Maylien, much less pay any attention
to me. She continued to ignore Maylien as she unrolled the scroll and gave it an initial
glance. The proclamation of adoption and legitimization was short and simple—quickly
read. Within moments the duchess had moved on to checking the seals and chops. After
another minute or two, she looked up at Maylien and her expression was now deeply
troubled.
“Baroness Marchon, would you please step to my left”—the king’s side, a very telling
choice—“and make room for the Lord Justicer and the Warden of the Blood to join me.”
Respectively the chief legal authority of the realm and the woman charged with validating
all issues of family relations with regards to succession.
As Maylien passed to the duchess’s left, I did the same on the floor below.
Aral, another Shade’s been here!
Triss’s words came as a mental shout of alarm.
The shadow trail is very fresh, no more than two or three hours old and it leads toward
the throne.
I forced myself not to show any visible reaction to Triss’s news, but immediately
began scanning the area around the throne for deeper pools of shadow. Another Shade
almost certainly meant another Blade.
Do you recognize the spoor?
Best would have been my sometime apprentice Faran, come to keep an eye out for her
teacher, but I didn’t hold out much hope for that. Neither for her, nor for Siri or
Jax or any of the tiny handful of other survivors who still retained some loyalty
to the memory of Namara.
Not quite. It tastes almost familiar, an older master perhaps, but not one I know
well. There’s something else there, too, something…ancient and wrong.
How so?
I don’t know. It’s not a
knowing
thing. It’s tasting and feeling and shadows of something I can’t quite touch.
I didn’t like the sound of any of that, but I couldn’t do anything about it without
more information. If it wasn’t Siri or Faran or one of Jax’s people, it almost had
to be one of Kelos’s renegades—the Blades who had gone over to the Son of Heaven after
the destruction of the temple. Traitors to everything we had once held sacred, they
called themselves the Shadow of Heaven. My eyes flicked across the king on his throne
for perhaps the dozenth time as I tried to spot someplace where a shadow-cloaked assassin
might hide. Something about the position of Thauvik’s head drew my attention back
to him with a sudden snap. He was looking up and somewhat back, as though he were
trying to see something positioned above and behind his chair, but couldn’t afford
to be seen to turn his head and actually look.
The velvet curtain that created an alcove for the throne hung from four large marble
pillars that approached but didn’t reach the ceiling. I tried to see if I could make
anything out in the shadows that clung to the gaps above. The king—who had leaned
forward a bit, as though idly glancing at the documents his councilors were so carefully
reviewing—slid his left hand even further forward. Then he made a tiny cutting gesture
with one finger.
I moved without thinking, lunging to grab the back of Maylien’s belt and yank her
off the dais. As I pulled her down flat behind the Duchess of Tien, alarmed gasps
broke out from the lesser nobility behind us, as well as the dukes and earls seated
across the table. The duchess herself half turned in her chair, and I was looking
right into her eyes when the tiny poisoned dart meant for Maylien struck her in the
neck.
She let out a gasp and stood straight up, knocking her chair and the Lord Justicer
off the dais. Then she fell face-first onto Maylien and me. The room exploded into
cacophony. Several hundred people leaped to their feet, variously yelling, running
for the exits, or reaching for dueling weapons as the notion took them.
If I hadn’t been lying practically at the king’s feet, I would never have heard him
shouting over the uproar.
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