“I trust Tessa,” says Earle.
“I trust Tessa,” says Bree.
Slowly, it turns into a chant that tightens my chest and makes it hard to breathe. They have so much faith in me—and they’re all a heartbeat away from being slaughtered by this army if they don’t lay down their weapons.
Lochlan is still staring at me. “You trust the king,” he calls to me.
“I didn’t before.” I pause. “But I do now.” I swallow. “Lochlan. Please. There are so many people here. Please don’t risk them all.”
Lochlan looks at Harristan. “Amnesty?” he says. “And eight weeks of medicine?”
King Harristan nods. “You have my word. It has been witnessed by the consuls.”
He sighs. “Fine. Let’s hope we’re not both fools.” He sets down his crossbow. The other rebels do the same.
For a breathless moment, Harristan says nothing, and I wonder if this was all a trick, if the army is going to start picking off the rebels one by one.
But then the king turns to face his army. “Stand down. Allow them to leave.”
I’m suddenly giddy with relief. I turn to look up at Corrick. His eyes are full of pain, and I realize he’s bearing no weight on his injured leg, and the cut over his eye is bleeding.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say. “You’re injured.”
His hands close on my waist, and they’re trembling a bit, belying his confidence. “Someone once told me that we should be riding at the front, not hiding in the shadows. I couldn’t let you and Harristan have all the fun.”
He leans down to press his mouth to mine, but just for a fleeting moment before he pulls me against him. His arms are warm and sure against my back, but he’s heavy with exhaustion. Behind us both, the army retreats as the flames die and the rebels allow their hostages their freedom.
Tension fills the air around us, but for the first time, it’s undercut by a tentative hope.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Corrick
The east wing of the palace has significant smoke and fire damage, and it is uninhabitable, but the west side fared much better. There were many casualties, but due to the late hour of the attack, many of the palace staff had already left for the night. By the time we return to the palace with Tessa and the consuls, I’m shocked to discover that Quint has already given orders and had rooms prepared—before apparently collapsing on a chaise longue in the dimly lit salon.
The consuls shuffle off to their rooms, but Harristan hesitates in the hallway. He studies Quint, sound asleep to the point where he’s almost drooling.
“I’ll wake him,” I say.
“No. Let him sleep.” Harristan shifts his eyes to me.
I can’t read anything in his expression, but his eyes are piercing. We may have stopped the rebels—for now—but there is a lot left unsaid between us. I want to collapse onto that chaise beside Quint, but I brace myself.
Harristan inhales, but Tessa holds up a hand. “Tomorrow,” she whispers.
My brother shuts his mouth, but now his gaze shifts to her.
Tessa almost falters, but then she steels herself. “Tomorrow. Your Majesty. If you please. If . . . ah, if I may add to my list of demands.”
“You may,” he concedes.
I look at her, and even battle worn and road weary, she’s more lovely than I’ve ever seen. “Your demands?”
She blushes, then bites at her lip.
Before she can say anything, Harristan claps me on the shoulder. “You heard her, Cory. Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow comes, but Harristan doesn’t visit my chambers. Not the following day either. He sends me a message to rest, to recover, to wait. I hear from the guards that he is meeting with each of the consuls individually, discussing plans to move forward. Lissa Marpetta has retreated to her sector, and Harristan has sent an army regiment to bring her back to the palace to answer for the fraudulent Moonflower petals.
Consul Sallister attempted to leave, but he was stopped at the gate. Every message he sends is scrutinized. Every shipment of Moonflower petals is inspected before it’s distributed.
Tensions in the sector haven’t lessened. The people are afraid of the rebels—and they’re afraid that the supply of medicine will stop. There’s a nervous hum to the city that’s very different from before.
But I hear of no attacks. I hear no alarms.
I hear of no one in the Hold either. No summons for the King’s Justice.
Quint doesn’t visit me much, but he’s as busy as my brother, arranging for tradesmen and carpenters and steelworkers to rebuild the east wing.
Tessa visits me often. Every break during her time with the palace physicians, every dinner, every spare minute. I teach her to play chess, and she immediately beats me in a game. She tells me that the palace apothecary was killed in the attack, but there are rumors that he was working with Lissa Marpetta.
I soak up every bit of gossip, and I worry for my brother. I worry for Kandala. I worry that we won’t have any way to move forward, that we’ll hit the end of the eight weeks and we’ll be no closer to a solution.
Tessa worries about the same.
I send my brother messages, requests, inquiries.
Demands.
His response is always the same: Tomorrow.
At first, I enjoyed the respite.
By the seventh day, my ankle doesn’t pain me, and most of my bruises have faded. I’m ready to don my mask and hat and stride into the woods as Wes, just for a chance to break the boredom.
When yet another deferral is delivered to my chambers—Tomorrow, Cory, if there is time—I crumple it up and toss it into the fireplace.
Then I stride down the hallway to his room.
Rocco is on duty, and while my brother’s guards have never stopped me from entering Harristan’s quarters, I wonder if things have changed.
But Rocco gives me a nod. “Your Highness. The king is dining with Master Quint.”
“Marvelous. I’ll join them.” I grab hold of the door handle.
Harristan is talking and Quint is writing when I barrel into the room. They both look up at me in surprise.
Quint stands at once. “Your Highness.”
“Corrick,” says Harristan. “I sent word that we could meet tomorrow.”
“Hmm.” I move to the side table and pour myself a glass of brandy. “I believe I’ve heard that before.”
“Shall I allow you a moment of privacy?” Quint says. He gathers his papers.
“Yes,” I say.
“No,” says Harristan. “Corrick, we can meet tomorrow—”
“I am the King’s Justice,” I snap, “and half the consuls were embroiled in a treasonous plot against you, Harristan. I should be a part of your meetings.” I step close and slam my glass down on the table. “I should be interrogating them. I should be reviewing their holdings and their dosages and their—”
“Enough.” Harristan puts up a hand. “You’re right. The King’s Justice should be doing those things.” He pauses, and there’s no censure in his voice. “But from what I’ve learned, you were unhappy in that role.”
My brother’s voice is quiet, but full of weight. The room seems to tilt, just for a second.
I don’t know what to say.
I don’t know what I want to say.
To my horror, my chest tightens, and I have to look away.
Quint finishes gathering his papers. “I will have another meal sent.” But as he approaches the door, he stops beside me. “Before you went to the Circle with Tessa, I said you can only be the King’s Justice.” He pauses. “I was wrong. You should be Corrick.” He glances at Harristan and then back at me. “Especially here. Especially now. You’ve come too far.”
I have to swallow. “Thank you, Quint.”
“Always.”
Then he’s gone, and I’m alone with my brother.
I take a long breath, then down the glass of brandy. I move back to the side table to pour another.
&
nbsp; Harristan appears at my side, and he takes the bottle out of my hands. “Cory.”
“Who will you choose in my place?” I say, and my voice is harsher than I expect. “You know, Rocco is more savvy than I gave him credit for, and he wouldn’t flinch from violence—”
“I’m not replacing you.”
“Ah, so you’re going to leave me to rot in my chambers?”
“No.” He sighs. “I was trying to see if I could understand what it is that you do.”
I freeze. “What does that mean?”
“It means I’ve been interrogating the consuls. I’ve been to the Hold. I’ve been—”
“You’ve been to the Hold?”
“Yes. You were correct about prisoners using chairs as weapons.”
Against my will, that makes me laugh. “I told you.”
He doesn’t smile. His eyes search mine. “I’m not replacing you. But I don’t want to return to the status quo. I don’t want to hide behind the King’s Justice.”
“You never hide, Harristan.”
“Father did.” He pauses. “And I wonder if that’s part of why they were killed.” Another pause. “There are very few people in the palace whom I trust. I would never replace you.”
That sentence doesn’t sound complete, so I raise my eyebrows. “But . . . ?”
“But . . . I do not want you to think you must hide your true intent from me.” His voice sharpens. “I do not want to think that you would lie to me.”
I swallow and look away. I think of that moment in the Hold when Allisander declared that my brother was not my friend, that he left me in the Hold for an entire day. He wasn’t wrong about that moment—but the choices that put me there weren’t Harristan’s. The blame was mine. “Forgive me.”
He hesitates, then reaches out to ruffle my hair, the way he did in the Hold. “You’re forgiven.”
I roll my eyes and duck away. “So . . . you don’t want me to be Cruel Corrick anymore?”
He grimaces. “There is so much gossip and unrest. If even a fraction of it is true, I think you’ll have plenty of opportunities to be Cruel Corrick. But . . . we have focused on the crimes of those who have little, those who commit crimes of desperation. The true insurrection was here in the Royal Sector. With us.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
“I was giving them to Quint before you burst in here.” He sighs and pours himself a glass of brandy, then smacks my hand away when I reach for the bottle. “I still have no idea why Roydan and Arella have been meeting secretly to review shipping logs. And we’ll have to do something about Leander Craft’s sector. I can’t have two sectors without a consul. Those explosives came out of Trader’s Landing, so we’ll need to discover how they were smuggled out. I suspect we may have more traitors in our midst than just Allisander.” He runs a hand through his hair. “We’ll need to appoint someone to oversee—”
A knock sounds at the door. “Your Majesty,” a guard calls. “Another meal has arrived.”
I smile at my brother. “Let’s get to work.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Tessa
A week after the rebellion, King Harristan shows me to a new room in the palace.
“Nothing too grand,” he says as a guard swings open the door. “As you requested.”
My eyes almost bug out of my head. It’s grander than anywhere I’ve ever lived in my life, including the small suite where I’ve been staying since the rebels bombed the palace. This is just down the hall from where Corrick sleeps, and the hallway alone is so lavish that I always feel like I need to whisper when I’m up here. The room is so immense that I can’t take all of it in at once. Glistening marble and gleaming wood and lush wall hangings and a bed the size of an ocean. It’s three times the size of the Emerald Room, where I first stayed the night I snuck in here. It’s too plush. Too big. Too much.
Definitely too grand, and he very well knows that.
Or . . . maybe he doesn’t. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Not just with him. With all of the elites.
“It’s lovely,” I say haltingly. “I just meant—I meant—”
“Corrick and I have been discussing the consuls and the rebellion and how we shall proceed from here. We suspect Allisander and Lissa are not the only people who were working against the Crown, so I will not be inviting the other consuls. We have not stopped a revolution yet, Tessa. We have merely . . . delayed it a bit.”
I stare at him. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
He’s not done. “As the consuls cannot be trusted, when you are not working with the royal physicians, I will trust you to be my personal adviser in dealing with Lochlan and the other rebels.” I blanch, and he adds, “You did request a job as well, did you not?”
And yes, I suppose I did.
Then he leaves me there in the hallway, my mouth hanging open, and he goes on his way.
“Thank you?” I whisper, but he’s already gone.
Much like the new room, this feels too big. But I wanted to be a part of the change, and I wanted to be leading the way.
I’ve been having breakfast with Corrick and Quint every morning. The Palace Master is full of gossip about the consuls and their loyalty, about Allisander and his hardly veiled insults about Harristan and Corrick, about who can be trusted and who can’t. While there’s hope in the air, there is fear, too, and it’s obvious the guard presence in the palace has been doubled.
My days are busy with meetings, but my favorite part of the day is when the sun has fallen from the sky, and I walk with Corrick under the stars, the moonlight tracing his features in shadow.
Tonight, the weather has cooled, the sky overhead deepening to a blue so dark it’s nearly black. We’re nearing the fiery arch, and sparks sizzle as they fall onto the pond below it.
I shiver, and Corrick wordlessly slips out of his jacket to drape it over my shoulders.
“Thank you,” I say.
“It suits you better anyway,” he says, and I smile.
He doesn’t.
I know he’s met with Harristan, and he says that they’re committed to making things better in Kandala. But that doesn’t mean they’ve made things better between themselves. I remember walking with Harristan in the Wilds, when he said that the king deserves no one’s pity.
I wonder if Corrick feels that way, too.
I lace my fingers with his. “You seem worried.”
“Harristan said that he doesn’t want to hide behind the King’s Justice.”
I wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t, and I frown. “I think that’s wise.”
“I don’t think he ever hid, Tessa. We never hid who we were.” He hesitates. “There’s so much at stake. Allisander and the others were going to try to overthrow him. I’m worried that if there’s no more King’s Justice, they’ll try again.”
I stop short and stare at him.
He must see my expression. “What?” he says, and he almost sounds petulant. “That’s what happened to our parents.”
“Do you know what you just said?”
“If there’s no more King’s Justice—”
“No! You said we never hid who we were.” I want to shake him. “Corrick! You hid everything that you are. I think Harristan did too.”
He startles, then sighs. He seems like he’s going to start walking again, but I hold fast. He looks down at me, his eyes heavy and intent.
“The people loved Wes and Sullivan,” I whisper. “Give them a chance to love Harristan and Corrick.”
He traces a thumb over my mouth. “They loved Tessa Cade, too, remember.”
“You can do this,” I say quietly.
He shakes his head a bit, then brushes his lips over mine. “We can do this.”
Then his hands find my waist, and I drown in his eyes and inhale his breath. The darkness closes in around us until there’s nothing but the warmth of his hands and the sound of his voice, low and teasing in my ear. There is so much to be done, so many things to
hope for.
But just for a moment, I close my eyes, lean into his touch, and remember what it was like when it was just the two of us against the night.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From the moment I first watched (and fell in love with) the Disney animated version of Robin Hood, I’ve always loved stories about supposed “outlaws” who are secretly doing the right thing for the populace. I grew up watching and reading every rendition of these kinds of stories I could find, from Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood to the old black-and-white episodes of Zorro to YA novels like Cynthia Voigt’s Jackaroo or Lynn Flewelling’s Luck in the Shadows. When I envisioned the characters of Tessa Cade and Weston Lark stealing medicine to help the people of Kandala, I knew what their journeys were going to be right from the beginning, and I completed the first draft of Defy the Night in early autumn of 2019. I then had to turn my attention to drafting A Vow So Bold and Deadly, so when my first editorial letter from my amazing editor came in January of 2020, it sat in my email in-box until I finished Vow.
And then, in March of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Since Defy the Night deals with a kingdom suffering a mysterious illness, I know there will likely be comparisons, and I’m already anticipating the questions of whether this is a “pandemic book.” If you’ve made it this far, you know that it’s not, but the way COVID-19 affected the world absolutely changed the way I looked at the kingdom of Kandala and what responsibilities rulers have to their citizens, especially in times of tremendous challenge and strife. My editor and I did several rounds of revisions to create what is now the finished book you have in your hands, and as usual, Mary Kate wouldn’t let me stop until it was perfect.
So that’s where I’m going to start. Mary Kate Castellani, my phenomenal editor at Bloomsbury, always takes my work to the next level, and then she somehow sees even more potential and pushes it even higher than that. I am always so grateful for your guidance and support, and I am so glad we have more books to look forward to in the future.
Huge thanks and gratitude go to my husband, Michael, who is quite possibly the most supportive husband in the world. I will never forget the time way back when I was first beginning to research literary agents, and he said, “Do you really think your writing is good enough that people would pay money to read it?” It was such a pivotal question at such a pivotal moment, and I thought about it for a second, then said, “Yes. I do.” He simply nodded and said, “Let’s get it done, then.” Ever since that day, he’s been 100 percent behind me, and I appreciate every single second we have together.
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