The King Slayer Part 15

"Stop that," I say. "You're meant to be servants. You're used to this." I turn to Malcolm, now slumped against the cold brick wall. His hand is no longer over his mouth, but he's bent over at the waist, staring at the ground. He looks as if he's going to vomit, but I don't think it's because of the smell of fish.

"That man the birds attacked," I say to him. "Was that who I think it was?"

"Uncle's chaplain," he confirms. "He's known him since he was a child. I don't know what he could have done to deserve that."

"He got in the way," I say, because that's all it ever comes down to with Blackwell. Malcolm nods, silent; he's beginning to know it, too.

"We're being circled." Schuyler's watching the blur of black wings wheel above us, those hexed red eyes searching the shadows below. "Where to next?"

I motion them down the alley, to a green painted door at the end. On the other side of it is the flesh larder. It's where meat goes to be cured, and it's always, always empty. For good reason: It smells like a slaughterhouse in here.

In the center of the room is a large grate set into the floor, where the blood drips from the butchered parts of at least fifty carca.s.ses hanging from hooks in the ceiling. I lean down and unfasten it from its sticky moors. The smell that greets me from below is worse than the one that surrounds me.

"I knew you had a plan." Keagan turns up her freckled nose, an expression that reminds me of Fifer. "But I didn't think it would turn out to be so foul."

"Not as foul as getting your eyes plucked out by crows," I tell her. "Now get inside."

She reluctantly lowers herself down, Malcolm and Schuyler following behind, Schuyler spitting out obscenities at the smell. I'm unwittingly reminded of John then, of the way he would swear often and with glee, making me laugh. I wonder if he's still in Hexham, or if they let him out after our escape. I wonder if he is still free with his words, or if he tempers them for her. I wonder if he wonders about me; if he ever thinks of me, in hatred or at all.

"Sparrow." Keagan peers up at me through the opening, breaking into my thoughts. "Let's go."

I fold myself through the grate. Inside, it's rancid. Sticky puddles of blood stagnate beneath our feet; c.o.c.kroaches scurry up the walls, maggots writhe in the dirt. The tiny s.p.a.ce branches off into a network of tunnels, and I lead them down one after another-the four of us crawling on our hands and knees, filthy and damp-as we wind beneath the palace.

It is foul down here; Keagan is right. I've only ever been down here once, the night I crept from my room to the docks where I hailed a wherry to take me to the stews, to a ramshackle room in a narrow, timbered building set high above the river. There was a wisewoman there; I heard the kitchen maids talk about her. A woman who could speak to the dead, who could make a boy love a girl, who could bring a baby to a woman, who could keep one away.

She was the one who gave me the pennyroyal and silphium, told me how to stew them for three days under the darkness of a new moon, to mask the pungent smell with peppermint. The one who looked at me as I left and said, "These herbs, they'll keep you out of trouble. But they won't keep trouble away."

A wise woman indeed.

Soon enough light begins to squeeze through the darkness, a halo around damp edges. Voices and the sound of footsteps filter down to us: the roasted smell of meat, the sweet scent of pie, and the yeasty warmth of fresh bread as we pa.s.s beneath the main palace kitchen, just where we're meant to be.

We set our bags down and prepare to settle in for the night. Keagan warms our clothes with a quick blast of heat, but we don't allow her to start a fire for fear a current will waft its way upward, warming the air and alerting someone to our presence.

The evening hours stretch out before us, made longer by the cold air, the damp, and the lack of food, made worse by the scent of dinner that lingers long after the kitchen closes. I whisper the plan laid out for tomorrow, every detail and amalgamation of it, nothing left to chance: for me to step into the tiny royal pew, no bigger than a closet, overlooking the chapel with its dark-paneled walls, lush red silk curtains, and richly painted ceilings. Where Blackwell takes matins every morning, where I will wait for him to arrive. Where I will pull out the Azoth and plunge it into his chest and watch his life's blood drain from him, along with his magic, along with the hold he's got on me, on John, on Anglia.

Rest comes uneasy for all of us. Keagan lies along the ground, s.h.i.+fting and turning for hours before finally going still. Schuyler sits against the wall, arms folded across his chest, eyes closed. He's not sleeping; revenants don't need to, but it's the closest thing to it.

Beside me, Malcolm fidgets: crossing and uncrossing his arms, pulling his cloak around his shoulders, raking his hands through his hair. He's s.h.i.+vering but I don't know if it's from nerves or cold. His distress puts me further on edge than I already am, and finally I can't take it any longer.

"What was it you were whispering?" I say. "Earlier, when we pa.s.sed down the promenade. It sounded familiar. What was it?"

At the sound of my voice Malcolm jerks his head toward me and, as I'd hoped, stops moving.

"It's the Prayer on the Eve of Battle," he says. "Do you know it? To know you is to live, to serve you is to reign, be our protection in battle against evil..."

He recites the words and at once, that cadence I recognized before becomes a pledge I wish I hadn't. Frances Culpepper, another of Blackwell's witch hunters, the only other female recruit and my only other friend besides Caleb, used to recite it before our tests. She said it brought her luck; she said it kept her alive. It was the last thing I ever heard her say: Frances didn't make it through our final test.

"I know it."

"I used to recite it before meetings," Malcolm continues. "With the privy council, with parliament, diplomats, councillors, chancellors, pensioners, pet.i.tioners, paris.h.i.+oners..."

"So, everyone then."

He laughs a little. Malcolm's always been free with his laughter, but his voice cracks on it this time, making him sound boyish and vulnerable, as if all his other laughs were just an imitation. Or maybe this one is the imitation.

"It gave me courage, I suppose, and I needed all the courage I could get," he says. "Those men, Bess. Elizabeth. They were awful, I can't tell you. Each meeting felt like a battle, it felt like they were after my blood. Who knew? Turns out they actually were."

I don't say anything to this. Because it's true, because I don't know how he didn't see it before. Blackwell was expert at deceiving Malcolm, yes. But by then Malcolm was already expert at deceiving himself.

"How will it go tomorrow?" Malcolm cups his hands around his mouth, blows into them, rubs his palms together. "Your plan. Do you think it will work? Or..." He breathes into his cupped hands again.

"It will work," I say. "Blackwell will die tomorrow, even if it kills me."

By my side, the Azoth thrums its approval.

INSIDE THE DISTANT CLOCK COURT, a bell chimes three times.

Schuyler nudges my foot but I'm already awake. Three in the morning. Time for us to go. My stomach curls around itself, lurching and tumbling in a dance of anxiety and antic.i.p.ation and finality.

We pull on our weapons belts and fill them, the sound of metal sc.r.a.ping on stone as we pick up dagger after dagger and stow them inside. They're all but useless against Blackwell, against his men and their magic, but it's all the protection we have.

Not all. I have the Azoth, but it's meant to be used only once: on Blackwell, to finish what I started. I don't need to use it any more than that; any more than that and the curse would set in more than it already has, and I would not be able to stop.

I slide the blade into the belt under my dress. Almost like a whisper, a call, words fill my head and my heart.

You will know the curse of power, it vows. The curse of strength, of invincibility. The curse of never knowing defeat. Of flaying your enemies, of never knowing another one. As long as you both shall live.

Schuyler jerks his head in my direction, his eyes wide in alarm. Shakes it once, hard. The voice and the warmth of the Azoth wink out, leaving me cold and uncertain.

"You're sure we'll be alone?" Keagan asks me the same question she asked at least a hundred times last night.

"We won't be alone," I remind her. "The scullions and pages will be there, stoking fires. Emptying chamber pots. Strewing rushes. They won't be paying attention to anything but that. Dressed the way I am, I'll blend right in."

"Are you sure they won't recognize you?" Malcolm's voice, raspy with exhaustion and fear, cuts through the abject darkness.

"At this hour, they'll all be half asleep," I reply. "Plus, they're children. They've never seen me before. I haven't worked scullery in years." Not since I was nine, not since I worked my way up to cooking and serving. The senior servants, were they to see me, would recognize me. But that's not the plan. The plan is to be long gone before they arrive.

"When it's safe for you to come up, I'll tap three times. We'll sneak up the back stairs, into the pages' chamber."

"What about the pew?" Malcolm says. "Are you sure Uncle won't be there already? And the magic. Are you sure-"

"I'm sure," I say. "And I need you to be sure of it, too. We can't have any doubt, any hesitation. That will kill this plan, and us, as sure as anything. Do you understand?"

The three of them nod in mute agreement.

With a small clank, Schuyler pops the grate open. He holds out a hand and I step into it; he boosts me up and through the opening with ease and at once, I'm in the kitchen. It takes a moment for me to adjust to this: I'm in the kitchen. Where I spent my childhood, where I met Caleb. Where this story began and where, if all goes the way I've planned, it will end. The sight of it-cold stone floors, warm brick fireplace, wide expanses of smoke-blackened, white plaster walls-combined with the smell-flour and spice, fire and hearth-is enough to fill me with happiness and sorrow, longing and regret.

It all looks the same. A row of low, rounded bread ovens. Stacks of pots and kettles. Cords of wood stacked high beside the fire. Trestle tables laid with food in various stages of preparation: loaves of bread draped with linen and ready to be baked; a boar carca.s.s impaled with an iron skewer, waiting to be roasted.

I slip into my old morning routine the way I'd slip into an old coat. Sweeping the floors, collecting the old rushes and placing them in a basket beside the back door, dragging in a bundle of fresh ones. A maid no older than ten pokes her head in the door. She sees me doing the work she should be doing but if she's surprised, she's too sleepy to show it. She stifles a yawn with the back of her hand and turns away, off to another ch.o.r.e.

I tap my foot against the floor once, twice, three times. There's a shuffle and a clank; the grate disappears and Schuyler, Keagan, and Malcolm reappear. I start for the darkened flight of stairs at the far end of the kitchen and gesture for them to follow me.

Upstairs, the pages' chamber. A long, narrow room with an unlit fireplace on one end, a single, closed door on the other. In the center, a long wooden serving table stacked with goblets and trenchers, linens and cutlery, for the servants to use in preparing Blackwell's breakfast. The room is near black but for a blade of moonlight piercing the bank of square-paned windows, illuminating the pale plaster walls and turning them yellow.

As we pa.s.s the table, I run a finger along the rim of a cold pewter goblet and think, just for a moment, how easy it would be to drop in some poison. A salting of Belladonna in a cup or on a plate, just a single taste and it would be over in a five-minute show of spasms and screams, a slowing breath and a stopping heart. It would be easy. Easier, anyway, than what we're about to do.

Schuyler glances at me then, no doubt reading my thoughts. But he shrugs, knowing as I do that poisoning is a faulty plan. Firstly, because we don't have any. But secondly-and most importantly-Blackwell never eats without a page tasting his food first. A man like him knows his enemies, by nature if not by name.

One by one, we file out the door into a long, winding stretch of hall called the gallery. It leads from the pages' chamber on one end of the palace to the king's chambers-now Blackwell's chambers-on the other. I've walked this hall a hundred times, a thousand, when I was summoned to Malcolm, when I was summoned to Blackwell, and it was then as it is now: quiet, empty, dimly lit; only a few flickering torches set into brackets along the wood-paneled walls.

We creep into the silence. Forty, sixty, a hundred paces, pa.s.sing portrait after portrait, gilded frames filled with oils not of Malcolm or his father or his father before him, not as it was before. Now there are only portraits of Blackwell. On the throne. On the battlefield. Sceptered, crowned, and ermined. I wonder: When did Blackwell have those painted? And how many months did he store those paintings, so sure of his success that he dared to have them commissioned?

The gallery turns right, and here we stop. Carefully, I peer around the corner. To the right, a bank of windows overlooks the courtyard below. To the left, a small fireplace with flames burning low, illuminating still more golden portraits of our tarnished king. Beside it, two closed doors lead into the royal pew, a dark-uniformed guard standing sentinel before them. Pike in hand, propped lazily against his shoulder. He's been on s.h.i.+ft all night, and he's tired. Even now I see his eyes slip closed, stay closed for a beat, two; then crack open again.

He's easy prey.

I turn to the others. Hold up a hand. They nod; they know what comes next. I round the corner and at once, the guard sees me.

"Halt!" he shouts.

I pretend not to hear him. My eyes are downcast, focused on the carpet, on the way my leather-clad toes peek from beneath the folds of my brown woolen dress. But my hand is restless, slipping beneath my ap.r.o.n to the Azoth beneath. I wrap my hand around the hilt, violence like the rush of fine wine warming me through.

"I said, halt!" The guard's voice draws closer and finally I lift my head. Slow, past his black uniform, past the strangled rose on his chest to his face, eyes now round with recognition.

"You!"

"Me," I reply. And with that, Schuyler appears beside me. In an instant he's got the guard's head between palms pressed flat and, with a savage twist, breaks his neck with a snap. The guard slumps, Schuyler catches the body, I catch the pike.

Malcolm appears then, Keagan on his heels. He walks straight for the fireplace; Keagan to the portrait on the opposite wall, one of Blackwell on a coal-black steed in the heat of battle. Malcolm kneels before the hearth and, after wrapping his hand with a linen napkin filched from the pages' chamber, reaches inside. He slides his hand up the brick, feeling for a lever that, when released, will pop the latch on a panel hidden behind the portrait Keagan has lifted off the wall. It opens to a circular staircase that runs downstairs and opens into the clock court. This was Malcolm's contribution to our plan. Later, it will be our means of escape. Now, it's our means to hide the guard's body.

"It's stuck." Malcolm rattles his hand inside the hearth. "The handle won't lift all the way."

Schuyler s.n.a.t.c.hes the pike from my hand, rushes across the hall, and jams the tip of it into the crack of the panel's barely visible seam. With a snap and a creak, the panel swings open. He steps back, a grin on his face, his foot knocking against the heavy gold frame of the portrait resting against the wall.

It begins to fall. Keagan, in her haste to stop it from hitting the floor, shoves it back against the wall, but too hard, and the frame slams against the paneling. In the soft predawn silence, the sound travels the hall like a shot.

We freeze.

A beat pa.s.ses; two, three. I start to relax, I almost do. But then I hear it: the tread of footsteps on carpet. Slow, then fast. The clink of pikes, the murmur of voices. Then they arrive: two guards rounding the corner, followed by two more.

d.a.m.nation.

I s.n.a.t.c.h two, four, six daggers from my weapons belt and send them flying, aiming for necks, eyes, hearts. Two hit, but two miss. Schuyler leaps forward, snapping necks one after the other. But he can't get to them fast enough, not before two of them shout a warning: the last thing they'll ever say.

Two more round the corner. One more dagger, one more snapped neck.

As fast as Schuyler and I kill them, Malcolm and Keagan drag the bodies to the pa.s.sage in the wall, pus.h.i.+ng them inside. But we planned for only two dead guards, maybe three. Not six, now eight.

We are surrounded by bodies and blood. It's everywhere: soaking into the carpet, black as ink, spreading among the rug's woolen vines. It spatters the gilded edge of the painting on the floor, of Blackwell in battle. Only now do I see that he's holding the Azoth, the emeralds in the hilt twinkling in the canvased daylight. As if in response, the blade of it fires hot against my leg, daring me to pull it out. Daring me to use it.

As the guards keep coming, the sounds of shouting, pikes clanking, necks snapping, and gurgled whispers of death filling the hall, I think of it. Think of moving past them down the hall to Blackwell's chambers, where he lies waiting-not sleeping now, not with this madness that's spun out of control-but rising, perhaps dressing, perhaps strapping on a weapon. Perhaps even knowing I'm here, readying to face me.

The Azoth whispers at me to do it, taunts me to use it. And though it is the bearer of curses and bad advice, I heed them anyway: pulling it from its bindings, the sing of the blade against leather more like a scream.

That's when it happens.

Keagan is locked in a fight with a guard, tangled together on the floor. The guard wrests the knife from Keagan's hand. But before he can attack her with it, she rolls toward the fireplace. With a sweep of her hands and a muttered incantation, the nascent flame in the hearth roars to life. It leaps from the brick and hurtles down the gallery, a fiery rope growing larger and larger, twisting and turning and suffocating. It crashes into the guard and sets him alight, his black uniform going up in black smoke.

She kicks him away from her. He smashes against the wall beside the windows and at once, the draperies catch fire. Flames devour the velvet and turn them to smoke that fills the hall, thick and noxious. Malcolm appears then, pulling me to the floor where the air is clearer but not by much.

"What do we do?" His words are barely audible through his coughing.

I think fast. This a.s.sa.s.sination attempt has gone well beyond even what I had planned for. But I refuse to retreat, refuse to walk away from what I set out to do. The Azoth won't let me and, besides, I won't let myself.

"You need to get out," I say. "All of you. Not through there," I add, when Malcolm twists his head in the direction of the panel, lost now in the smoke. "There's too much blood leading to it. Once the air clears they'll see it, and they'll follow you. Go through the kitchen. It will be chaos by now; no one will notice you."

We paw our way back toward the pages' chamber, smoke obscuring our view and our breath. I s.n.a.t.c.h the cap off my head, press it against my nose and mouth before pa.s.sing it to Malcolm, still choking and retching.

We're almost to the end of the gallery.

Five feet, four feet.

Three.

A fierce wind rattles down the hallway then, shrieking and whistling, a blast so frigid and cold it blows out the entire bank of windows above us. Gla.s.s explodes into shards, raining down on our backs, our necks, and our arms, splintered and sharp. Blood drizzles down my skin, hot and dire. Flames dance along their moorings, then begin to break, winking out one after the other like candles.

"What's happening?" Malcolm's voice is a panicked hiss in my ear.

"I don't know." But it's not true. I do know. I'm just too afraid to say.

The smoke swirls above us, s.h.i.+fting into fog, then into clouds, lifting high into the coffered ceiling. They hover there a moment, a warning. Then a clap, a reverberation, that thunderous sound of a storm, and those clouds open up and begin to pour, a relentless lash of rain.

There's only one person I know who can manipulate the weather this way, who can summon a storm where there was none, bend the skies to his will, bring down rain and wind and dark and light. The way he did the last time I saw him, at the masque I nearly didn't return from: Blackwell.

"New plan." Schuyler's voice appears somewhere above me. He yanks me to my feet, the force so great it nearly dislocates my arm. Keagan grabs Malcolm. They push us back the way we came, toward the panel in the wall. Through the receding smoke and the rain, through my hair that's come loose from its knot and streams into my eyes, I see it: wide open and beckoning.

And then...

And then...

And then.

I hear it. Music. Dirgelike, the strains of it leaking beneath the door to the royal pew from the chapel below. It's coming from the organ, all music and no words but I know the lyrics anyway: