Page 23 of Once Broken Faith

EIGHT

WE SPENT AN HOUR or so out on the balcony, eating slowly, enjoying the night air. I was enjoying the absence of the nobility—well, except for Tybalt, Raj, and Quentin, which really meant that I was enjoying the absence of annoying nobility—even more. The teenagers finished their spaghetti and made a raid on our tea tower, taking half the scones back to their table. I threw a wadded-up napkin at them, and they laughed, and everything was perfect.

That alone should have told me it couldn’t last. The air rippled and Sir Grianne of Shadowed Hills was suddenly sitting on the balcony rail. Her Merry Dancers spun in the air around her. Like King Antonio, she was sketched in shades of gray. Unlike him, her skin was ash and her hair was granite, striated in bands of dark and light. Also unlike him, she was wearing simple livery: a tunic in the blue and gold of Shadowed Hills and a sash around her waist in the silver and purple of Arden’s household.

“Grianne,” I said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

She lifted one shoulder in a shrug, like my ignorance was none of her concern. “On loan,” she said.

Candela tend to be short-spoken, preferring to communicate through pulses of light and the motion of their Merry Dancers, the glowing orbs that accompanied them everywhere from birth onward. Grianne exemplified her race. I waited several seconds, and no further details were offered.

Right. “Did you need something?” I asked.

“The conclave is resuming,” she said, her voice thin and reedy as the wind through the trees. “Your presence is requested by the High King.”

“I guess that’s our cue.” I stood. Quentin and Karen did the same. I started to turn toward Tybalt, but stopped as the smell of pennyroyal and musk tickled my nose, carried to me by the light midnight wind. He was already gone. So was Raj. It made sense: they hadn’t left the gallery with us, so they couldn’t exactly return with us without making the declaration of allegiance that Tybalt had been trying so hard to avoid. I understood the necessity, but it still bothered me.

Quentin put a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t have to look down when I turned to meet his eyes. That bothered me, too, but in a different way. He was growing up. He wasn’t going to need me much longer. He already didn’t need me in the way he had, once, when he’d been trying to muddle his way through puberty and I’d been the one who was willing to restock the fridge and let him crash on my couch. Everything was changing, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go sit through more political screaming.”

There was a flash of greenish-white light as Grianne toppled backward off the railing and was gone. Sometimes I feel like we hang out with too many teleporters.

It didn’t take long to walk back to the dining room where we’d been served our first, abandoned dinner. It was empty. The tables had been cleaned, and the lights were turned down low, presumably so no one would get confused and try to come here for the conclave. There was a strange sound as we stepped through the door, like the distant rustle of skeleton leaves, or the beating of a thousand autumn leaf wings on the wind. My heart dropped into my stomach. I knew that sound. It stopped almost instantly, but it was too late. I’d already heard it.

I stopped and spread my arms, keeping Quentin and Karen from moving forward. They were good kids. Better yet, they had both known me long enough that when I indicated that I needed them to stay where they were, they froze immediately.

“What is it?” asked Quentin.

“That sound,” I said. “Did you hear it? When we first came in.”

“Dead leaves,” he said. “The whole place is decorated in redwoods. There’s going to be some settling, especially when there’s no one talking to cover it up.”

“Redwoods don’t have leaves, you doof,” said Karen. “They’re evergreens.”

“Just stay here, both of you.” I stepped forward, wishing I’d been allowed to bring my knife; wishing I wasn’t walking, unarmed, into a large, empty dining hall where I’d heard—or thought that I’d heard—the beating of the night-haunts’ wings. It hadn’t been loud enough to have placed them in this room. They were approaching. But why?

Something crunched underfoot. I glanced down to be sure that it was neither glass nor bone, and saw that I’d stepped on what looked like the shell of some large egg. Nothing to worry about, then. I resumed my forward progress, and stopped again as something else crunched. This time, I knelt and picked up a piece of what I’d stepped on.

It was thin, curved, and brittle as an old snail’s shell, colored like carnival glass and patterned with thin whorls and swirls, as distinctive as a fingerprint. I frowned, trying to figure out where I had seen this before, and why it looked so familiar.

The answer came to me on the beating of the night-haunts’ wings, still distant, still impossible to ignore. I was holding the shell of a broken Merry Dancer.

I was holding proof that King Antonio Robertson of Angels was dead.

“Stay where you are, kids,” I said, staring at the broken shell in my hand. “Quentin, I know you’ve been working on illumination spells. Can you throw me a globe of witch-light please?” Casting a spell inside Arden’s knowe might be enough to get her attention, or at least the attention of a member of her staff. That wouldn’t be a bad thing. This wasn’t the sort of situation that I could handle on my own.

“Okay,” said Quentin. He murmured something incomprehensible. The scent of heather and steel washed over the room and a globe of light appeared above me. It looked distressingly like one of Antonio’s Merry Dancers, before they had been broken, save for the fact that it didn’t dance or weave; it just hung there, casting a cool white light over everything below it.

Thin, glittering shards littered the floor, like someone had smashed a giant Christmas ornament. The point of impact was somewhere ahead of me. I started gingerly forward, careful to avoid as many of the shards as possible. I didn’t want to destroy the evidence before I’d had a chance to really look at it. Quentin’s ball of witch-light caught on the shards, making them easier to see.

After five steps, I found King Antonio.

He was sprawled in a way that mostly hid his body under one of the dining tables; if not for the shards of Merry Dancer scattered everywhere, it would have been easy to write him off as a shadow cast by the intersection of curtain and wall. With Quentin’s mage-light to brighten the scene, and the curved shell in my hand, it was impossible for me to pretend he was anything but what he was. A corpse.

The night-haunts hadn’t arrived yet. We’d interrupted them before they could descend and devour the evidence. That was a good thing, in a way; it’s easier to examine a body when there actually is one. I knelt, looking carefully at what had once been King Antonio Robinson of Angels. It wasn’t hard to guess what killed him. Purebloods can be difficult to kill, but on the whole, a rosewood spike through the chest will stop virtually any of us where we stand. His eyes were open, staring in silent horror at the table above him.

“Huh,” I said.