Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey (49 page)

“Someone cut her bonds, Stephen. Someone set her free. Lord Powell is dead.”

Color ran into Stephen’s face. “It could have been anyone,” he said. “Someone else could have helped her. Your son was taken with her. Why didn’t she attack him? Have you asked yourself that?”

Alexander clenched his fist. “Are you saying Nicholas is enchanted?”

Nicholas’s eyes were wide. He was staring at his father in disbelief. “Father—”

Alexander waved a hand to silence him. Nicholas needed to wait. Alexander couldn’t afford that distraction. Not yet. “Don’t change the focus of the conversation, Stephen. We are talking about you.”

Stephen gripped the edge of the table. “Why are you accusing me of this now? You’ve trusted me all year.”

“Someone let the Fey know that we were going to attack them last night. Only you and Nicholas knew the plan.”

All of the lords looked shocked. Monte reached for the knife at his belt. Nicholas stood.

“And you wouldn’t think of accusing your son?” Stephen asked with a snarl that Alexander had never heard before. In all the years he had known Stephen, Alexander had never heard such contempt in Stephen’s tone.

Alexander didn’t think. He whirled, grabbed the basin, and flung the contents toward Stephen. Stephen screamed and launched out of his chair, grabbing Nicholas and using him as a shield. The water splattered the table and chair and sloshed near Stephen’s shoes, but did not touch him.

Lord Fesler grabbed another vial off the shelf. Monte rose, knife extended. Stephen pulled a knife himself and placed it at Nicholas’s throat.

“Use that,” Stephen said to Fesler, “and I will kill this sorry excuse for a boy.”

“Do it,” Nicholas said, his voice strained against the knife. “He won’t have time to kill me.”

Alexander gripped the dripping basin, breathing hard, terror pounding in his chest. Either way he was risking Nicholas. “What did they do to you, Stephen?” Alexander asked. “I thought of all of us you were the most incorruptible.”

“Did you?” Stephen said. “There are ways to get to everyone.”

“He’s not Stephen,” Nicholas said. A drop of blood ran down his skin and disappeared under the collar of his shirt. “If he was Stephen, he would not need to be frightened of the holy water.”

“The boy thinks he is so clever,” Stephen said. “But what do you know of the Fey and their magicks? Nothing. Nothing at all. Perhaps the water will merely break the enchantment.”

Fesler took the stopper off the vial.

Stephen smiled. “It will cost a Prince’s life to find out.”

“Do it,” Nicholas said again.

“And lose what pitiful advantage I have? I don’t think so.” Stephen backed toward the door, his grip on Nicholas tight.

Alexander set the basin on the table and held up his hands. “Let my son go, and you can go free.”

“Really, Sire, I am not that stupid. Your son will get me out of here.”

“You can’t get out of here when you’re pulling him,” Lord Stowe said. “If the King gave his word, then he means it.”

“But he didn’t give his word, did he?” Stephen smiled. The smile looked odd on his face. “He merely made an unsubstantiated promise.”

Alexander opened his mouth to give his word, and in that moment Nicholas stomped on Stephen’s foot. The older man grimaced and Nicholas grabbed his arm, pulling the knife away from his throat. Alexander reached behind himself and grabbed the water pitcher, flinging the contents at Stephen. Lord Fesler needed only the suggestion: he tossed the holy water at Stephen. Alexander’s water hit Nicholas and splashed on Stephen, but Fesler’s holy water hit Stephen on his left side.

Nicholas pushed away from Stephen and scrambled across the room, hand at his throat. Stephen’s clothes peeled off his skin. A haze filled the room, followed by the stench of burning flesh. Stephen screamed. The lords looked on in horror. Nicholas stood beside his father and grabbed his arm. Alexander leaned into him, relieved at his son’s strength. Relieved that his son was still his son.

Stephen slipped onto the floor, his legs jelling into a single mass. He tried to push the water off his skin, but his hands were melting, the skin dripping off like blood. He cried out again before collapsing on the floor.

Alexander could no longer see him, but he heard thuds that stopped after a few short moments. The haze and stench grew. Alexander had to swallow hard to keep the meager contents of his stomach from rising.

Finally all sounds stopped. He patted Nicholas’s hand, then took it off his arm and made his way around the room. The body was unrecognizable. Only the eyes remained, open and staring at nothing. The stench was so strong that Alexander felt as if it had got inside him.

Alexander stood over the body. His trembling had increased. One mistake and he would have died. If he had been a bit less cautious, if he had ever allowed himself to be alone with Stephen, Stephen would have murdered him. Alexander’s eyes were watering from the smell. He wished now that he had approached it all differently. He wished he had tested his advisers from the beginning.

“By the Bloody Sword,” Lord Stowe said. He was now standing behind Alexander. Nicholas approached too but said nothing. Lord Fesler was pale, and Lord Egan still sat at the table, his hand over his mouth. Monte had moved closer to the body, still holding his knife.

“You hit him with the holy water,” Nicholas said to Lord Fesler.

Fesler nodded.

“We’ll need to test anyone who comes near the King with holy water from now on,” Nicholas said.

“We tried that already,” Lord Stowe said.

“How did we miss Stephen?” Monte asked. “He’s with the King all the time.”

“At first,” Alexander said, not looking at any of them but still staring at the body, “he avoided the tests. Always some excuse. I never really noticed. But one afternoon he took a vial and poured it onto his hand.”

“He couldn’t have.”

“Not unless he planted it himself,” Nicholas said.

“He probably replaced the water with regular water,” Monte said.

“Then why didn’t he do that up here?” Fesler asked.

“No one gets into this room without me,” said Alexander. He was shaking so hard, he had to sit down. He took the closest chair, the one Nicholas had been using.

“I don’t understand,” Lord Stowe said. “He looked like Stephen, but he disintegrated like a Fey. Is this what happens when you’re possessed?”

“If it was that easy,” Nicholas said, “then why haven’t we seen others like this?”

“Maybe we have,” Lord Fesler said, “and didn’t know it.”

“He looked like Stephen,” Alexander said. “He acted like Stephen. He remembered things only Stephen would know. He had to be Stephen, changed somehow. That woman transformed him in the corridor.”

“Or before”,” Nicholas said.

Alexander shook his head. “Before, he was speaking against the Fey. After, the things he said could have been taken for concern if we had only paid attention.”

“But you knew,” Lord Egan said. “How did you know?”

“I knew there was a leak,” Alexander said. “I tested all of you. It wasn’t until Stephen that I had a direct link. Stephen gave himself away. But I never expected this. Ever. I had thought, when I threw that water, to startle him. To test him. I had never expected to scare him.”

“They could be everywhere,” Lord Fesler said, his voice soft. “We would never know. They could be in this room, and we would never know.”

Alexander put a hand to his forehead. The thought had occurred to him. The Rocaan’s task would be doubly difficult. Not just holy water for war, but for tests as well. Daily tests—and how far would they go? Each servant? Each person who came near the nobility? What about the people on the streets? What about the children? Where did the distrust end?

“How many of them are there?” Egan asked.

Alexander sighed. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “But they just won this battle.” He backed away from the body and turned to the curious faces around him. “Not only do they have our people and our holy water, now they have our confidence as well. We will never completely trust each other again.”

FORTY-FIVE

Jewel pressed her hand against her forehead, as if she could push the headache out the back of her skull. She had been awake almost thirty hours, and she could feel the tension in her back with each movement of her shoulders. The buckets of water were heavy. She wished the Domestics had assigned her another task.

She pushed open the double doors that led into the Domicile with her backside, letting the rust-iron stench of blood overwhelm her. The Domicile was the largest building in Shadowlands. Rugar had decreed it the most important, since he figured it would have to act as hospital as well as the foundation for most of the interior work done on the Shadowlands. The building was long and narrow, divided into sections. Rooms for chefs, rooms for weavers, and a private room for the Shaman. Some of the rooms were small. The main room, the one she had walked into, was the size of three rooms, and currently the hospital.

Seven Infantry filled the beds with sword wounds to the gut. Another had a slash along his arm, and one body rested on the cot near the door, waiting for someone to take it for ritual cleansing and disbursal. Jewel set the water down near the cot and stretched. Her back cracked and popped as she straightened it. She had never sat out a battle before, and the smells, leaching through the walls of Shadowlands, had terrified her more than the glimpse of darkness when the first Fey had come through the Circle Door.

The prisoners, though. The prisoners intrigued her. And she was not allowed to see them until her father and Caseo had spent time with them.

Neri approached Jewel, face drawn and white with exhaustion. Since the move to Shadowlands, the Domestics hadn’t had much rest. The strains of a battle so nearby had drained them even further. Neri bent and picked up one of the buckets.

“Thanks, Jewel,” she said. Her smile was as tired as her eyes. “We’ve done all we can for the moment, I think.”

Jewel nodded toward the beds. “Will they be all right?”

Neri shrugged. “With Infantry it’s hard to tell. We do what we can, but most of them lack the magick necessary to heal themselves.” Then her eyes widened just a little. “No insult intended,” she said.

“None taken.” Most of the Fey did not know, even yet, of Jewel’s Visions. In fact, many believed that her capture during the First Battle for Jahn had been because she had no magick power of her own.

Seven more wounded, perhaps seven more dead. And no reinforcements. The Fey would become servants of the Islanders through attrition if this continued. Just by the sheer numbers. Eventually, there would be no Fey left to go to battle.

Her father’s revelation that the Black King would not help them had shaken her to the core. It made the entire situation different. They were as helpless as the Hevish when the Fey had surrounded them on all sides, cut off access to the roads and rivers, and interrupted their trade. The Hevish were a small but determined people, and they had fought a pitched battle from their fortified country for five years. But time worked against them. Slaughter of the young, then of the older generation, as well as starvation, had defeated them.

A trapped people could not withstand a siege. Especially when the enemy had all its resources at its command.