Caelan
The guard is on the floor when I get there and blood is spreading across the stone in a slow, dark pool beneath him.
Eryx stands over the body with his fists raised and his chest heaving, his eyes wild and ready for another fight. I take one look at the scene as rage climbs up my throat so fast I can barely speak because this happened inside my own palace, inside walls I was born to protect, inside a place no one should dare to touch without my word.
"What is this," I asked, my voice comes out flat and cold because that is what happens when I am furious enough to stop shouting.
"He came in with a knife," Eryx said, not moving from where he stands. "He said it would be quick, and you would never know." He kicks the guard's boot lightly with his foot and looks up at me. "He was wrong."
I step into the room and crouch beside the unconscious guard, pressing two fingers to his neck. He is still alive, barely, his breathing shallow and wet. I stood up, turning to the men who followed me down the corridor.
"Take him out of here," I say, jerking my chin toward the body. "Put him somewhere secure and get a healer. He does not die until I say so because I need to know who gave him orders." The guards move fast, grabbing the man under his arms and dragging him toward the door. I wait until their footsteps fade before I look back at Eryx.
"What exactly did he say to you," I ask. "Every word."
Eryx drops his fists and rolls his shoulders back. "He waited until the other guard went to change shifts. Then he came in, real quiet, crouched down like he was checking on me.
Then he got close and whispered that the council grows tired of waiting." He pauses, watching my face. "Then he pulled the knife."
My hands are shaking and I press them flat against my thighs so no one will see it. The council. My own council sent a man down here with a knife to end a prisoner in the dark so I would wake up tomorrow and find him already cold. They did not even have the courage to bring it to me, to argue their case, to demand justice through any door that was not a back one. They went around me like I was nothing and the thought makes something sharp curl behind my ribs.
"How did you stop him," I ask.
"He was slow," Eryx says simply, as though that explains everything. "People who plan to kill someone quiet usually are."
I look around the cell. The thin blanket is torn. The wooden stool in the corner is missing one leg and I find it a few feet away, splintered at the end. Eryx used it. He fought off a man with a knife using a piece of broken furniture and he is standing in front of me now without a single serious cut, which tells me more about who he is than anything he has said since I first saw him in chains in my throne room.
"You could have been killed," I say.
"I am aware," he says. "That was the point."
I move toward the door and wave at the remaining guard in the corridor. "Bring a torch and follow me." Then I look back at Eryx. "Come."
He does not argue. He follows me out of the cell and up through the corridor, his footsteps steady behind mine as we climb the dungeon stairs back into the warmth of the palace proper. I take him through a side hall, past two checkpoints where the guards snap to attention the moment they see me, and up a staircase I rarely use that leads to the east wing where the guest quarters sit. Most of them are empty. The kingdom has not had many guests lately.
I push open the door to one of the better rooms at the far end of the hall. It is nothing like the royal chambers but it is warm and there is a proper bed against the wall with a thick blanket folded across it. A window looks out over the courtyard below and moonlight comes through the glass in a pale, wide stripe across the stone floor. I watch Eryx step inside and take it in, all of it at once, the bed and the window and the fire already burning low in the hearth as though someone lit it earlier and forgot to put it out.
He does not say anything for a moment and then he turns and looks at me with that careful, measuring look he always has, the one that makes me feel like he is reading something I have not finished writing yet.
"You are moving me up here," he says.
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because whoever sent that guard will send another one if you stay down there," I say. "And next time they will send someone faster."
He nods slowly, folding his arms across his chest. "And up here."
"Up here you have guards at the door who answer to me directly." I step back toward the hall. "No one touches you without going through me first."
I turn to leave because I have already said more than I planned to and the night has been long enough. But then I feel it, a hand closing around my wrist, firm but not rough, and I go still.
Eryx is behind me. I did not even hear him move.
"They will try again tonight," he says, quiet enough that only I can hear it, and his thumb presses once against the inside of my wrist where my pulse is running fast. "Sleep with one eye open, King."
I pull my arm free. I do not look back at him because if I do I will not leave and I need to leave. My heart is going too fast as I walk out into the corridor and I hear the guard pull the door shut behind me. I kept walking until the hallway bends and Eryx is out of sight.
But he is right.
I know he is right, and that is the part I cannot shake as I walked back toward my chambers in the dark. Because it is not just an assassin in the dungeon I have to worry about anymore. The threat is closer than that.
Chapter 8
Caelan
The torches are still burning when I push through the council chamber doors at midnight and the sound of them hitting the wall echoes down the corridor behind me because I did not bother being quiet about it. The council members are all there. Every single one of them, which tells me someone sent word ahead, which tells me at least one of them knew I was coming, which tells me everything I need to know about who is actually surprised and who is just pretending.
I walk to the head of the table and I do not sit down.
"Who sent him," I say.
The room is silent. Lord Theron is the first to look up and I watched the color leave his face in a slow drain, starting at his forehead and working its way down.
He opens his mouth and then closes it again and then opens it a second time like a man deciding how much of the truth to use.
"Your Majesty," he starts, "I do not know what you are referring to."
"The guard," I say. "The one who went into the prisoner's cell tonight with a knife and a message about the council growing tired of waiting. That guard. Who sent him."
Theron's jaw tightens. "I swear on my bloodline that no order came from me." He says it the way men say things when they want you to believe the words instead of looking at the space around them. "I would never move against you directly, you know that."
"I know what you are telling me," I say. "That is different from knowing it."
Lady Mirabel leans forward from her seat across the table, her fingers folded together neatly in front of her. "Your Majesty, perhaps we should consider a different possibility.
We have had rogue spies inside the palace before. It is not impossible that someone slipped in, used a guard's uniform, and acted without any council involvement at all. A planted agent looking to stir trouble between you and your own advisors."
She says it smoothly, like it is a perfectly reasonable idea that just occurred to her, like she has not been sitting here since someone sent her word and thinking up the cleanest answer she could build.
"A planted agent," I repeat.
"It is possible," she says.
"It is convenient," I say.
She does not flinch. She just holds my gaze with that patient, careful face she always wears and I feel my wolf moving under my skin, restless, because something in this room smells wrong and it is not just one person.
It is the air itself, the way everyone is holding just slightly too still, the way no one is asking what happened to the prisoner first, only what I plan to do next.
I look around the table and I let them wait because the silence is the only honest thing in the room right now.
"Eryx lives under royal protection," I say finally. "As of tonight. He is no longer a prisoner of the crown.
He is a guest under my authority and anyone who touches him, through a guard or a knife or a message written in invisible ink on palace stationery, answers to me. With their life."
The room breaks apart. Voices climb over each other and Lord Danvers stands up from his chair and one of the younger council members slaps his palm on the table and someone in the back says something about the old laws that I do not fully catch over the noise.
Marcus is near the wall and I see him watching me with a careful, steady face, not arguing, not agreeing, just watching the way he always does when he is trying to figure out how far I am going to take something.
"He is a criminal," Lord Theron says, loud enough to cut through the others. "He has broken crown law. He stole from our villages.
He led rogues against the realm. You cannot grant royal protection to a man like that, it makes a mockery of every law we have upheld."
"I can do whatever I decide is right," I say. "That is what it means to be king."
"With respect," Mirabel says, and her voice is back to its smooth, careful register, "there are limits even kings must observe. The council exists to advise you when…"
"The council exists because I allow it to," I say, and I say it quietly, which is worse than shouting and everyone in the room knows it.
"You advise me. You do not decide for me and you certainly do not send men into cells with knives to handle things you do not have the courage to bring to my face."
No one speaks.
Marcus steps forward then, placing himself slightly between me and the table without making it obvious, the way he has done since we were boys when he could feel something about to break.
"Perhaps we should revisit this in the morning when everyone has had time to think clearly," he says, keeping his voice even. "It has been a long night."
I hold the silence for another moment, long enough to let every person in the room understand that the meeting is over because I am done with it and not because they have run out of things to say. Then I turn toward the door.
The council filters out behind me in clusters, quiet now, talking in low voices that stop the moment they notice I am still in the corridor.
I wait until Marcus passes and catches my eye and I tilt my head toward the far end of the hall to tell him to stay close, and then I start walking back toward my chambers.
I almost miss it.
Lord Theron stops at the bottom of the staircase and leans close to a young servant who is waiting there with a candle, and the boy nods twice, fast, before Theron presses something small into his hand. The servant turns to go and looks up and sees me standing twenty feet away in the shadow of the corridor arch.
He runs.
Not fast enough to be anything other than what it is. Not slow enough to pretend he was doing anything ordinary. He just turns and goes, his footsteps quick on the stone, and the candle flame bends sideways with the speed of him.
Theron turns back slowly and finds me watching him. He says nothing. I say nothing. We stand there for a moment in the dark and then he bows his head and climbs the staircase without a word.
I watch him go.