Elevation of the Marked (The Marked Series Book 2) (2 page)

Arlow trailed after her, but the gnawing in his gut redoubled.
 

The throne room extended before them: a long hall, all gleaming marble and gilded molding, lit by wide windows in the ceiling. The moderate-sized crowd parted for them, allowing Arlow to position himself at the head of the standing gallery.
 

The hall was manned by dozens of green-coated security guards, all standing with their famed rigid uprightness. Those on the ground had hands to sword hilts. Above, a second group with crossbows gazed down on the proceedings. Arlow scanned their impassive faces until he made eye contact with Pappon Jasser, second-in-command of the guard. Pappon’s features were as inscrutable as his men’s, but upon meeting Arlow’s eye he bowed his head ever so slightly.

Arlow hadn’t attended an audience since his first month at court. Spirits, how excited he’d been then; how naïve. Back before he had discovered that the audiences, as with most of what the king did publicly, were a mere pageant. He heard only three petitions a day, and those were patently spurious. It was all designed to give the king the appearance of caring for his people, without his having to actually care for them.

The thought made Arlow’s jaw tighten. He could never forgive this king for the disillusionment he had inspired. After idolizing the man as a child, after spending nigh on a decade in the study of governance and state management, to find the leader of the three nations indifferent and indolent was a blow.

It would seem the man was feeling especially indifferent and indolent on that day, as the minutes steadily ticked beyond the appointed time of the audience. After thirty minutes of standing, the crowd grew shifty.

At forty-five minutes past, Arlow began to hope that there would be no audience that day. Almost as soon as the thought entered his mind, the door beyond the golden thrones opened and the king himself appeared, his broad chest bound in a garish red satin waistcoat, his bald head gleaming brighter than the crown atop it.
 

“About bloody time,” Vendra murmured beside him.
 

Arlow, with the rest of the assembly, went down to a knee and pressed his forehead to his fist. He turned to Vendra and whispered, “Yes, rather unsporting of the chap, being late to his own assassination.”

“All rise,” a deep voice commanded.

Arlow stood, his knees popping as he did so, and found that the queen and prince had appeared as well. The king’s throne boasted a tall, intricately carved back that towered like a spire. It was topped with a great diamond, the size of an apple, which cast small rainbows on the far wall. The queen and prince flanked him in more modest, though still ornate, seats.
 

A stroke of good fortune: three of the four in one place. Yet it gave Arlow no pleasure. The prince was a good sort; it seemed a pity that he should have to die.

One cannot remove a monarchy without removing the monarchs
, a part of his mind that sounded rather like Quade Asher said.

The first petitioner came forward, a small man in a clean but worn suit. “Your majesty,” he began, in suitably deferential tones.

Vendra nudged him. “Give the signal, Arlow,” she said between her teeth. “No reason to wait.”

She regarded him, her lips pressed in a smug smile. Clearly she didn’t believe he would do it.
 

He wasn’t so certain himself. As the small man droned on, Arlow’s thoughts were at war between the resolve he had formed with cold logic and the uncertainty born of human sympathy.
 

Perhaps there is another way…a third option. Perhaps, if I could speak to Yarrow, we could work together to find some alternate, peaceful solution…

This introspection, and the pleas of the petitioner, were cut short by the sound of the great main doors being thrown open and banging against the wall. In the entryway stood the impressive form of Arlow’s old friend, Sung Ko-Jin.

His time of imprisonment had altered him. Now, at this closer vantage, Arlow could discern a new hollowness in his cheeks, the bruise-like circles beneath his eyes. He looked wretched (though, blight the man, even wretchedness seemed to suit him).
 

Ko-Jin’s gaze swept over the crowd, and for a second Arlow thought he would go unnoticed, but then that dark-eyed scrutiny wheeled back and landed directly on him.

In the moment that their eyes met, Arlow perceived the change in his friend’s features—the anger and betrayal—and his windpipe constricted. If he was hated by Ko-Jin, always easy-going to a fault, then there was no going back. No chance to change course.

He, Arlow, had made his bed. Time to sleep in it.

He drew in a breath and belted, in a loud baritone that echoed through the otherwise still hall, the chorus of a well-known Dalish drinking song:
 

“
Oh, take me where the drinks are strong,

The land of barley, malts, and foam,

Oh, take me where I do belong,

To the place they call the Spirits’ Home!”

 
The song was greeted with a moment of silence before several bystanders broke into nervous laughs. Arlow groaned internally, regretting his choice of signal. It had seemed funny to him at the time, but there could be nothing humorous at such an occasion.

The collective sigh of swords drawn from sheaths silenced the laughter.
 

The whiz of a loosed arrow sounded, and a bolt blossomed in the king’s chest. The ruler of Trinitas looked down at the shaft in one final moment of confusion before toppling face forward from his throne.

Bray shut her eyes and swallowed, willing her nausea to subside, willing her hands to cease their tremors. Sweat slithered down her temple. She wandered up an unfamiliar hall in the Chiona living quarters, her eyes darting from room number to room number.

Yarrow, beside her, walked with the air of a mouse amongst cats. His anxiousness seemed to have increased since dropping Ko-Jin off at the palace, leaving him the only Cosanta on the Isle.

“Could you try to look less…shifty?” she asked him.

His dark brows shot up, and then with a visible effort he relaxed his shoulders and assumed a look of nonchalance. His feigned casualness was even more conspicuous than his open paranoia.
 

Bray snorted, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “Remind me not to bring you undercover, will you?”

The apartment they sought appeared at the end of the hall, and without question she took his hand and phased them through the locked door.

“Why?” Yarrow asked in a whisper as they entered.

“Your acting leaves a bit to be desired.”

He laughed shakily as his eyes scanned the chamber. The late afternoon light illuminated an ordinary sitting room: a leather couch, desk, bookshelf packed with leather-bound tomes, and an empty hat stand atop a maroon rug. The door to an equally commonplace-looking bedroom stood ajar.

“Huh,” he said, rubbing his eye. “I thought it would look more…”

“Villainous?”

He nodded, though even that movement seemed a great effort for him.

“Why don’t you sit?” Bray asked as she opened the top drawer to the desk and began sifting through its contents.

“And leave you to do all of the snooping single-handed?” he asked, though he thunked down on the couch even as he said it.
 

Bray flicked a concerned glance at him before returning to the drawer. His stomach wound had been healed, but he, Ko-Jin, and herself had been, for the past week, quite sick. Kellar said it was withdrawal, that it would pass. It seemed whatever drug Ko-Jin and Yarrow had been given had greater side effects upon leaving the system than her own.
 

“Yarrow, I’m a professional,” Bray said, as she skimmed a yellowing letter. “I don’t
snoop
; I investigate.”

He sank deeper into the couch. “My apologies.”
 

They remained quiet for a time as Bray read through a stack of old correspondences. Most of them were mundane in nature, saved more out of negligent housekeeping than importance, she suspected. The place hadn’t been used in well over a decade and a half. Likely there was nothing to find.
 

She opened the second drawer and extracted a worn, decorative wooden case that bore the word ‘Asher’ in embossed letters. Her trembling fingers unclasped the cover, revealing a family photograph rendered in a deep chocolate brown.
 

The corners were black and light dots freckled the image, but the four figures remained clearly transfixed. Bray brought the image closer for inspection, her gaze taking in each face. The father—tall, handsome, and mustachioed—appeared to be stifling a laugh, his dark eyes glittering with eternal mirth. His wife perched at his side, petite and pretty. The eldest child, a girl in a frilly frock with ringleted hair, beamed broadly, revealing a missing tooth. The face of the last family member, a small boy standing before his father, caused the hairs on Bray’s arm to stand.
 

Quade
.

His black hair had been parted with severe straightness down the center of his head. He wore knee-length knickerbockers and a suit jacket lined in gleaming buttons. His left hand clutched what appeared to be a child’s shovel. His face, even in youth, possessed that sharp spear of a nose, those dramatic cheekbones. But it was his expression that sent shivers racing across her skin, a countenance that no child’s face should ever assume. It was cold, intense—sharp-eyed, thin lipped. It made Bray’s stomach clench, her hand quake. Those dark orbs, transfixed in imperfect sepia, seemed to pull at her, tugging at her very spirit. She couldn’t break eye contact, couldn’t blink. Suddenly, she felt as she had in that round prison at Easterly Point, when Quade had jumped down within the confines of the Sphere, and his charm had been stripped from him, his face and voice adopting an inhuman coldness.
 

And then she was on her knees, her breath coming in ragged bursts.
 

“Bray?”
 

She hadn’t heard Yarrow stand or cross the room, but she felt his hand come to rest on her shoulder. She exhaled.

Normally, the touch of others set her on edge. But Yarrow’s touch had always felt different, somehow. Welcome. She let the tranquility of his presence wash through her and thought of the very first time they’d touched—when they shook hands on that carriage so many years ago. She’d felt it then, too: the inexplicable comfort his nearness afforded. That memory brought a slow smile to her lips and chased the shadow from her mind.

Yarrow took the photograph and analyzed it himself. Bray wanted to reach out and smooth the crease between his brows, but kept her hands entwined in her lap.
 

He hefted the image and examined the thickness of the casing. “It’s an old glasstype photograph.”
 

“How can you tell?”

“It’s thicker and heavier. Modern portraits are done on thin metal sheets.”
 

She watched as he sucked in his bottom lip and studied the image. “Spirits, that is…” He swallowed. “Unsettling.”

Bray stood and crossed to the bookcase. It contained primarily historical texts, nothing noticeably insidious to her eyes. She spied several volumes about someone named Alfenze Guenez. The man’s autobiography had a creased spine. Bray snatched it and leafed through the pages. Someone, presumably Quade, had heavily annotated the text. She paused at a passage that had been underlined and starred:

Above all else, it is our duty to preserve the predetermined stratification of mankind. This is not to say that all people are born to the station for which they are intended. It is often the case that those born to power are unsuited to the position. Rather, it is the inherent qualities of a man which dictate his hierarchal placement. Those who are strong, wise, and unflinching should lead. The weak are meant to follow or fall. In this way, even those people of lesser quality will experience the ultimate satisfaction of having fulfilled their predestined role. And so, I posit to those who have questioned my methods that I have never erred. I have never once taken a life out of malice. Merely, I have executed my predetermined role as leader, and I have allowed my enemy the dignity of fulfilling his own purpose as the vanquished.

Bray frowned down at the page. “Yarrow, are you familiar with Alfenze Guenez?”

He set the photograph back in the drawer and came to read over her shoulder. “The genocidal tyrant? A bit.”
 

“Quade seems to be a fan.”

Yarrow ran a finger along the spines of several books, cherishingly. Belonging to a homicidal despot was not enough to render a text unsavory in his eyes, it would seem. “That’s not surprising. Every megalomaniac of note over the past seven hundred years has slept with Guenez’s autobiography under his pillow. For people like Quade, his philosophy on predetermination is like an unqualified sanction for atrocities. You know, the strong must exercise their strength; the weak must wallow in their weakness—the usual self-aggrandizing fallacy.”