CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1049 Words
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
POV: Hadeon
The throne room smelled like something dying and I had been pretending not to notice it for three days because pretending not to notice things was a skill I had developed across a lifetime of waiting for the right moment and had never yet failed me, but the truth was the smell was getting worse and what it smelled like was the specific rot of a plan that had been brilliant when I made it and was now collapsing in a direction I had not modeled for.
Soren found me at the window.
"The sickness is in the eastern courtyard now," he said, without bothering with a greeting because we had never bothered with greetings, Soren and I, not since we were boys running the same borderland training circuit and learning together that sentiment was something other people performed while the two of us got things done. "It moved overnight. Three servants dead before sunrise and the outer garden is black to the roots."
"I know," I said.
"And Celene."
"I know about Celene too."
"Do you." He crossed the room and stood beside me at the window and looked at the courtyard below where the stone was beginning to darken at the seams, that particular black spread that had no natural explanation and no natural solution. "Because what I know about Celene is that she killed Aldric last night and she is not currently containable by anything this palace has available and the warriors I sent to assess the situation this morning came back minus two of their number and considerably less willing to go back a second time."
"I did not marry her for love, Soren. I married her for the title and the position and the specific opportunity she represented on that ceremony ground." I turned from the window. "That opportunity has changed shape. That is all."
"Changed shape." He looked at me with the expression he wore when he thought I was being deliberately obtuse about something serious. "Hadeon. She killed her own father. She is spreading a sickness through this palace that kills on contact. The original plan required a functional Moon Goddess Luna who could legitimize your claim to the Voss seat, and what you actually have is a permanently transformed black wolf who cannot be in the same room as anything living without it dying."
"Then I need a different legitimizing force." I said it simply because it was simple. Plans that failed were simply plans that needed replacing, and I had always been faster at replacing them than anyone around me gave me credit for. "The original opportunity was Celene because Celene was presented as the Moon Goddess. She is not the Moon Goddess. The actual Moon Goddess is currently somewhere in unclaimed territory, which I know because I have had people watching the outer territories since the ceremony, which I had planned for because I plan for everything."
Soren was quiet for a moment. "You are going to go after Nyla Croft."
"I am going to position myself correctly in relation to Nyla Croft, which is a different thing." I walked to the table and poured two glasses because this conversation required them. "She will have to move toward Ironmere eventually. The sickness is spreading and she is the only thing that stops it and she knows that and whatever pride she is currently exercising in the outer territories has a time limit attached to it. When she moves, I want to be standing in a position that looks like an ally rather than another obstacle."
"And Tarek."
"My cousin is currently somewhere in unclaimed territory being a tragic figure, which he was always going to be given the specific shape of his personality. He will fight beside her because that is what Tarek does, he finds a cause and he commits to it with his whole chest regardless of what it costs him, which is both his greatest quality and the reason he lost everything in a single evening." I handed Soren his glass. "He is not my concern."
"Your mistress arrived this morning," Soren said, which was his way of changing the subject when he decided he had said everything useful on the current one. "She is in the east wing. She is asking whether the plan has changed."
I looked at the courtyard below, at the black creeping through the stone, at the palace I had claimed in a single evening of calculated movement and was now watching die from the inside.
"Tell Mira the plan has not changed," I said. "Tell her the shape of it has adjusted and I will explain the adjustments tonight." I drank from my glass. "And tell her to stay away from the eastern courtyard until further notice."
"She will not like that."
"She does not have to like it. She only has to do it."
Soren set his glass down and looked at me with the particular patience of a man who has watched me navigate worse than this and come out correctly positioned on the other side. "What do you actually need from me right now."
"I need you to find out exactly where Nyla Croft is and exactly who she is allowing near her and exactly what it would take to get a message to her that does not read like a threat." I turned from the window. "I spent my whole life being told the seat would never be mine. I took it in one evening. I am not giving it back because the woman I used to claim it turned out to be a different kind of problem than I budgeted for."
"And if Nyla will not deal with you."
"Everyone deals with someone eventually," I said. "It is only a matter of finding the right currency."
I looked at the black courtyard below and I thought about Tarek standing on that ceremony ground watching everything he had built dissolve in real time, and I felt nothing about it except the clean, practical satisfaction of a man who had been patient long enough and had finally gotten the thing he had always been meant to have.
The palace was dying around me.
I was already planning what to build in its place.
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