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

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Who Never Sleeps

For a long moment, no one in the courtyard of Valmere moved.

Two kings stood forty feet apart, the same coat, the same iron circlet, the same silver thorn, and the crowd looked from one to the other like people watching a duel that had not yet decided whether to begin.

"Seize him!" said the king on the balcony.

His voice was perfect. It carried the weary, righteous anger of a man betrayed. "Guards! That man is an impostor. A demon's creature, wearing my face!"

The Holy Guard stirred. Dray, at the foot of the steps, said nothing at all.

"He's the false one!" someone shouted. "Look at the way he stands!"

"No, the other, the one who came from the crowd!"

Kael felt the whole courtyard begin to tip. Another five seconds, and it would break one way or the other, and he did not think he would like the way it fell.

"Now," breathed Seraphine, at his ear.

"Now what?"

"Your hand."

He did not ask why. He drew the knife from his belt, opened the healing cut across his palm, and let the blood run, bright and shocking, down his wrist. Seraphine's fingers closed around his. She moved him half a step to the left, and he understood: the sun slanted through the gap in the cathedral roof, and for one clean moment the false king stood in a pool of perfect light.

"Lady Isolde," said Seraphine, not loudly.

Across the courtyard, a copper head turned.

"Your best archer," said Seraphine. "One arrow. Blood on the tip. Graze the cheek. Do not kill him."

Isolde did not ask for an explanation. She was already moving, a hand raised. A lean knight in eastern green stepped out of the ranks with a short bow, and Kael held out his bleeding palm, and the man dragged the arrowhead through it without a flicker of surprise.

"Graze a fly's wing at fifty paces," said the archer mildly. "It is hardly a challenge."

Isolde's mouth twitched. "Eastern archers," she said. "We do not miss."

"Do it."

The bowstring sang.

The arrow crossed the courtyard in the space of a heartbeat and passed so near the false king's face that the iron circlet rang. A thin red line opened along his cheekbone. He lifted his fingers to it, and stared at the smear of blood on his glove.

Then his face rippled like a pond struck by a stone.

The crowd gasped as one. The stern line of the mouth went soft, and the stormy gray eyes darkened to brown, and the broad shoulders narrowed and slid, and where a king had stood there stood a slim, dark-eyed man in a wine-colored coat, with Kael's blood running down his cheek and a delighted, unrepentant smile.

"Well," said Lucan of Envy, and sketched a bow to the horrified courtyard. "That was quicker than I expected."

"Seize him!" Isolde roared.

Lucan did not run. He simply stepped backward, into the tall glass doors behind the balcony, and the glass took him like water. For an instant his reflection lingered, grinning, a ghost in the shattered pane. Then the pane was only glass, and the torn decree drifted down into the courtyard like a dead leaf.

The silence lasted a breath. Then the whole courtyard erupted, and bells across the city began to ring, a long, confused clamor.

Kael stood with his hand dripping blood onto the cobbles. He felt dizzy. He felt, absurdly, like laughing. Beside him, Seraphine had let go of his fingers and was staring at the parchment where it had landed, and for a moment her face was unguarded in a way that made his chest ache.

"You trusted me," she said.

"You told me where to stand."

"I could have been wrong."

"You were not."

The silver thorn on his wrist burned once, hot and long, and went still. The promise had held. But the price had not been paid, he thought. It had only been postponed.

"The Chancellor," Isolde said, in a voice like iron.

Kael turned.

Lord Chancellor Dray stood at the foot of the balcony steps in his chain of office, white as parchment. Isolde's knights had closed around him in a quiet circle. He looked at them. He looked at Kael. He lifted his ink-stained hands, with an expression of mild, wounded dignity, as if he had been asked to account for a misplaced receipt.

"Majesty. I served the Crown. The signature appeared to be yours. I have acted in good faith."

"You were not surprised," said Kael quietly.

"I do not follow."

"This morning. When I told you I had not signed it. You were not surprised." Kael took a step closer. "You knew, Dray. You knew before I did. Who told you?"

The Chancellor's mouth opened.

It was a very small sound. A soft, wet hiss, like air leaving a punctured bellows. His eyes went wide. His hand rose slowly to his chest, and found nothing there, and then, with a shudder, reached behind him.

He fell forward onto his knees. A black-bladed dagger stood between his shoulder blades, buried to the hilt.

"Dray!" Kael caught him. The old man was heavier than he looked. His chain of office clanked against the cobbles. Isolde's knights wheeled, swords out, scanning the crowd, but the courtyard was a sea of faces, frightened, shouting, shoving, and no one was running.

"Who?" Kael said. "Dray, who did this?"

The Chancellor's eyes swam into focus. He looked, with a strange and terrible clarity, at Kael's face. His lips shaped something. Kael bent close.

"Ask..." The words were barely breath. "Ask who never sleeps."

The light went out of his eyes.

Kael knelt there with the old man's blood soaking through his sleeves, the courtyard roaring around him, and did not feel any of it.

Who never sleeps.

Isolde pulled the blade from the body and turned it in the sun. It was black and wicked, with a long red-lit groove down the center, and Seraphine, at his shoulder, went very still.

"Wrath-forged," she said. "The same as the one that struck me."

"Then the same hand threw it," said Kael.

"The same hand." She pressed her hand to her ribs. Her voice was a thread. "And my wound has not closed. It only closes when the thrower dies. Whoever threw that first dagger is alive, Kael. And they are standing in this courtyard."

Kael raised his eyes slowly.

Across the crowd, by the foot of the steps, stood Captain Rowan Thorne with his hand on his sword, his face gray with exhaustion, his eyes red-rimmed and bright. He had not slept since the coronation. He had said so himself.

And beside Kael, in her stained white gown, with a thin silver scratch across her palm, the bride looked back at him with wide, stricken eyes. She opened her mouth as if to speak, and closed it. She had not slept in twelve years.

Who never sleeps.

He did not know which of them Dray had meant.