Page 4 of The Crown’s Temptation

The healer does not look away from him.

"Because she is dead, Your Highness." Her voice is even, careful, the care of someone who has done this before and knows there is no good way to do it. "Her body has already begun to firm."

The hall is very quiet.

He looks at Asharin's face.

He thinks about when she told him about the twins, the way she had taken his hand and placed it against her and said two and watched his face with those careful eyes of hers, waiting to see what he would do with it. He thinks about the night she fed him her blood and stayed beside him until dawn and wrapped her wrist in linen and said nothing about what it had cost her. He thinks about her voice in the dark saying I am yours. Only you. You are my family, Colsar. There is nothing else.

He thinks about the future he had been building in his head the way you build things when you believe in them without question. Veynar settled. More children. Something quieter than the past, something that belonged only to them.

He cannot see any of it without her in it. His hand finds the knife at his boot. He looks at it for a moment. At the blade. At the simplicity of what it would mean.

Then he thinks of Kiss. He thinks of Ari. He thinks of two small bodies in Kentan's arms going somewhere below the surface, somewhere safe, somewhere that is safe because he sent them there, because he is here and he is alive and he is the thing standing between them and everything that just happened in this room.

He puts the knife away. He hears boots in the corridor. Fast and heavy, the rhythm of a soldier who has stopped caring about composure.

Trophi hits the doorway at a run and pulls up short.

He takes it in the same way Colsar did. The broken window, the deathmage, the blood, and then his eyes find Asharin on the floor and he goes very still. A look crosses his face that Colsar has never seen there before. It is not grief but something else, and it is gone before he can place it.

Trophi has stood in front of undead armies and deathmage attacks and the mountain pass in the dead of winter and his face has never looked like that.

It registers slowly. Then all at once.

Before he can speak Colsar says, "Search the palace. Up and down. Every corridor, every room, every passage. Do not rest until you find out who has harmed your queen."

Trophi looks at Asharin one more time. His jaw tightens. Then he turns and walks out and within seconds his voice is carrying through the corridors, sharp and absolute, barking orders that echo through the palace walls and do not stop.

Colsar looks at the healer. Then at the guard still standing near the door.

"Get out," he says.

They go.

The doors close.

He pulls Asharin back into his arms and holds her against his chest and presses his face into her hair and stays there in the quiet of the room, in the cold coming through the broken window, in the dark that the guttering candles are losing ground against.

"You do not get to do this," he says. His voice is barely held together. "You do not get to leave me here without you. Do you hear me?" His voice breaks. "Asharin."

She does not answer.

The sound that comes out of him the second time is worse than the first. It tears through the room and this time he does not pull it back. Fire bursts along the far wall in a line that has no direction or intent, just heat and grief and the siakar rising in him with nowhere to go. Flames catch the curtains. A candle holder melts along its base. Through the broken window, from somewhere outside, the sound of the outer palace wall beginning to give follows, stone crumbling under the weight of something it was never built to carry.

He calls for the Fyrekin council the way he called for them in the snow that night, from somewhere below everything else, below reason and control and the part of him that knows how to be a king.

They arrive without announcement. The three council members, and behind them Arabar, his Sentinel, who takes one look at the room and says nothing.

"Fix her," Colsar says.

None of them speak immediately.

"Fix her," he says again.

The council member closest to him looks at Asharin in his arms and does not look away when he answers.

"We cannot resurrect the dead, Your Highness."