“Sister!” Malcius came to greet her, his embrace warm and close. “Your adventures had me greatly worried,” he whispered into her ear.
“Not so much as I. We have much to discuss, brother.”
“All in good time.” He stepped back and extended his hand to the two figures standing in the centre of the room, a young man and woman, dressed in mean clothing, but also both handsome of face and athletic of build. The man was well muscled with a stern visage, his features possessed of a hungry leanness. The woman was no less striking, lithe like a dancer and darkly beautiful. She seemed somewhat overawed by her surroundings, keeping close to the man’s side and casting wary glances at the assembled lords and guards.
“You are in time to join me in a joyous occasion,” Malcius said, moving towards the young man. “Brother Frentis.” He shook his head in wonder. “How you gladden my heart!”
Lyrna moved to her usual seat on the left of the throne, pausing to press a kiss to the queen’s cheek on the way and exchange hushed greetings with her niece and nephew. “Did you bring me a gift, auntie?” little Dirna asked.
“I did.” She tweaked her niece’s nose, drawing a giggle. “A Lonak pony for you and a new playmate for your brother. We’ll all go riding tomorrow.”
“I come . . .” Brother Frentis was saying in a halting voice as she took her seat. “I come, Highness. To beg . . . forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness?” the King replied with a laugh. “Whatever for?”
“Untesh, Highness. I couldn’t hold the wall . . . My men . . . My failure saw the city fall.”
“The city was always going to fall, brother. Do not seek forgiveness for an imagined failing.”
Lyrna noticed Lord Al Telnar, onetime Minister of Royal Works, standing at the far side of the room. His expression, normally one of smug self-satisfaction or obsequious solicitation, was oddly tense as he offered her a bow. She had heard from a maid that he had been the one to recognise Frentis at the docks that very day, a perfect opportunity to curry lost royal favour. So where is his triumph? she wondered. Or his customary leer? The man had been another unwelcome suitor over the years, one she dismissed with almost as much alacrity as she had dismissed Darnel, but like the Fief Lord it hadn’t dimmed his ardour.
“For all the long years of slavery and torment,” Brother Frentis was saying, “it has been my one ambition to stand before you and crave your pardon.”
“Then it grieves me to disappoint you,” Malcius replied, moving forward with his arms wide, enfolding Frentis in a warm embrace. “For no pardon is required.” Malcius drew back a little, his hands on the brother’s shoulders. “Now, tell me of how you came to be here, and in company with such a lovely associate.”
Frentis smiled a little, head downcast, nodded, and reached up to clasp the King’s head between both hands, jerking it up and to the side, breaking his neck with a loud crack.
The knife was in Lyrna’s hand as she rose to her feet. She had no memory of having drawn it from her bodice. The screams began as the shocked stillness turned to confusion and rage, as the queen shrieked and the lithe woman dodged a guard’s pole-axe and drove a punch into his throat. Lyrna’s knife flew from her hand and buried itself in Frentis’s side. He convulsed instantly, back arching, a scream every bit as terrible as Kiral’s erupting from his throat, collapsing onto the marble floor, jerking as the agony wracked him.
The Volarian woman turned from the dead guard at her feet, gaping in shock at the sight of Frentis’s writhing form, his jerks ending abruptly, limbs suddenly slack. A single Volarian word issued from her lips in a whisper: “Beloved?”
“Kill her!” cried the queen in terror and grief. “Kill them both!”
Guards charged from all sides of the room, pole-axes levelled. The woman paid them no heed, her gaze fixing on Lyrna, face rendered ugly with malice and revenge. She extended both arms as the guards closed, and flame erupted from her hands.
Lyrna staggered back in shock, reeling from the heat as the woman whirled, her flames engulfing guards and lords as they swept the room. Lyrna saw little Dirna bathed in fire, her mother next, then little Janus, their bodies charred and blackened in seconds. Lyrna would have screamed but for the choking stench of smoke and burning flesh, making her crawl and rasp on the floor.
“You took him from me!” the woman screamed at Lyrna, advancing towards her on unsteady legs, blood flowing from her eyes in thick red tears. “You took my beloved! You festering cunt!”
A figure came staggering out of the swirling smoke as the woman raised her hands towards Lyrna, reaching out to restrain her. Al Telnar! Lyrna realised in shock.
The lord shouted at the woman as he grappled with her, his words lost amidst the roaring flame. The woman bared her teeth in a feral snarl and drove her hand open-palmed into the centre of his face. Al Telnar staggered back, sinking to his knees, his nose driven back into his skull, then collapsed lifeless to the floor.
Lyrna scrabbled back as the woman lurched closer, arm raised, flames erupting . . . and she burned.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Frentis
Agony erupted as the knife sank into his flesh, instantly spreading to seize his entire body. He heard screams he knew were his own as his legs gave way. It was like being squeezed by a fist made of a million jagged steel points, the pain so intense he felt his reason slipping away, memory fading amidst the torment. Vaelin, the Order, the woman . . . the King’s eyes just before he killed him, the brightness of them-a man finding relief from guilt. Far away there were more screams, a great heat filling the air, but it was so dull, beyond the wall of pain that surrounded him. He retained sufficient reason for one more thought: At least I won’t live to suffer the guilt.
Then it changed, the agony born of the knife blade shifted as it met something, an echo of a previous pain, a seed, stunted, prevented from growing, now given new life. The seed will grow . . . The steel-point grip faded, replaced by something worse, a burning, a searing fire ripping through him, covering his skin, finding his scars. It reached a crescendo then, the pattern of scars covering his torso flaring with a force greater than any he had known before . . . Then it was gone. All the pain, gone in an instant . . . along with the binding.
Air escaped him in a rush as he rolled on the floor, the sensation of freedom overwhelming. His hands found his chest, searching for the scars, finding only smooth flesh. They were gone, healed and disappeared. No scars, no binding. I can move. I CAN MOVE!
He began to rise then grunted as a fresh pain gripped his side where the princess’s knife was still embedded. An Order knife, he thought in wonder, tugging it free. The cut was bad, bleeding freely, but not fatal. He surged to his feet, finding himself standing amidst an inferno. Blackened and burning bodies lay everywhere, flame and smoke covered the walls, the King’s corpse lying before him, dead eyes open, meeting his own.
A shout to his left dragged his gaze away, finding the woman, flame streaming from her hands towards the prone form of Princess Lyrna. For an instant it caught her hair, her face, raising a scream of terror and agony. “No,” the woman said, stilling her flames, stumbling towards Lyrna, blood dripping from her face. “Too quick. You I’ll have raped every day for a year. You I’ll have cut, one piece at a time. You I’ll ha-”
The pole-axe blade slammed into her back and erupted from her chest. Her back arched as blood fountained from her mouth. She hung there for a moment, head lolling to the side, her eyes finding his face. “Beloved,” she said, showing red teeth in a smile of complete devotion. Frentis twisted the blade and watched the light fade from her eyes.