The Devil's Debt: A Kiss That Binds the Damned

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Two Kings

The decree was nailed to the east gate at dawn.

Kael learned of it from Captain Rowan, who woke him by hammering on the chamber door with his fist, and who stood on the threshold afterward with a sheet of parchment shaking in his hand.

"Sire. You must read this."

By order of the King, Seraphine Vale, called the Collector, is stripped of every office and title, and is banished from the palace at noon this day, under pain of death.

Below it, a signature in Kael's own cramped hand. Below that, the impression of the royal signet, still faintly warm. It was not the mark of Kael's own ring, which sat on his finger. A hairline crack ran through the lion's mane. It was his father's seal.

"I did not write this."

"It was sealed at three in the morning." Rowan's eyes were red and wild. "I saw you, sire. In the east corridor. You walked past me with a lantern. I thought you could not sleep."

"I never left this room."

Behind him, Seraphine rose from the great chair, white-faced, one hand pressed to her side. She had slept at last, and he saw the guilt of it in her eyes. "He did not," she said. "I would have felt him go. The Collector's Clause..." She stopped. She looked at the parchment as if it were a coiled snake. "Kael. The promise."

He had been trying not to think of it.

"A promise to Hell is a debt," she said, very quietly. "If this decree stands at noon, you will have taken my office with your own hand. You will have broken it."

"And Hell takes the forfeit."

"Whatever it chooses."

"Envy," said Kael.

"The twins." Her jaw tightened. "They cannot touch me. They can touch you. Anything you sign, anything you say, if they can wear your face—"

"Then we find the face before noon."

"It was always going to be this," she said bitterly. "I only did not think they would be so quick."

On the bed, the bride stirred and sat up, her hair tumbled and her eyes wide. She looked at the parchment in the Captain's hand, and then, very quickly, at her own lap. Kael noticed a thin silver scratch across her palm, as though she had gripped something sharp.

"You are hurt."

"A mirror," said the bride lightly. "In my sleep. I have the most terrible dreams."

Seraphine looked at her for a long moment, and Kael saw something pass behind her eyes. She did not say it. She only turned to him.

"There is a way," she said. "A borrowed face is a reflection. It holds until the original's blood touches it. Cut the false king and the glass falls away."

"Then I only have to make him bleed."

"In front of a crowd. Before noon. While he wears your coat and stands behind a hundred guards who believe he is you." She almost smiled. "It will be easy."

---

By ten the news had reached every corner of Valmere. By eleven the courtyard was packed from wall to wall with a muttering, restless crowd, sullen, frightened, ready to cheer or to riot. Hawkers had abandoned their carts. A small boy sat on his father's shoulders waving a paper flag.

Lord Chancellor Dray stood at the foot of the balcony steps in his chain of office, with a double rank of Holy Guard behind him. He looked, Kael thought, like a man who had been handed a gift and did not intend to ask where it came from. He glanced up at the balcony, then away, and did not meet Kael's eyes again.

"A decree under the royal seal is law, Majesty," Dray said when Kael found him. He said it gently, without surprise, which was a surprise in itself. "I cannot in conscience refuse to enforce it."

"I did not issue it."

"The Council has examined the signature." A pause, regretful. "It is yours."

"Dray—"

"Perhaps His Majesty is unwell." The Chancellor's eyes were mild. "Perhaps it would be wise to submit to the Rite of Cleansing after all."

Isolde's knights had formed a ring along the south wall, mud-spattered, silent. She stood among them with her arms folded and met Kael's eyes across the crowd, and gave a short nod. I am here.

"Noon," murmured Seraphine, at his shoulder. Her hand was an arm's length from his sleeve, and he could feel the tension in her like the hum of a plucked string. "He will come out on the balcony. He will read it himself."

"And I will not be able to stop him."

"You will be able to stop him." She drew a long, steady breath. "If you stand where I tell you."

The great bell of the cathedral began to toll. Twelve strokes. The crowd surged, craned, fell silent.

On the balcony above the courtyard, the doors opened.

A man stepped out into the light.

He wore a black coat, with no gold on it. He wore the plain iron circlet of the crown in his dark hair. He walked to the balustrade with a slight stiffness in his left shoulder that Kael recognized, with sick certainty, as his own. He looked down on the courtyard of Valmere with a face as familiar as a mirror, the same stern line of the mouth, the same shadows under the eyes, the same stormy, tired gray.

A murmur went through the crowd like a wind.

"People of Varyn," said the king.

It was his voice. It was exactly his voice, pitched a little lower than he would have used, the cadence a half-beat more deliberate. Kael felt the skin crawl on the back of his neck. He had faced Dravik's blade with steadier hands.

"I come before you in a dark hour." The false king unrolled the parchment. "Hell is at our gates. Our sky is red. And in the heart of our own house, a demon has taken the king's ear and the king's counsel." His gaze swept the crowd, grave and sorrowful. "I have been blind. I have been weak. But no longer. By my order, the woman Seraphine Vale is stripped of every office, and driven from this palace, by sword if need be—"

"No."

It tore out of Kael before he could stop it. A hundred heads turned.

He shoved through the crowd, past startled apprentices and soldiers and women with children on their hips, with Seraphine at his shoulder. The crowd parted around him. People stared. Someone gasped. Someone said The king, and then, in a different voice, " The king? Somewhere a woman began to cry.

He reached the foot of the balcony steps and looked up.

The man above him lowered the parchment. For a heartbeat the two of them regarded each other across forty feet of air, the same face, the same coat, the same silver thorn burning at the same wrist.

Then the false king smiled, slow and warm and entirely unlike anything Kael had ever done.

"Ah," he said softly. "There he is."

And the whole courtyard turned and looked from one king to the other.