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“I don’t need to explain anything to a whelp of a boy who wears a crown like it’s a costume in a child’s game,” Hadrian growled.
Sai flinched and looked even more stricken. He glanced to Magnus, who wore a sympathetic look. That sympathy only went so far, though.
“How much information have you sent back to King Julius?” Sai asked in a defeated voice. “What does he know of our accomplishments?”
“Accomplishments?” Hadrian laughed. He tried to straighten, but Neil kept him bent over. That only made Hadrian snarl. “You’ve accomplished death and devastation. You’ve done a capital job of dying and robbing the rightful king of desperately needed resources. Go on and praise yourself for that if you’d like, but all you’ve really managed to do is squander what rightfully belongs to King Julius by sucking the cock of this aberration who calls himself King Julius’s brother.”
Magnus grinned and looked mildly surprised by Hadrian’s speech, but that was it. “Well, there you have it,” he said. “And here I thought it would take a great deal more to convince the man to confess he was my brother’s spy.”
Hadrian laughed. “The debauched whore turned traitor is calling me a spy? As if that were a bad thing?”
“Don’t speak to Magnus like that,” I growled, stepping forward. Really, I wanted to kick the man for all the trouble he’d put everyone through. “He’s a great man and you’re just some dumb parrot who doesn’t even know what the frontier is like anymore.”
Apparently, my outburst surprised everyone. Magnus looked at me with both shock and amusement. Peter and Neil seemed amused as well. Sai was still so stunned by the turn of events that I couldn’t tell what emotion he felt as he looked at me. And Olympus was proud of me, of course.
“You’re the fool, if you think some pretend kingdom ruled by a whore has any chance of standing against the might of King Julius,” Hadrian went on. “And you’re an even bigger fool if you think mine are the only set of eyes and ears in these backwoods of yours. The king has had his eye on you all for years now. He is the one who has shaped your world and your lives all this time. You think you’ve accomplished something? Built something?” He huffed a laugh. “King Julius was right. It’s better to let you all die out and kill each other, which I’m certain you’ll all do within a decade, if not sooner.”
His words were meant to be an insult and a threat, but Magnus reacted as though he’d just been handed a golden prize. He glanced over his shoulder at Peter and Neil, beaming at them. Both Peter and Neil shared his smile, but they looked more than a little perplexed at the same time.
“I suppose there is only one thing left to do, then,” Magnus said with mock solemnity. He gave a dramatic shrug and a sigh, then said, “I suppose we shall all be forced to give up our endeavors to build kingdoms and make happy lives for ourselves and throw ourselves on the mercy of my little brother.”
My mouth twitched into a smile, but like Peter and Neil, I was confused as hell as well. Clearly, Magnus was trying to goad Hadrian somehow. I doubted he had any intention whatsoever of heeding a word Hadrian had said or showing any deference to King Julius at all. Something Hadrian had said must have made sense to him in a way that it didn’t to the rest of us. I supposed it had something to do with Hadrian’s clear lack of understanding about the nature of the frontier these days. If Hadrian didn’t have a clue, then King Julius didn’t either, which meant we had less to worry about than we’d thought…maybe.
“Who would like to do the honors?” Magnus asked, confusing everyone even more. He glanced around, making a show of being disappointed in his present company. “Not Peter and Neil. My loves don’t quite have the constitution for it. And not Lefric either.” He smiled over at me. “You are a bright young man with far more potential than Radulph ever cared to see, but this is not the task for you.”
Magnus shifted to look at Olympus with narrowed eyes. “I think perhaps it would be wise to keep Good Port out of this altogether,” he said, then seemed to continue the thought and the sentence as he glanced to Sai, his expression falling into sharp seriousness, to finish with, “Which leaves you, my friend.”
We all glanced quickly to Sai. I held my breath.
Sai blinked and stiffened. “You can’t possibly mean….” Sai’s voice cracked, so he stopped.
Magnus nodded his head toward Hadrian. “A good king thinks only of his people. He must be willing to sacrifice himself for the benefit of his subjects, even if the sacrifice is a difficult one.”
Sai’s mouth dropped open, and all color left his face.
“Think of the bad kings you’ve know,” Magnus continued in a softer voice, stepping closer to Sai. “Think of what Gomez did and didn’t do, what he allowed to happen and what he prevented from happening. Think of all the lives that were lost because Gomez put himself before the people he had conquered, before the king he supposedly served.” He glanced down at Hadrian.
“You were in the Old Realm,” Magnus went on. “You saw the destruction my uncle, the old king, caused. You saw the results of the war he never should have involved his kingdom in. You witnessed the deprivations that led to sickness and famine. As the son of a ruling duke, you saw the way he bled his distant subjects dry to prop up a kingdom crumbling due to his own mistakes. Do you want to see the same thing happen again? Do you want your cities to be nothing but fodder for a new king who has failed to learn the lessons of the recent past?”
I was mesmerized by everything Magnus had to say. He was just so fucking magnificent when he got going like this. Even Hadrian was startled by what Magnus had to say, almost as if he hadn’t grasped the bigger picture of the last few decades the way Magnus did. It also made me wonder how Magnus knew so much about the Old Realm. But then, even though he and his old lover, Rurik, had fled to the frontier ages ago, Magnus probably still had friends and family on the other side of the mountains who sent him information.
I almost laughed. King Julius wasn’t the only spy. Magnus had people in the Old Realm too. I wondered if Conrad was one of them.
I didn’t have time to wonder. Sai stared at Magnus with a combination of awe and sorrow. That alone was enough to signal Magnus’s words had hit their mark. When Sai let out a breath and lowered his head, I knew Magnus had as good as won a war. We all knew it when, without moving his eyes away from Sai’s, he withdrew a long, narrow dagger from his tunic.
My breath caught. I hadn’t even realized Magnus was armed. Then again, the man was nearly killed by a surprise attack once, and I supposed after something like that happened to you, you found a way to always be armed. I still couldn’t breathe as Magnus slipped the dagger into Sai’s hand.
Sai let out a shuddering breath and glanced down to his hand.
Magnus still held Sai’s hand and the dagger in both of his hands. “Your brother had the courage to take one life in order to save a hundred thousand,” he said. “Do you have Jace’s courage?”
Sai squeezed his eyes shut. His face pinched with agony. None of us moved or so much as breathed too loudly. I got it. I really did. I got both sides of it. Sai had to be the one to kill Hadrian. If anyone else did it, Sai could turn on us all and bring hell raining down on us. But it couldn’t have been easy, even if Sai was a soldier and had probably killed men before. He’d served with Hadrian, which meant it might have been a little like if one of us had had to kill another of the Sons for the good of the world.
That comparison made me shiver. My slight movement appeared to distract Sai from his thoughts and his hesitation. He drew in a breath and closed his hands around the handle of the dagger, then stepped away from Magnus.
Even Hadrian seemed to know what needed to happen. When Magnus signaled to Neil to move back and as Sai moved in and took his place, wrapping his left arm around Hadrian’s shoulders to hold him steady and raising the dagger to his throat, Hadrian didn’t struggle.
“I die as a martyr for my king,” Hadrian said in a hoarse voice. “King Julius is the only true king, and he will make you all pay for this.”
Sai’s whole body stiffened, he hesitated for only a moment, then he sliced the dagger across Hadrian’s throat.
