“After she comes for you,” Aedion promised the king, “they’ll have to scrape what’s left of you off the walls.”
The king only smiled. Then he looked to Dorian and Sorscha, who seemed to be hardly breathing. The healer remained on the floor and did not lift her head as the king braced his massive forearms on his knees and said, “And what do you have to say for yourself, girl?”
She trembled, shaking her head.
“That’s enough,” Dorian snapped, sweat gleaming on his brow. The prince winced in pain as his magic was repressed by the iron in his system. “Aedion confessed; now let her go.”
“Why should I release the true traitor in this castle?”
•
Sorscha couldn’t stop shaking as the king spoke.
All her years of remaining invisible, all her training, first from those rebels in Fenharrow, then the contacts they’d sent her family to in Rifthold . . . all of it ruined.
“Such interesting letters you send to your friend. Why, I might not ever have read them,” the king said, “if you hadn’t left one in the rubbish for your superior to find. See—you rebels have your spies, and I have mine. And as soon as you decided to start using my son . . .” She could feel the king smirking at her. “How many of his movements did you report to your rebel friends? What secrets of mine have you given away over the years?”
“Leave her alone,” Dorian growled. It was enough to set her crying. He still thought she was innocent.
And maybe, maybe he could get out of this if he was surprised enough by the truth, if the king saw his son’s shock and disgust.
So Sorscha lifted her head, even as her mouth trembled, even as her eyes burned, and stared down the King of Adarlan.
“You destroyed everything that I had, and you deserve everything that’s to come,” she said. Then she looked at Dorian, whose eyes were indeed wide, his face bone-white. “I was not supposed to love you. But I did. I do. And there is so much I wish . . . I wish we could have done together, seen together.”
The prince just stared at her, then walked to the foot of the dais and dropped to his knees. “Name your price,” he said to his father. “Ask it of me, but let her go. Exile her. Banish her. Anything—say it, and it will be done.”
She began shaking her head, trying to find the words to tell him that she hadn’t betrayed him—not her prince. The king, yes. She had reported his movements for years, in each carefully written letter to her “friend.” But never Dorian.
The king looked at his son for a long moment. He looked at the captain and Aedion, so quiet and so tall—beacons of hope for their future.
Then he looked again at his son, on his knees before the throne, on his knees for her, and said, “No.”
•
“No.”
Chaol thought he had not heard it, the word that cleaved through the air just before the guard’s sword did.
One blow from that mighty sword.
That was all it took to sever Sorscha’s head.
The scream that erupted out of Dorian was the worst sound that Chaol had ever heard.
Worse even than the wet, heavy thud of her head hitting the red marble.
Aedion began roaring—roaring and cursing at the king, thrashing against his chains, but the guards hauled him away, and Chaol was too stunned to do anything other than watch the rest of Sorscha’s body topple to the ground. And then Dorian, still screaming, was scrambling through the blood toward it—toward her head, as if he could put it back.