The King Slayer Part 16

Sleep and peace attend me, all through the night.

Angels will come to me, all through the night.

Drowsy hours are creeping; hill and vale, slumber sleeping, A loving vigil keeping, all through the night.

The song I sang to myself in my final test, the lullaby my mother used to sing to me. The song that kept me alive inside the tomb that tried to kill me; the one that broke the spell before it could kill me.

I turn around, face the sound. Raise the Azoth.

Schuyler is before me in a moment, his blue eyes wide, his grip on my arm fierce. I'm in awe, just for a moment, at the power Blackwell wields, so strong that it could cast fear into someone as fearless as Schuyler.

"Forget it, bijoux. It's too much. He's too strong-"

"I know." I twist out of Schuyler's iron grasp. "And that's why I have to do it." I push Malcolm toward Keagan. "Get him out," I tell her. "If you're caught, you won't escape this time. They will kill you on the spot. It's the Order's job, it's your job, to keep him safe."

But Malcolm jerks away from her and rounds on me.

"Don't do this." He takes my shoulders, grips them hard. Leans into me, his face inches from mine. For a moment, I forget to be afraid of him. "As king, I ask you-no, I command you-to come with me."

"You are not king," I say. "Not unless I do this."

"G.o.ddammit." I've never heard Malcolm swear before; the word comes out a frustrated groan.

Moon's watch is keeping, all through the night.

The weary world is sleeping, all through the night.

A spirit gently stealing, visions of delight revealing, A pure and peaceful feeling, all through the night.

A shadow appears through the smoke then, dark and looming and figureless: a specter in a foggy cemetery, a boggart in a dusky swamp. I can't see who it is, but then, I already know.

"Go," I say. "Let me do this. I need to do this."

Schuyler growls one last curse before tearing Malcolm away from me, nearly lifting him off the ground with the force of it, shoving him toward the pa.s.sage in the wall. Through the fog and the driving rain I can just make out Keagan hauling him inside and the final look Schuyler gives me before crawling after him. The panel door closes, a spark in the smoke as Keagan fuses it shut, the three of them making their way down the winding stairs into the clock court and the still-dark skies and, I hope, to safety. I am alone.

Not alone.

He walks toward me, and even in the swirling coalescence I know his height, his strength, his black clothes; I know the wink of the weapon he holds in his hand. How long has he been waiting for me? Since yesterday? All night? He knew I would come. He knew what I would do.

And deep down, I knew it, too.

The Azoth fires hot in my hand, the energy and the strength, the latent curse and the manifest hate coursing through me: sparks before a bonfire, drops before a storm. It is dangerous ground. But I don't care about drowning, and I don't care about burning. I only care about ending him, ending it all, once and for all.

Like a monstrosity lurking from the depths of the dark lake surrounding Rochester Hall, he emerges, and at last I see him. But it's not Blackwell, as I was expecting: It's someone-something-else entirely.

Dark blond hair, falling in waves above his eyes. Tall, pale, dressed in black with that d.a.m.ned strangled rose fixed to his sleeve. And the scent of him: a hint of earth and loam, mold and decay.

I never thought I'd see him again. I thought I had killed him. Yet here he is before me; the shock of it would bring me to my knees if terror weren't holding me up.

Caleb.

He is alive.

He is dead.

He is a revenant.

"h.e.l.lo, Elizabeth."

THE AZOTH GOES WILD IN my hand. Searing, coursing, trembling, cursing; the power of it threatening to unhinge me if the sight before me doesn't. All I manage is his name: "Caleb." The music has ceased, and my voice echoes through the destruction of the gallery, a haunting moan.

He steps toward me. His gait unsteady, his eyes fixed not on me but on the Azoth, the emeralds in the hilt dull and lifeless now, as if they know they're caught. He doesn't reach for it but he looks at it, something like distaste but also fear crossing his cold, white face.

I should say something. I should do something. I should thrust the blade into him and I should run; I should find Blackwell and do the same to him. But all I can do is stand there and look at him.

Caleb a revenant. He didn't die after all, didn't die after I sliced him in the chest with the Azoth, spilling his heart and his blood and his life onto the ground, didn't die, didn't die...

"I did die," he says. His voice is strange, murky. It's his but it isn't, the tone the same but the tenor gone. Not gone: dead. "I died. I'm dead. Because you killed me." Caleb tilts his head, an odd, unnatural angle, and fixes me with those eyes. Once blue and sparkling with life and mischief and ambition, now lifeless, pale, and gray, no soul behind them at all.

"I didn't want to kill you," I whisper. "I didn't mean to, I didn't. I cared about you. I loved you-"

"Funny things happen to the people you claim to care about," Caleb says, and I freeze. He's reached into my head, plucked out the very thing John said to me inside his cell, the very thing I can't stop thinking about, can't stop turning over and over in my head.

"Caleb," I whisper again. I think to plead with him, to ask him to spare my life when I know he stands before me to take it. But as soon as I think it, I dismiss it. Caleb didn't spare me when he was alive. He will not spare me now that he is dead.

This is what I know about revenants: I know that they are more dead than alive. I know they have no connection, no anchor to this earth. I know that they are little more than ghosts, the person they once were now just a wisp of cloud in a storm.

Revenants can learn to be human again, a facsimile of their former selves. They can learn to feel, to love; they can even begin to appear human again, the way Schuyler has-the soul he's rebuilt evidenced by the color regained in his eyes. But it takes many years and an unwavering desire to attain it, along with an unshakable connection to someone, such as the one Schuyler has with Fifer. Revenants need a living, breathing being to keep them in the light, when their very nature is to live in the dark.

This is what I also know: Caleb has always lived in the dark.

"You knew I was coming to Ravenscourt," I say. "You read my thoughts, and you heard me coming. You told Blackwell, and that's how he knew to do this." I wave my free hand at the rain-soaked gallery, at the pew in which I meant to meet him, in which I meant to end him.

Caleb nods, once.

I think of Malcolm then, and of Keagan and Schuyler. If Caleb knew I was coming, he must have known they were with me. Did they get free? Or did they simply wind down that staircase and into greater danger than they left?

Caleb only shrugs, a wholly human gesture, stiff and awkward now in the replicate.

"Blackwell doesn't care about Malcolm," he says. "If he did, he wouldn't still be alive. Malcolm can't stop Blackwell from becoming king. Nothing can. He is the king." Caleb gazes at me, eyes hard and unfeeling as flint. "You know what he needs."

I nod, because I do. He needs the Azoth for its curse and for its power, and now he needs me, for reasons I still don't understand, to take back what he believes is his: my stigma. It flashes through my mind then-a thought so swift it takes flight again before it can land, before Caleb can seize on it-how can I give Blackwell what I no longer have?

With a confidence I very nearly feel, I squeeze the Azoth's hilt, long since gone cold, and I step toward Caleb, surrendering myself to him. His blank gray eyes go wide just for a moment, and I feel a fierce jolt of pleasure. Caleb may be able to read my thoughts, but I won't let him read my deeds.

"Take me to him."

Down the wet, smoky, b.l.o.o.d.y hallway we weave around bodies: guards in black with twisted necks and punctured eyes, one charred and black and unrecognizable. Blackwell knew we were coming and he sacrificed his men to us anyway. For the sport of it, for the game of luring us in to see what we would do, how we would play it.

And I don't know how to play it. Not yet.

The hallway ahead ends in a row of double oak doors, closed. I can just make out the shadows of two men standing in front of them. Not guards, no, because they're all dead, but as I get closer and I see them-one tall, black-haired, brutish; the other medium height and reddish, from his hair to the freckles that spatter like blood against white skin-I see that they, too, are dead: Marcus and Linus.

Witch hunters once, now both Knights of the Anglian Royal Empire. Both revenants. I feel their gray, dead gaze track me with a hate that turns to wariness as they catch sight of the glittering blade in my hand, the very one that brought them to the ground before Blackwell hauled them out of it. As Caleb steers me past, I turn my head. As with any monster, it's best not to look it in the eye.

Through the doors, the privy chamber. Where the king receives pet.i.tioners, where courtiers gather in sycophantic attendance, where musicians come to entertain. Now, it's empty; bare of everything save the throne, upholstered and canopied with a rich crimson cloth of state bearing the royal coat of arms: a crowned lion and a chained steed on either side of a red-and-gold quartered s.h.i.+eld. Etched below, in Latin, a motto. Not Blackwell's old, steadfast motto: What's done is done, it cannot be undone. A new one now, for a new ruler and a new kingdom: Faciam quodlibet quod necesse est.

I will do whatever it takes.

In my wet woolen dress, I s.h.i.+ver.

Next, the presence chamber, the king's innermost private room. Bare and dark, just one shuttered window and one small fire burning in one small grate. No tapestries and no throne, only a desk in the center flanked by two chairs, with a single book lying page-up on the surface. And there, sitting in the chair closest to the fireplace, facing the flame, his back to us, is Blackwell.

Whatever calm I'd forced myself into, whatever illusion of control I once had, now threatens to abandon me. My heart begins to race, my stomach to churn, my palms to sweat. That old feeling of dread, the one I always feel when faced with him, rushes toward me like a tide. Beside me, Caleb s.h.i.+fts; he must feel my turmoil. But I take a breath and push it down, as far as I can, away from his grasping intrusion.

Finally, Blackwell speaks.

"Elizabeth."

This is all he says. He doesn't rise, he doesn't turn, he does nothing but stare into the fire in front of him, the flames crackling and spitting in the grate. At once, I know something is wrong. Maybe I should have known it when he didn't greet me in his privy chamber, on his throne, for me to witness the spectacle of his power.

Keagan's words come back to me, what she said in Hexham: He hasn't made a public appearance since he was crowned. No one has seen him.

"You didn't make this easy, did you?" Blackwell goes on. "Coming here. You ruined my gallery, my paintings; you killed my guards."

"You knew we were coming," I say. "If you'd wanted to protect your men, you could have."

He shrugs, dismissive. But he doesn't reply.

"You want your power back from my stigma," I continue, going straight to the point. "It's why you sent Fulke and Griffin after me, why you sent the others the day of my trial." I pause. "I killed them, you know. All of them." It's a lie, but it's what he would expect me to say if I were still who he thought I was. "If you wanted them to bring me back to you, you should have presented a real challenge. I'm almost insulted."

A strange huffing noise, something between a hiss and a laugh. Then: "You always were one of my best witch hunters."

Abruptly, Blackwell rises from his chair, the legs sc.r.a.ping against the wooden floor. He looks every inch the king: dressed in crisp navy trousers and a matching coat embroidered in rich gold thread. Knee-high black boots, a black velvet cape around his shoulders, the collar and sleeves trimmed in ermine. Moments pa.s.s and, still, he will not turn around. My neck p.r.i.c.kles in warning: a distant rumble of thunder before a storm.

"Do you know what you did?" he says. His voice is measured. But beneath the calm I hear a note of something else: an undercurrent of fury.

Blackwell turns to face me, and I see what I have done.

He is every inch the monster.

HIS FACE-WHAT'S LEFT OF IT-IS completely ravaged. A scar runs a diagonal path from his temple, across his right eye, and over his nose and lips, ending at his jaw. His right eye is useless, frozen half open; the eyeball underneath it white and cloudy and unseeing. His nose is split in two, his mouth ripped and twisted, half his jaw visible. Someone st.i.tched him up-someone tried-and did a sorry job. The scar is raised and raw and horrible, and I can see the crooked marks of the needle and the indentations in his flesh where the sutures were tied. This is the damage I did, the damage the Azoth did.

Unflinching, I stare at the horror. As if it recognizes a job well done, the blade fires to life in my hand.

"Caleb said that you, too, were injured by the Azoth." A pause. "I a.s.sume it doesn't look like this."

I don't reply. The wound I received was terrible; I would have died were it not for John. But after he was sure I wouldn't die from every other injury I received the night of the masque, he made certain I wouldn't be scarred by them, either. He spent weeks applying herbs, making tisanes, doing everything he could for me. It was a labor of love, I know that now. But now that love is gone, just like my scar.

Blackwell lets out a short, barking laugh, that twisted, gaping mouth glinting in the room's dim light. "Perhaps I should have spared myself a healer after all."

I s.h.i.+ft toward the fireplace. If I'm to do it, it's to be done now. Can I do it now? Are the Azoth and his fear of it enough to repel Caleb, enough to keep him away to do what I came here for?

In one fell motion this could all be over.

"Taking my stigma back won't heal you." I inch forward another step. "Its power is no match for the Azoth." I remember the way the blade sliced into me, the way it hurt, the way it bled. The way my stigma did nothing. "It won't do anything."

Blackwell's mouth twists into a shape that almost pa.s.ses for a smile. "And I'm sure your warning is in my best interest and has nothing to do with self-preservation."

I adjust my grip on the hilt. Fingers curled loosely, firm but not tight, my thumb pressed against the cross guard. All the while the Prayer on the Eve of Battle marches through my head, keeping my thoughts engaged so Caleb can't besiege them.

I'm almost to his desk now, almost halfway to him. I slide to the far side of it, putting as much distance between me and Caleb as I can, as if a mere wooden desk could keep him from me.

As I do, the book on the surface catches my eye. Red leather-bound with gilt-edged pages, open to a page dense with scrawling text surrounding a single image, an image I know well but didn't expect to see here. A glyph used in the Reformist symbol, representing unity, infinity, wholeness: a snake devouring its own tail.

"The circle closes its end."

The words slip from my mouth; I didn't intend them to. It's a line from the prophecy given to me all those months ago by a five-year-old seer, her recitation holding the cryptic instruction that opened the gate to the path I stand on now, between one dead man and another cursed one, holding a sword.

"The Ouroboros," I continue. "It's a symbol of resurrection, continually reborn as it sheds its skin. It represents the cycle of birth and death, the eternal harmony of all things. The unity of opposites."

Blackwell raises a ruined eyebrow. "Been studying alchemy, have you?"

Not really, no; but in a way, yes. For a moment my thoughts slip from the battle prayer to the alchemy books at Rochester, the ones I brought to John at Hexham. How I flipped through page after page to choose one he'd like. Studying the words to try to get close to him, to try to understand what he was going through when Nicholas told me the magic I gave John was at war with his own.

"The stigma is a manifestation of invincibility." Blackwell speaks the words as if they were wine, something to savor. "While the Azoth is pure destruction: the opposite of invincibility. Alchemists believe that if you were to combine a single element together with its opposite, uniting them, you could transcend them. Move beyond the power of either in order to become the power of both."

I can almost picture the pages before me in that dark and shadowed library. The words etched on yellow parchment, the drawing of the serpent devouring its tail, the words One is all scrawled beneath it.

"The power of both," I repeat. "What would that power be?"

Blackwell watches me, his expression hungry. "I think you already know."

I don't answer right away, because he's right. I do. But if I say the words, if I allow them to form shape, then they become real: an abdication of sanity.

"Immortality," I whisper at last.