Wedding Hells (Schooled in Magic Book 8) (49 page)

“Well done,” Alassa said. “I’m sure the executioner will thank you for saving him a job.”

“I doubt it,” Emily said. She looked at Jade. “How bad was it?”

“Thirty-seven dead, including Baron Gaunt, Lady Amethyst, and all of the rebels,” Jade said. He shook his head in amused disbelief. “Baron Gaunt put himself between Queen Marlena and one of the shooters, Emily. He died a hero.”

Emily felt a flicker of guilt. She’d never thought well of Baron Gaunt. He’d quite seriously proposed to marry Imaiqah, despite the forty years between them. But if he’d saved Queen Marlena from death, maybe he hadn’t been a monster after all.

She frowned. “None of the rebels were taken alive?”

“None,” Jade confirmed. “I tried to catch a couple, but they’d warded themselves against capture. They died the second there was no hope of escape.”

“It was a suicide mission, then,” Emily mused.

“Maybe,” Jade said. “The explosion in the lower levels did a great deal of damage and threw the entire castle into confusion. It’s quite possible that a number of rebels did manage to make their escape. The bastards were wearing guard uniforms, after all. They might not have been noticed on the way out.”

“And Nanette made a spectacular escape,” Emily said. “She could be anywhere by now.”

“Father will hunt her down,” Alassa said. She looked up at Jade. “You’ll be helping him, won’t you?”

Emily winced. Alassa’s honeymoon plans had probably been canceled.

“Of course,” Jade said.

“Be careful,” Emily said. She would have been surprised if Nanette came anywhere near Zangaria for years to come, as the entire kingdom was out for her blood. “She’s a tricky one.”

“And has a grudge against you,” Alassa said.

Which gives her ample motive to reveal Paren’s treachery from a safe distance,
Emily thought.
She knows it will hurt me to watch my two best friends tear each other apart.

Emily rose. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to get some sleep in my rooms,” she said. “What happened to Frieda and Caleb?”

“Frieda exhausted herself casting spells,” Imaiqah said. “I told her to sleep in her room, but she might have slipped into yours instead.”

“She’s still carrying a torch,” Alassa said. “And
you
are still giving her some pretty mixed messages.”

Emily flushed. “And Caleb?”

“He was helping with the clean-up, last I saw,” Imaiqah said. “His father was talking about going home, but I can’t see Caleb leaving without taking the time to have a word or two with you first.”

“I’ll see him tomorrow, I hope,” Emily said. “Would it be terribly wrong of me to invite him to a private dinner in Cockatrice?”

“Do it in Dragon’s Den,” Alassa advised. “Too many wagging tongues in Cockatrice.”

Emily rolled her eyes. Bryon had told her that the other barons - and almost all of the other aristocrats within the kingdom - were spying on Cockatrice, watching her with a mixture of fascination and horror. She’d never really been able to get used to the idea, let alone start hiring spies and informants of her own. But if she stayed in the barony, she might have no choice.

She looked at the clock. She’d been asleep for five or six hours, but it felt as though she hadn’t been asleep at all. “Alassa, please take it easy for the next couple of days.”

Alassa gave Jade a sultry look. “You mean I have to let him do all the work?”

Emily blushed and hastily hurried out the door, hearing Alassa’s laughter following her. At least she hadn’t
acted
as though she was in Emily’s debt. If they were lucky, they’d circumvented the problem completely. Jade would keep his mouth shut and Alassa would never know.

But I healed her completely
, she thought, as she reached her door. In hindsight, she’d done too good a job.
She’ll wonder what happened if she can’t find a wound.

She shook her head, dismissing the thought, and stepped into the room. Frieda lay on the sofa, snoring loudly. Emily looked down at her for a long moment, then carefully removed the remains of her blood-stained dress and dumped it on the floor. The maids would probably want to salvage it - or at least the silk - but she knew from bitter experience that leaving blood lying around was asking for trouble. Gritting her teeth, she cast a spell to reduce the dress to dust, then swept it up and dumped it in the bin. No one would be able to collect enough samples to work blood magic on anyone from what was left.

Jade will know to remove the blood from Alassa’s sheets
, she told herself. Students at Whitehall were taught to be careful with their blood from the day they first entered the school.
Or Alassa will do it herself once she recovers completely.

Turning, she walked back into the bedroom, washed the blood from her hands and then lay down on the bed without bothering to don a nightgown. Her eyes closed as soon as she lay down, but visions of Lord Hans and Paren haunted her, no matter how desperately she tried to meditate. It felt like hours before she finally fell asleep...

...And, while she was sleeping, the nightmares began once again.

T
HE NEXT TWO DAYS PASSED VERY
slowly. King Randor was nowhere to be seen, while Alassa and Jade were wrapped up in one another. Emily spent her time with Imaiqah, trying to give what little comfort she could, and Frieda and Caleb, chatting to them about nothing in particular. The castle was slowly recovering from the assassination attempt, but a strange depression had settled over the wards. Guards blocked every major passageway, demanding proof of identity before they let the servants proceed, while the servants themselves were jumpy, glancing over their shoulders every so often as if they expected the blow to fall at any moment. Emily was quietly sick of it before the end of the first day.

“My father wants me to go with him this afternoon,” Caleb said, as they ate lunch together in Emily’s rooms. “He has to report to the White Council.”

“About the muskets,” Emily guessed. Caleb nodded in agreement. “That secret is out and spreading.”

She winced, inwardly. The Nameless World was hardly unaware of projectile weapons - they had bows, arrows and slingshots, after all - but guns were something new. A complete novice could learn to shoot within hours; a master craftsman could put together a handful of flintlocks and muskets within days. And she had a nasty feeling the formula for gunpowder was out and spreading too. Even if Nanette hadn’t seen fit to spread the word, Paren’s former apprentices would have made sure of it.

And the king won’t let us go down to the city
, she thought.
God alone knows what’s happening there.

“I wish you could stay,” she said. “Don’t forget your chat parchment.”

“I won’t,” Caleb promised. It had taken them three tries to duplicate Aloha’s work, using the original parchment as a guide, but they could now talk to one another from hundreds of miles apart. “But father won’t let me stay alone.”

Emily nodded, ruefully. General Pollack had given them all the freedom they could reasonably ask for and more, under the rules of a formal Courtship, yet he couldn’t leave Caleb and her alone in the castle. It made little sense to her - it wasn’t as if they had the castle completely to themselves - but she knew there was no point in arguing.

“I’ll miss you,” she said, leaning forward for a kiss. “Try and make it to Dragon’s Den before school resumes, please.”

“If my father will let me,” Caleb said. “He’s
very
enthused about the new weapons.”

“And determined to do things properly,” Emily finished. Watching the assassination attempt had clearly been enough to change the General’s mind. “I’ll see you soon, I promise.”

She watched Caleb leave the castle an hour later, then walked slowly back to her rooms, feeling alone. Frieda was with Imaiqah, she knew; Alassa and Jade were
still
in Alassa’s private chambers. Magic crackled below her skin, reminding her that she hadn’t been to the spellchamber since the battle with Nanette. She’d need to go soon or risk developing another headache from trying to contain the magic within her wards.

“Lady Emily,” Nightingale said. “The king requests the pleasure of your company in his private chambers.”

Emily jumped. Where the hell had
he
come from?

“It will be my pleasure,” she lied. She had been half-expecting the king to summon her ever since the wedding disaster. Randor was no fool. He might well have put the pieces together and figured out that Paren had betrayed him. And if he did, Imaiqah and her family were likely to be executed. “You may lead me there.”

She followed him, thinking hard. If Alassa owed her a debt, she could try to trade on it...but the rules governing soul magic might not allow someone else to repay the debt on Alassa’s behalf. And even if she did, even if she used the debt to convince Randor to pardon Imaiqah and her family for being related to a traitor, it wouldn’t be enough to save the friendship Alassa and Imaiqah shared.

They’ll expect me to take sides
, she thought, feeling ice falling down her spine.
And whichever one I side with, the other will accuse me of betrayal
.

Nightingale led her straight into the War Room, then bowed and retreated, closing the door behind him. Emily could sense wards humming around the chamber, some new and designed to counter magical threats, others old and crafted to prevent long-distance spying. Jade must have either emplaced them or reworked them, she decided. The wards were normally not so blatant in announcing their presence.

But Randor showed them to me before
, she remembered. It hadn’t been
that
long since she’d visited Zangaria for the first time.
Is he trying to show off his power?

King Randor stood at the far side of the room, peering down at a large map. Emily waited to be acknowledged, then walked forward and went down on her knees when Randor looked up at her. He studied her for a long moment, before motioning for her to rise and jabbing a finger at the map. It was remarkably detailed, showing a castle, hundreds of houses and a number of fortifications, but she couldn’t place it at all. There was no name on the map, merely notes in Old Script.

“Lady Regina is dead,” King Randor said, without preamble.

Emily blinked in surprise. Lady Regina, dead? She took a closer look at the map, trying to visualize the streets she’d driven through with Lady Barb. Yes, that was Swanhaven City. It was easy enough to mark out the buildings she’d seen, and where the dead bodies had been left to rot in the town square. And if Lady Regina was dead...

She looked up. “What happened?”

“Many of my agents were killed,” King Randor said. “From what I have been able to put together from the survivors, a handful of servants and guards within the castle overwhelmed the loyalists and opened the gates. A mob swarmed into the building, killing everyone who wasn’t already a rebel. Lady Regina was stripped naked, then placed in the stocks and stoned to death.”

Emily shuddered. Lady Regina - and Lord Hans - had spent their time in Swanhaven making sure that everyone hated them. The mob had probably wanted to make sure her death was horrifying as well as thoroughly unpleasant, just to send shivers down the spines of the remaining aristocrats. Despite herself, despite her awareness that Lady Regina had been a monster, Emily couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.

And Nanette freed Lord Hans
, she thought. The more she thought about it, the more she suspected it didn’t quite make sense. And
that
probably meant she was missing something.
Did she intend to take him back to the rebels, or did she just intend to use him to add to the chaos?

“Swanhaven has declared itself a free state,” King Randor added. “The regiment I sent with Lady Regina was caught by surprise and pinned down in its barracks. By now, the commander may have tried to break out, but the terrain doesn’t favor them. The outcome is as yet undetermined.”

He took a long breath. “And several other cities are restless. I believe the only barony that has avoided patches of unrest is Cockatrice.”

“Because I haven’t been grinding the faces of the poor,” Emily said, before she could stop herself. The nasty part of her mind insisted that Randor and his aristocrats had brought the unrest upon themselves. “Once they started asking questions, you needed to come up with some good answers.”

Randor ignored her. “Apparently, several of Lord Paren’s apprentices were deeply embroiled in the plot,” he added. “Backed by several Assemblymen, who provided the funds, they stole muskets, flintlocks and gunpowder from the factories and used them to set up their own private fighting force.”

Emily allowed herself a moment of relief. Paren’s treachery remained undiscovered.

“Something must be done,” King Randor said. He looked back down at the map, his voice cold. “An example must be made.

“I have two other regiments within a couple days’ march of Swanhaven,” he added. “However, the rebels have been throwing up barricades and clearly preparing for a long siege. They may have been planning this for quite some time. I may have to devastate the countryside if attacking the city seems a costly option.”

Emily swallowed. “If you devastate the countryside,” she said, “you’ll sentence most of the population to starve, the innocent along with the guilty.”

“It may lure the rebels into battle,” King Randor said. “And outside the city, my troops will have the advantage. The rebels will be slaughtered.”

He might well be right, Emily knew. Trying to fight in a confined space hampered trained troops, but in open countryside they would be almost unstoppable. The rebels would have to choose between risking an open battle, which they would probably lose, or allowing the soldiers to burn the croplands, cart off the farmers - if they hadn’t already fled-- and eventually let starvation do their dirty work for them.

But they might have muskets
, she thought.
The odds might be a great deal more even than the king thinks.