Daindreth's Assassin #1 Page 3

  The archduke was here? Amira’s thoughts whirred. How many hours had she lost to the surgeon’s potions?

  “I’ll come in a moment,” Fonra said quietly.

  “You will come now.” Queen Hyle’s command was short, clipped. The queen consort’s only real power was over her servants and the personal household of the king, but she wielded that like a blacksmith’s hammer.

  Fonra snapped her chin up in a rare show of defiance. “Your future empress will come when she is done here. Thank you, Mother.”

  Amira watched the queen redden, the vein in her forehead bulge like a fat worm as she and her daughter faced off.

  Surprisingly, the queen was first to break. Whirling in a storm of skirts, she clipped a short order to her servants and marched into Fonra’s boudoir. Her ladies and pages scurried after her.

  Fonra’s chief lady stayed in the doorway, hands clasped in front of her in the “repose” posture like a proper subservient gentlewoman. “Princess Fonra, we do need to get you ready.”

  “He won’t even be meeting me proper tonight,” Fonra clipped back. “I’ll be with Mother and the rest of the household on the balcony. The feasts start tomorrow.”

  The chief lady inclined her head in agreement. “Yes, Your Highness. But you know the way of it.”

  Fonra huffed, just a slight rise and fall of her shoulders and a tightening of her hands. “Go wait with my mother.”

  The chief lady’s jaw clenched, but she gave no other signs of her frustration. With a curt nod, she floated after Queen Hyle, hands still clasped before her.

  “I’ll send one of my girls to tend you.” Fonra brushed a sweaty strand of hair from Amira’s temple. “King Hyle wanted us to dance tomorrow night.” Her lips pressed together. “The bride’s dance. I was hoping you’d be dancing with us.”

  Amira closed her eyes. “He’ll sacrifice you, if not me.”

  “What’s that?”

  Amira winced at the slight tug at her throat. Her father had ordered her to secrecy in her latest assassination attempt, as he did with every assignment. She was pushing into a grey area of disobedience and needed to be careful.

  “Fonra, listen to me.” Amira gripped her sister’s arm. “This is very important. You can’t marry the archduke.”

  Fonra looked up, blinking. “The king has—”

  “I know.” Amira winced. Two commands warred for control of the curse—protect Fonra clashed with speak no word of this to anyone. A fluttering sensation in her collarbone warned her to tread lightly. “But you can’t. The archduke, he’s—he’s not right. There’s—” The curse yanked tight across Amira’s throat like an invisible cord. Gasping, she focused on the window across the room, something that didn’t defy her father’s orders.

  The curse loosened its hold bit by bit while Amira’s eyes watered.

  “Amira, shush. Don’t hurt yourself.” Fonra never asked about the curse, but she had seen plenty to know what happened to Amira if she disobeyed their father. “I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.” She smiled, but there was something resigned and more than a little sad behind it. “I wouldn’t be the first woman in our family to marry a man I didn’t love.”

  Amira believed that everyone married for love—just not usually love of the person they married. Yeomen tended to marry for love of grazing land and sturdy roofs. Merchants married for love of money and trade routes. Kings and archdukes married for love of power.

  But that thing that lived behind Daindreth’s eyes? What did it want? What did a demon love?

  “This isn’t about love,” Amira’s hand tightened on her sister. “He’s a monster, Fonra. I can’t explain it. Just...please.”

  “What happened last night, Amira?” Fonra whispered softly. “Where did you go?” She touched the side of Amira’s face, her delicate brows furrowing, then rising. “What did you see?”

  Amira shook her head. She couldn’t tell. No matter how much she wanted to. “Father has brought doom on us all. You and I, at the very least.”

  Fonra’s lips parted as she studied Amira. “What can we do?”

  The assassin looked away. “I failed.”

  “Let me help,” Fonra said. “For once, let me do something.”

  Amira turned back to look at her sister again. “Find a way to break off the engagement. I don’t care what you have to do.”

  “But the insult to the empire—”

  “I don’t care,” Amira repeated, voice dropping to a hiss. “That thing...” She trailed off at a twinge in her throat.

  Queen Hyle’s voice called from the other room again, insistent and angry.

  Fonra exhaled a long breath. “I will try.”

  Amira’s heart sank. “Please.”

  Fonra nodded. “I’ll do what I can. Rest well. I’ll send a girl to look after you.”

  Her sister left and closed the door, shielding the assassin from Queen Hyle in the next room. Her Majesty had been born Adelaide Boless of Highcrest, daughter of a house with an impressive pedigree, a long history of loyalty to the imperial house, and not much else.

  Amira vaguely recalled Queen Hyle—belly stretched and swollen with Fonra—screaming to the king at the supper table that he would have sons now, sons of the Empire’s stock. Did he have to keep that redheaded brat? That witch’s daughter?

  Queen Hyle had bragged that she would be the one to give King Hyle sons. When Fonra had been a girl, that had dampened the queen’s boasts for only a few months before she again had a full belly and a full ego.

  First there was one stillborn son, then another miscarriage, then at last the much-longed-for male heir arrived.

  As a child, Amira had hated and loved Fonra in equal measure. Yet when Fonra had been pushed aside in favor of the new baby brother, Amira had found herself looking after Fonra more and more. Amira had been the one to teach Fonra to plait her hair. The one Fonra had run to when she’d had her first bleeding.

  In turn, Fonra was the one who had massaged Amira’s shoulders when she’d come back sore from training. The one who had quietly mended the slashes and tears in Amira’s clothes and never questioned why her sister kept swordsman’s shirts and leather jodhpurs in the bottom of her wardrobe.

  When Amira turned sixteen, she was sent to spend the summer “studying abroad.” When she had returned, with new scars under her tunic and more blood on her hands than she would ever wash off, Amira’s half-brother had already fallen ill and died a month before his seventh birthday.

  No one spoke of the boy now. Camden had been his name, after Adelaide’s father. But his death had changed the household and the kingdom forever.

  Queen Hyle lost all hope of producing another son and poured almost a decade’s worth of withheld motherly attention into Fonra within the span of a year. Ever since, Fonra had been like a jewel at her mother’s breast—clutched tightly, ruthlessly polished, and flaunted at every opportunity. A jewel that the queen was unknowingly damned and determined to pawn off on a monster.

  Amira hoisted herself upright. She didn’t know what she would do, but she had to do something. Stiff, aching, and groaning in pain, Amira forced herself into a linen chemise and stiff surcoat.

  She couldn’t quite reach to straighten the back laces of her surcoat, so she tossed a fur mantle over her shoulders to hide the crooked strings.

  She winced at the loud swishing sound her dress made with every step down the hallway. One hand on the wall for balance, she ventured into the main palace.

  “My lady, are you well?” It was Corman, one of her father’s footmen. Though he was barely a year her senior, his mother had been a scullery maid in the steward’s household and he was one of the few servants who remembered when Amira’s mother had been queen. That had been before the sorceresses’ rebellion, the annulment, and the scandal that had followed.

  Corman hovered close but didn’t dare touch her. She was still a king’s daughter—even after being bastardized.

  Amira waved him away. “I’m going to see His Majesty.”

  Corman hesitated, his hand half raised between them. Concern lined his face. It was a nice face, soft and kind beneath a close-trimmed beard. He hadn’t had that beard when she’d kissed him outside the silver cupboard three summers ago. “My lady, forgive me, but you hardly look—”

  The assassin peered past Corman to the dark hallway at his back. “Is the king holding court?”

  “No, my lady. He’s in his dressing chamber now.”

  “Then I needn’t concern myself with my appearance.” Amira pulled away from the timid man.

  Corman’s mother—who now oversaw the cleaning and tending of the castle’s bed linens—had caught them that evening, and it was just as well. Amira had been too drunk to think about what might have happened to him if he’d accepted her offer to come to her rooms.

  Amira approached her father’s personal chamber, a few halls away from Fonra’s. Head spinning, she thanked Eponine it wasn’t far.

  The queen’s chambers were beside the king’s, the bedrooms adjoined by a door to give conjugal visits some privacy. They now belonged to Queen Hyle but had once belonged to Queen Cyne.

  Amira had the vaguest memory of sitting in the queen’s suite back when it had been her mother’s. It had been painted white and trimmed in the thinnest layer of gold leaf. She remembered tumbling into her mother’s skirts, pulling an avalanche of chiffon on top of her head. It had been like playing in a golden cloud. Her mother had scooped her up and kissed either of her cheeks and that was where the memory ended.

  Cyne of the Istovari—the banished queen of Hylendale.

  In truth, Amira could have dreamt it. The woman in that memory was all light and smiles and golden softness. Surely that couldn’t have been the same woman who had left her only child alo
ne to die in a crumbling tower. While her mother’s abandonment meant Amira was the only Istovari who had not been banished from the empire, it was still not something she planned to forgive.

  Amira reached her father’s doorway and the two guards outside let her pass, though neither opened the door nor announced her. Like all her father’s guards, they were Boless men, recruited by Adelaide’s uncle and brother in the west.

  The assassin waited in the foyer, finding that some shred of her still valued protocol. Even the antechamber was gilt all in gold now. The empire cared for its vassals if nothing else.

  “My lady!” cried a footman who apparently recognized her better than she did him. He strode straight for her with a scandalized flutter of his hands. “My lady, His Majesty is dressing. It’s not proper for you to be here.”

  “I need to speak to His Majesty.”

  “My lady, your royal father is preoccupied with preparations to receive the Grand Archduke. Their caravan was spotted not two hours ago and—”

  The king emerged, pulling on a pair of doeskin gloves with attendants billowing about him. She had never seen her father alone. Always, he was with advisors, footmen, valets, or other nobles.

  “Your Majesty!” Amira scrambled past the footman to reach the king and gripped his forearm.

  “My lady!” one of the servants gasped.

  Amira knew better than to lay a hand on the king, but she was desperate. Two servants stepped forward to pull her away, but the king waved them off.

  The king shot a glance over her, head to foot. His brows rose. “Lady Amira. You look ill.”

  He wouldn’t speak of her assignment last night, not in front of so many servants.

  At his back hovered Cromwell, her father’s legal advisor. Amira’s neck prickled at the sight of him. She never quite knew where she stood with Cromwell. To her face, he had always been kind. He was the one person in the palace who had never failed to bring her gifts—birthdays, feast days, holidays, even when he simply visited another city. On the other hand, he was the reason she was no longer a princess.

  “My liege.” She squeezed her father’s arm, though she doubted he could even feel it through the layers of padding in his sleeve, fashioned after the imperial style. “I wanted to see you before the archduke’s arrival. What happened last night—” The curse tightened in her throat. She wasn’t permitted to speak of that assignment in front of anyone who didn’t already know.

  “Leave us,” King Hyle said to his retainers. “This will be brief.”

  Several of the servants watched Amira hesitantly, but Cromwell nodded, and the room emptied.

  Men like Cromwell were not the sort to conquer kingdoms, but they were the sort to keep them. It had been Cromwell who had helped King Hyle navigate the tenuous days when the Empire had come lusting after their pine forests and deep-water harbors on the coast. It had been his suggestion that Queen Cyne be banished.

  Amira hated the man for years, but her father was still king, none of Hylendale’s cities had been razed, and now the future emperor was set to marry Hyle’s daughter. To an outside observer, one might say Cromwell had saved the kingdom.

  When the door closed, Cromwell remained with his back to it, clasping a thick ledger in his hands. He wore black same as he had when Amira was little—the only difference was then it had been humble linen and now it was plush velvet.

  Amira cleared her throat as the curse loosened, looking up to her father. “When I faced the archduke, he changed into something else. He saw through my spells as no man could and he fought like nothing I’ve ever seen. His ka was different, somehow. Wrong,” she whispered. “What is he?”

  King Hyle flicked his gaze over her from head to foot. “You failed.”

  Amira stifled a cry of frustration. “You can’t give him Fonra.”

  “That’s why I sent you,” King Hyle snapped. “Whatever it is that...” He shot a glance to Cromwell. “There’s nothing to be done for it now. If anything happens to him within our walls, it will be war. But I can’t break off the engagement. No one refuses the empire.”

  “He’s not human!”

  King Hyle grabbed her by her upper arms. “You listen to me.”

  It would have taken but a twist and yank for her to free herself from his hold and then drive her elbow into his mouth, but she didn’t dare. She couldn’t harm him. He’d already given her that command.

  “You had your chance to save your sister,” the king said. “Now we can only hope to save Hylendale from another war.”

  Amira shook her head. “If you knew what I saw—”

  “I can’t know,” the king said in a low voice. She might have imagined it, but she thought he sounded pleading. “Don’t you see? I didn’t know anything of it. A rogue attacked the imperial retinue. An enemy of the empire. Someone hired by a foreign dignitary who fears a stronger tie with Hylendale. Nothing else, do you understand me? If anything happens to him within our walls, it will be war.”

  “But you did know,” Amira whispered, realization washing over her in a cold shiver. The pain in her side throbbed and her head spun. She needed to rest, but Fonra’s life and more could be at stake. “You must have. Why else would you have sent me?” She looked to Cromwell, but the lawyer was as unreadable as ever. “Papa,” Amira looked back to the king, “what have you done?”

  King Hyle released her. “It isn’t your concern.”

  “I’ll finish it.” Amira limped after him as he moved for the exit. Cromwell waited stiff and stoic as a headsman in front of the door. “I’ll find a way. You can’t let him have Fonra. You can’t.”

  “But I can.” King Hyle spun on her. “If she is the price.”

  “Nothing is worth her life!” Amira cried.

  “No?” King Hyle’s nostrils flared. “What about the three hundred and eighty-two thousand people in our kingdom, according to the last census? What are their lives worth, Amira?”

  The assassin had no answer.

  “I sent you to prevent this. But you failed. And now we must all live with the consequences.”

  His words hit her like a sucker punch. “Your Majesty, I beg you. Let me try again.” Amira had never thought she would beg to kill. Yet if it would protect her sister, if it would keep Fonra out of the clutches of that thing, she’d kill a thousand archdukes.

  “No! You are to keep silent on this. What you saw, what you did. And you will not lift a finger against the archduke nor anyone in his retinue while he is here, do you understand me?”

  Amira felt the command strike her in the hollow of her throat. She almost gasped with the force of the order. “Father.” She hadn’t called him that in years. “Father, please. If he needs a Hylendale bride, give me to him instead.”

  King Hyle’s hands closed into fists, but he looked away from her.

  “Please. He’ll tear her apart. He’ll kill her if she’s lucky. I’m begging you.” The implication hung unspoken between them that he’d do the same to Amira.

  King Hyle exhaled.

  Cromwell watched their exchange, the carved lines of his face deepening in thought. No doubt, he was thinking of all the legal reasons the bastardized daughter of a king—without a dowry—was unsuitable as an archduke’s bride.

  “Return to your rooms and rest until you regain your strength, Amira.” The king turned his back, but his voice softened enough that she noticed the change in tone. “I know you did the best you could.”

  The curse would have allowed nothing less.

  “You have sacrificed much for this kingdom.” King Hyle raised his chin, back still to her. “You will sacrifice much more, I’m afraid.”

  Amira forced down the lump in her throat.

  “Perhaps, this once, we should let your sister sacrifice instead.”

  Amira wanted to wail, to scream, to strike her father, beat him and Cromwell so bloody that their own mothers wouldn’t recognize them. But she didn’t. The curse wouldn’t allow it and she was too battered for the effort anyway.

  She followed her father out of his apartments and limped back to her own room. She eased into her bed, staring at the flowers Fonra had painted on the wood paneling for Amira’s fourteenth birthday.