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“Whereas you’ll need corrective surgery in another moment,” he drew out.
“Oh, but you misunderstand again. ’Tis not me you should be worried about.” I knocked my head to Briar. “’Tis her, you’re underestimating. For a start, she has a name.”
“Does she,” the prince observed, dicing his attention toward the princess. “It’s a shame she hasn’t lived up to it.”
I hissed, and Avalea opened her mouth to intervene, but her daughter’s voice cut in. “Andsheis standing right here,” Briar rebuked. “I am a princess, your host, and your patient. And I would thank you to remember that.”
Instinctively, her eyes captured mine. But instead of privately scowling and reprimanding me for having yet another alpha relapse, a gleam of understanding flashed across her face—right before a riot of screams tore through the room.
The four of us broke into motion just as Aire blew past the doors with his broadswords unsheathed. Our group rushed to the window, beyond which flames engulfed a section of the maple pasture. There, a dead body was affixed to a tent of kindling, the corpse blazing just as Rhys’s body had when I tried to murder him.
Only this was different. For this burning body didn’t belong to the Summer King.
28
Briar
Gasps of distress tore through the pasture. We raced across the grass and then staggered in place, a thick wall of smoke barreling into us.
Mother’s lips parted, her eyes glazing with shock. “Dear gods.”
Our friends had arrived shortly before us. Posy and Vale clasped hands as they beheld the scene. Cadence and Eliot stared in speechless horror.
Aire grimaced and pointed one of his swords at the troops. “Disband!” he shouted, ordering them to stalk the area, lest the perpetrator was nearby.
The stench of charred flesh singed my nostrils and watered my eyes. Amid the tumult, my joints gave, and I stumbled backward into Poet. The jester caught my shoulders, steadying me while hissing an oath under his breath.
“Seasons al-fucking-mighty,” he uttered, ripping out a dagger, flipping it between his fingers, and bracing the hilt. At the same time, he yanked me harder into his chest, slinging one strong arm across my midriff.
The murderer could still be here. Of course, Poet would react instinctively, priming to protect me.
Nonetheless, he did not block my view. The jester knew me well enough by now, accessing my thoughts like his own.
A princess does not look away.
This had happened before in The Shadow Orchard, when the Masters forced an innocent child to sever the head from one of my soldiers. As I had back then, I straightened on shaky limbs, needing to see the extent of this nightmare.
I locked my gaze on the blackened mass, its form attached to the pyre. The corpse slumped like a mound of smoldering coal. Orange sizzled across numerous parts of the body, the flesh too incinerated to be recognizable.
Bending my arm, I covered my nose and mouth. Then I stepped out of Poet’s grasp and shuffled toward the victim.
“Princess,” one of the knights warned.
“No,” I protested in a daze.
Yet another soldier tried. “Your Highness.”
“Leave her,” commanded the jester.
The outbreak of noise faded, the court falling into horrified silence while I stumbled closer to the scene. Amid the stench, cinders flitted into the air. The army had extinguished the fire before we’d arrived, yet heat seeped through my clothes.
The agony this person must have felt. The screams we hadn’t heard, because we’d been too far away, a world away from their suffering.
My chin trembled as I reached the corpse. Their features had been reduced to a flaky pulp, so that I could not discern their expression. I stared, my heart grieving for this unknown soul. No sooner did I mourn than the pain tightened into something harder, harsher.
Panicked, we had checked on Nicu before coming here. Even so, I’d already known—prayed, prayed, prayed—it wasn’t him. The body belonged to an adult, not a child.
Still, it wassomeone. In another two decades, the personcouldbe him.
