pressed into soft gold, the rim worn thin by the habit of his thumb. I worked it free and held it in my palm.

I had watched him turn that ring before issuing a sentence, answering a challenge, dismissing a servant who had disappointed him. As a boy I thought the motion meant certainty. Later I understood it bought him the second he needed to choose which face the room would see. In death the ring came away without resistance.

I did not put it on. I slid it beneath my cuff instead, into the place where iron had once rubbed my wrist raw. The gold was still warm from him. I closed my hand over it and kept it there.

Under my ribs, Astra’s line moved fast and steady. I found it without reaching for it. Warm. Going lower. Still alive.