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“How many people do you think are here today? Several thousand, I’d say.” He gave a nod to the guards lined up on the stairs. Each one moved into the gathering and picked someone out at random, ripping them from their families and dragging them back up the stairs. An elderly woman, a middle-aged father, a youth with the first shadow of a beard . . . The guards returned to their stations to stand at attention, swords held at a perfect perpendicular to each person’s neck. Toris’s hand hovered in the heavy air for several tense moments, as if he were an orchestra conductor extending the last note for a little too long. And then he let his hand fall. In perfect synchronicity, the guards moved their swords across each victim’s neck with all the p
racticed elegance of musicians in a murderous symphony.
Order in all things.
The exodus of nearly a dozen spirits at once hit me like a wave; I felt their passing from the material to the spectral planes in the vibration of my bones. It made my sight blur, my ears ring, caused hazy shapes to form just outside the edges of my vision while whispery words circled me like vultures. Let me out. Let me out. Let me out. I pressed my hands against my ears. Go away. Leave me alone.
Kellan was shaking me. “Aurelia, snap out of it! Look at me. We have to do something!”
Through bleary eyes, I saw Toris calmly asking Zan again, “Valentin Alexander, do you take this woman, Lisette de Lena, as your wife, willingly, now and forevermore?”
“Stars forgive me,” he said brokenly as Toris lifted his hand, ready to signal another slaughter. “Yes.”
“Stop,” I tried to yell, but my voice came out a crackling whisper.
“With the great Empyrea as witness above, your two lives are now entwined into one. Exchange the rings now, as king and queen.”
This was the first image of Aren’s last vision: the exchanging of the rings. I fought through the disorientation left by the bloodshed and climbed, unsteady, to the top of the roof. “Stop!” I yelled again, louder. I needed to draw blood, let the magic carry my voice. I cast around in the layers of my uniform to find my knife.
“It is done,” Toris said triumphantly, snapping his book shut. “All these years, all these preparations, and just like that—?it is done!”
“No power is worth killing your own child,” Zan said. “May your remaining life be tormented by it.”
Got it. My hand closed around the knife handle.
Lisette was crying. “Don’t, Father. Please don’t hurt me. You’ve gotten what you wanted. You have control of Achleva now—?”
Toris turned a glassy stare on her. “I am not your father,” he stated.
And with predatory dispassion, he drove his knife into her heart.
I screamed, drowned out by the shocked cries of the crowd. Lisette.
Zan had tried to pull her back into the safety of his arms, but there was nothing he could do. Blood swept across the bodice of her dress as he lowered her down, her hair fanning out on the stone steps, and she reached for him even as blood began to well up in her throat and drip from the corners of her lips. “I’m sorry,” she said, choking, trying to return the wedding ring to Zan with bloody hands. “I never wanted to hurt you. I lo—?” She sputtered blood. “I love—?”
“It’s all right,” Zan reassured her. “Hush now, be still. I’m sorry, too. I’m so sorry.”
“Nihil nunc salvet te,” said Toris.
Zan laid a soft kiss on Lisette’s brow. “Go in peace,” he told her. “Empyrea keep you.”
She closed her eyes.
The wind howled, and a pulse of light burst from her body and rolled like a shock wave through the air until it hit the wall’s cylindrical shield and spread across it like an ulcerous cancer.
Lisette’s spirit stood beside her body, staring sadly down at it. Don’t linger here, I thought. Find serenity in the arms of the Empyrea, my friend. She gave a slight nod, as if she had heard me, and then walked slowly, gracefully up the stairs toward the castle, fading away a little more with each step. She was gone before she reached the top.
“The queen of Achleva is dead!” Toris announced, smiling. “Long live the queen!”
35
“Toris!” My voice cut across the square like the fall of a scythe. I’d drawn a drop of blood and sent the resulting magic out in waves, not as heat or fire but as sound. I climbed to the high peak of the roof and stood like a pillar against the wind as the clouds went black and began to churn in circular rotation, lightning crackling in their angry depths.
Toris, who had been advancing on Zan, his knife still slick with Lisette’s blood, snapped his head toward me. His guards, too, began to surge in our direction as I defiantly raised a vial of blood into the air.
“Have you been looking for this?” I trumpeted. I pulled the stopper from Victor de Achlev’s blood vial. “The blood of the Founder. The last remnants of Cael’s essence. His magic. If those guards come any closer, I will spill every last drop.”
Toris froze. When his men did not, I let a single drop fall.
