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With Starling leading the way through the familiar courtyards and corridors, no one we came across presented any true challenge. Half a dozen guards and a pair of bitter servants who hissed out slurs in my direction before attempting to raise the alarm succumbed swiftly to her Touch, felled by the merest brush of her fingertips against their clothing or skin. Allowed to draw close to them out of a massive and repeated underestimation for her size and gender, she was a one-woman fuckingarmy, and I felt my eyes grow wider and wider as the number of unconscious bodies grew in our wake.Dios mío, she was getting anything she wanted when I had the power to give it to her.
Velichkov had tried to help, at first, hefting Dima’s unconscious body onto me and diving into each fray with Wolf at his side. But the huge Temarian quickly realised that his sword and muscles didn’t hold a candle to Starling’s impressive magic, and that I was doing no one any good bent almost double under another man’s weight – in the non-sexy,it’s not Mathias so I don’t want itkind of way.
And when the guards standing outside my old rooms crumpled to the floor and I shoved my way into the antechamber to find my father’s healer reclining on the worn lounge, I finally let myself smile.
It wasn’t a nice smile.
“Yanev,” I said, watching him slowly push himself to his feet. There was a faint twitch, like he’d felt an old urge to bow, before he creased his already wrinkled face into a frown.
“Renato,” he rasped. “What are you...”
He glanced behind him to the closed doors of the bedchamber.
“We’re here for you, Yanev,” I said, gesturing for Starling to wake Dima. She rolled her eyes, having already reached for his trailing wrist where it rested at Velichkov’s waist. “I hear you’ve been telling lies about me.”
Yanev shook his head frantically, wisps of grey hair fluttering around his scalp like a halo.
“No, my prince, not lies!”
“How could you destroy my mother’s memory like that?” I demanded, anger surging through me. “To accuse her of-”
“Of what, Your Highness?” He was almost crying now, hands wringing uselessly at his sides. “Of doing what she had to do to survive your father? We all did!”
I faltered.
“Your mother loved you,” whispered Yanev miserably. “She held you as she died, did you know that?”
Dima began to mutter frantically from behind me, but I paid him no heed. All I could hear were the old healer’s words, circling softly around my head.
Your mother loved you.
No one who knew her had ever spoken to me about her before.
“I remember her tears,” Yanev told me through his own. “She was so happy as she looked down at you.Renato, your father said, and she nodded and smiled.Ren, she breathed, as she kissed your face and you wrapped one of her fingers in your whole tiny hand, and then the king...”
Swallowing, he dared to glance up at me for the briefest of seconds. “He ordered you be taken from her arms, said Consuela needed her rest, bent down to whisper in her ear...”
He whimpered, and I fear I made a sound that mimicked it. Everything felt impossibly heavy and still.
“I didn’t hear what he said, but I didn’t need to. I knew his tongue would have shone as black as his magic.”
My breath caught. “You knew he had the Voice?”
“Your father was many things to many people, my prince.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but it seemed Dima did, as he gave a shuddering, pained breath. Had the healer been another of Iván’s victims? Would I ever know the true depths of my sire’s cruelty? Yanev had apparently said he’d terminated my mother’s preceding pregnancies: had that been as unwilling an act as my own forced submissions before the king: kneeling, back bared, and head bowed as I waited for the blows to fall?
Or were these more lies constructed to save his own skin?
“Dima,” I whispered, tearing my gaze away from the healer. The man was knelt on the floor, held up only by Velichkov’s hands on his shoulders, rocking and sobbing.
There was no point ordering anyone to leave the room. Too many people occupied the palace for his mind to be clear, and I felt a pang of guilt that could have only come from the portion of Mat’s heart resting in my chest, because my own was incapable of such feelings.
“Dima,” I repeated, urgently. I knew I didn’t need to speak the words out loud, but it was a difficult habit to break. “Dima, I need you to focus, just for a moment.”
He knew the importance of this. Felt it as I felt it, as we all did, and the weight of our combined expectation turned his tear-stained face towards Yanev. He squeezed his eyes shut, flinching and slapping his hands over his ears as if bracing against a great cacophony, and heaved in a rattling, helpless breath.
“Everything Yanev just spoke was true,” Dima hissed in a voice little louder than a whisper, and we all leaned in closer to hear him better.
