Want raced to the tubs. They sat level with her head, twenty pounds of heavy cream and sugar. She grabbed the plastic of the chocolate tub with both hands and tried to pull it off the shelf, but the container was slippery with frost and iced in place, and it didn’t budge an inch. She elbowed her brother to help her, and he reluctantly lowered his hands from his face to put them next to hers.
I stepped back quietly, into the warm kitchen, one hand curling around the door handle. I’d told the truth: it was a heavy door. If I let go, it’d swing shut on its own. There was a release on the inside, but that wouldn’t lighten the load; and emaciated children who couldn’t lift an ice cream tub might not be able to open it. Even if I didn’t latch the exterior lock, they’d be trapped.
They say you feel warm before you freeze to death.
My fingers convulsively tightened and loosened. I thought of the way Want had eaten, and of the missing knights. I thought of how it had felt to lose myself to my own mind, at the slightest touch of Ignorance’s hand. I thought about what I knew would happen if I didn’t act now. I thought about innocent human lives and families and the future of my nation. I thought about the auction house and about doing what was necessary and about the greater good.
As I watched, Want gave up trying to tug the chocolate ice cream down and began beating the outside of the tub instead, in an attempt to rip through. Her fingers were blue with cold.
I was going to regret this for the rest of my life.
I released the door and let it shut behind me. “Here,” I told Want kindly, reaching over her head to wrestle down both tubs. “Let me help you with that.”
There wasn’t much actual conferencing that day. We tried, but the knowledge of King Emil’s imminent arrival hung heavy among us. The prefects were afraid. They no longer trusted one another—or me—and they certainly didn’t trust Want and Ignorance, who never left Prefect Avior’s side, at Lindo’s insistence. She had, she said, lost enough knights.
It was almost a relief when one of Lindo’s knights radioed in to tell us that the king, entourage in tow, was going to arrive early.
I’d been seeing flashes of Lindo knights all day, as they found places to secrete themselves around the manor—which they now did.
Sr. Nordfeld was waiting for us in the entry hall, and kept his expression entirely blank when Avior handed the children over to him and told him to wait with them in the sitting room by the front door. “And as for you, dear children,” Avior told them, scruffing their hair, “be ready. I’ll point out which one the king is. He’s the one you need to kill.”
I met Sr. Nordfeld’s eyes over their heads, then turned mine hurriedly away lest we arouse comment. It had been, I supposed, too much to hope that my knights had succeeded in getting a message out. I did know that they and Francis were no longer in the knighthouse, because Lindo had told me so, with many a baleful glance at Avior. Equally gone, she said, were the knights guarding them. She was extremely sorry for my loss and expressed again how brave she thought I was, given the circumstances.
I thanked her gravely and told her I couldn’t bear to think about it, so she’d change topics.
I was so utterly focused on what was ahead of me, it didn’t occur to me until we were actually walking out of the manor to meet the approaching vehicles that, as Prefect Edenfield, it was my duty to take point. Even then, I expected Avior or Lindo to usurp me, but they didn’t. It would have looked too strange, I guess.
The royal knights arrived first, in a rush of black vans. They came and they kept coming, dozens of them, crowding around every gap left by the prefects’ cars, along the edges of the gravel loop, and down the sides of the road. I’d expected the king to bring a few kingsmen, not an army. My heart fluttered with hope, and I had to school my expression lest the other prefects read it aright.
Once they’d parked, the royal knights themselves gushed from their vehicles. There must have been nearly two hundred of them: men and women in black uniforms with white stars at their caps and necks and white stripes around their wrists. They spread out with military precision, scouting the immediate area and delving deep into the woods. Several searched the empty knighthouse and then took up position before it. Then I was distracted by a few of the higher-ranking royal knights separating the prefects out and patting us down, swiftly and professionally. It happened so quickly it didn’t occur to me to protest until they were done. The other prefects seemed to have been expecting it, and the knights didn’t find anything objectionable on them. In fact, the only thing they took away was my multi-tool knife, which I’d kept in case it came in handy.
As quickly as they’d appeared, the royal knights withdrew, stationing themselves in various groupings, both offensive and defensive. All this, they did without a word and with fantastic precision.
Only then, with his patriotic Carinan soldiers in place, did the king arrive. Nine identical white cars drove into the parking loop and fanned out. The king would be in one of these vehicles: neither the first nor the last, but one of the seven in between. There was no telling which of the seven it would be; rumor had it, even the inhabitants of the other eight cars did not know.
The vehicles parked and the engines extinguished, and suddenly everything became very familiar and very formal, exactly like I’d seen it on television. Only, from the comfort of my living room, the array and fanfare hadn’t been so overwhelming and confusing. The foremost thought in my mind was that I had no idea how I was supposed to greet the king. Why hadn’t Torben included that in his notes?
Kingsmen emerged from their cars, sharp in little white hats with brims to shade their eyes, crisp white jackets and trousers, military-grade white boots. They had black stars at their collars, indicating rank, and at their wrists and on their hats. These were the best of the best, a full complement of eighteen, as utterly and continually focused as air traffic controllers, forming up around the fourth car. One bent back to open the door, and the king himself emerged.
My mind wiped itself as blank as if Ignorance were holding my hand. I’ve never considered myself impressed by celebrity, but this—he—
He was at once precisely as I’d seen him on television (and stamps and money and in magazines) and a complete stranger. He stood five feet ten-and-a-half inches, and struck me as both shorter and taller than I expected, because he was so much realer. He had a large build, powerful but neither fatty nor muscular, and an oval face. His chin receded into his neck when he opened his mouth, and his skin was not the poreless wash it became under studio lights. Sloping eyebrows led to a broad forehead elongated into thinning hair. He even dressed as I had often seen him—elegantly suited, with a gold sash across his chest and the sword of state by his side. But though he wore black and white, he did not for an instant blend in with his men. If anything, they blended into the background against the powerful foreground of his presence.
“Prefects,” he announced, and his voice, too, was as I knew it and yet not: sonorous, the Canopan accent trained to crispness, deep to the point of buzzing, with the slow rhythm of one accustomed to speaking publicly and making himself heard over a cheering crowd. It was exactly the voice he used in his Christmas and Easter speeches. The voice I associated intimately with royalty, with the personality and confidence to back it up. That voice said, We are speaking words of vast importance, and thou shalt not interrupt or ignore us. Every syllable, every intonation proclaimed his majesty; and I thought that even if I had never seen or heard him before, I’d have known him as king from the way he spoke.
That thought snapped me out of my daze. I wasn’t here to gape and prostrate myself; I was here to save his life.
Sudden violence has a way of getting people’s attention, so I turned, raised my foot, and drove it down into Avior’s kneecap. I didn’t get the angle right, as I had with Dinez, but Avior still collapsed, wheezing. I stomped my nice spiky heel into his stomach.
“Your Majesty!” I cried. “Beware! These prefects are plotting to kill yo
u! You will be attacked the moment you enter the manor!”
In the way of nightmares, no one responded as they ought to have. The kingsmen did not immediately jump to the king’s rescue, throw him into the car, and burn rubber away from here. In fact, they didn’t do anything at all.
Neither did King Emil. He said, “We know.”
Which explained why he’d brought a small army with him, but not why he’d come himself.
“We have heard your recording, Edenfield,” he said. “Two of your men brought it to us. But we knew of the prefects’ treason long before that—our high marshal caught wind of it months ago. We had not the evidence to move against our prefects, and so we sent spies to each of our prefectures to learn the truth of it.” He motioned negligently. My eyes skipped over automatically and stuck.
There was Torben Nass, leaning in that reedy way of his, light-footed and ugly as ever. His white uniform did nothing to ameliorate his appearance, but it did mark him utterly and indubitably a kingsman.
In retrospect, it was obvious. It should have been obvious. True, Torben hadn’t exactly treated me well—but then, I hadn’t given him any reason to. I’d been too busy convincing him I was in league with the prefects. I’d gotten rid of and then supplanted Prefect Edenfield, bypassing the usual and legal mode of succession. He’d obviously known from the first that I wasn’t the king’s spy, that I couldn’t possibly be for the simple reason that he was. And if that weren’t enough, I’d taken it a step further by acting like a madwoman, flouncing about filling Bo’s head with partial truths and gorging myself on rabbit.
But none of that, none of that, was as horrible and shameful as the knowledge that I would have realized the truth much sooner had Torben not been so very ugly.
And that he knew this.
He met my gaze steadily and nodded. Not in triumph or in sarcasm and certainly not in friendliness; only in acknowledgment.
I was so busy staring and wishing the earth would just swallow me and get it over with that I missed whatever the king said next. What I didn’t miss was the royal knights jogging around and past us, the vast majority of them streaming through the doors and windows of Edenfield Manor like a plague of locusts. They jostled us prefects, surrounding and separating us and holding Avior upright. Canopus and Silvertip had barbed comments for the circling knights, but they kept them brief, and none of the others said anything. Tey looked like he was about to faint or throw up, but Lindo burned sheer hatred at me.
“. . . have arrested every man and woman wearing Lindo colors,” the king was saying. “Then we can go inside and discuss this like civilized people. . . .”
There was so much going on, I was having trouble catching everything. I had to focus on what was important, and right now alarm bells were bonging in my brain. I cleared my throat, and my voice emerged uncertainly amid the rush of knights. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.
The king didn’t pause his speech. He was used to talking over people. His topic of choice appeared to be scolding the prefects as if they were a bunch of naughty children. This struck me as a most peculiar attitude with which to treat treason. But then, a lot of things weren’t making sense.
I caught Torben’s eye and shook my head. He leaned my way like a sapling in the wind, curious but uncomprehending. Of course: I had only told my knights about some sort of mysterious weapon; he had no way of understanding about Want and Ignorance. No one here but the prefects knew the truth, and they weren’t telling. I couldn’t count on Sr. Nordfeld to do anything that might endanger the children, and the knights—they would do what any compassionate and sensible person would do with a pair of piteous waifs: bring them out to the king.
“Sire!” I yelled. I didn’t think about it first, and I didn’t hold back. That was the only way I could override the implicit command in that voice, the power of royalty. “Sire, listen to me!”
The king glanced at me and kept talking. No one paid me any attention except Torben, whose curious look sharpened. He sidled up to King Emil and swayed in.
The king broke off his speech long enough to say, “Not now.”
“Your Majesty,” Torben said urgently, “Prefect Edenfield has important—”
A shot boomed from inside the manor, then another. Then another. In seconds, the air filled with the thunder of intense gunfire. I slapped my hands over my ears, and the kingsmen clumped around King Emil, guarding his body with their own. They drew weapons, transformed from guards to soldiers in an instant.
The barrage continued for what felt like ages. My ears rang so much, even through my hands, that I didn’t realize the battle sounds were petering off until I could distinguish clear breaks: bursts, then single shots, and finally nothing but the echoes between my eardrums.
No one spoke, not even the king. We waited for more, but there wasn’t any more. No light streamed from the windows, because every bulb had been shattered. No one emerged. Under the afternoon sunlight, the manor leered down ghostly white and crosshatched brown.
Maybe four dozen knights had remained outside with us, and one of them jogged forward, dropped briefly to one knee before the king, and reported, “Sire, we’ve lost radio contact.”
“They’ve probably shot out their own radios,” King Emil said dismissively. “Deal with it.”
“Sire.” The knight snapped back to his fellows and started giving orders. Soon after, every remaining knight quick-marched into the manor, leaving only the kingsmen to guard and separate king and prefects.
“Your Majesty,” I called, “they won’t be able to—”
“Shut her up,” the king said absently, not bothering to look my way. “We would have silence.”
“Your Majesty, this is important!”
“If she speaks again without leave,” the king said, “shoot her.”
I clamped my jaw shut, shocked. I tried to tell myself there was something else going on, that under the circumstances as he understood them, the king was acting sensibly. But I felt betrayed anyway. Hadn’t I been the one to send that memory card? Wasn’t I trying to save his life? Shouldn’t he trust me enough to let me speak?
The other prefects were watching me, their expressions ranging from satisfaction to loathing to resignation. Avior was standing fine on his own, though he was favoring his right leg. The whole situation felt more like a nightmare than ever.
The king had lost his bug for speaking, and we waited in silence for his knights to return.
No shots were fired, and no one emerged. Ten minutes passed, then twenty. Attempts to radio those inside resulted in static. Attempts to call were frustrated by whatever Lindo had done to the phone towers.
Finally, the king turned to Torben in pure exasperation. “What game are they playing, Nass?” he demanded. “You said there were only ninety Lindo knights inside. They couldn’t have overpowered my men.”
“Certainly not without making any noise,” said Torben, and I thought I caught some edge in his bland tone. He doesn’t approve of the king’s strategy, I realized.
Torben went on, “Lindo’s knights could be hiding from yours, but that doesn’t explain why we aren’t receiving any radio communications or why none of them have come out to explain—or why no Lindo knight has attempted to shoot from one of the upper stories. Something else is happening. A hostage situation, maybe.”
“Or they’re all dead,” I said without thinking. “I’m sorry—don’t shoot!”
“Don’t,” Torben agreed sharply, forestalling the kingsmen. “She knows something.”
King Emil held up his hand, and guns were lowered away from me. “If the first set of knights were dead,” he mused, “the second set would have reported it.”
“Unless they’re dead too,” I said.
“You mean Lindo set booby traps,” said Torben. “Or are you referring to the mysterious weapon you told Roald about? Have you not dismantled it?”
“About that,” I hedged.
“Mysterious weapon,” the ki
ng scoffed. “What will you come up with next? Avior managing to summon his demon?”
I didn’t answer, I was so surprised.
“We listened to the whole recording of that meeting,” the king explained. His eyes trailed over the other prefects, smug in his victory. “And my people have analyzed it. We have known for years of Avior’s obsession with demonology, but since he clearly had neither the expertise nor the intelligence to summon an actual demon, we did not interfere. But now it seems he found—or believes he found—an expert. A real one, I wonder?”
The king . . . believed it was possible to summon demons? What was this, the Dark Ages?
Or did he somehow know of personifications as well? Was that part of the secret knowledge given to kings?
Regardless, his belief would make my explanation a lot easier.
“He found an expert,” I said, “although the fact that the summoning worked surprised even that expert.”
Or had it? I wondered.
“My former employer,” I explained, “Jon Nordfeld, the one who purchased the recording equipment. He made himself an expert so that he could infiltrate the conference to gather the treasonous evidence you heard.”
I was straying too far from my point, and was losing my audience. I hurried on. “Anyway, Prefect Avior and the others managed to summon a demon and make a bargain with her—to murder you.”
“Her?”
That’s what he focused on? “Yes, her. It took the shape of a woman. And the prefects—Avior was the spokesman—asked her for a way to kill you without anyone knowing, and she gave it to them.”
“Really,” said the king. “What sort of weapon?”
I hesitated, knowing how absurd the explanation must sound. But I could hardly refuse to tell him. “A pair of children,” I said slowly. “Horrible, animalistic creatures with special powers, not ordinary children. She called them Want and Ignorance.”
One of the kingsmen laughed knowingly. It was such a distinctive, such an unexpected sound that we all swung around to stare at him. The man straightened and put on his military face. “Sorry, sire. It’s just—A Christmas Carol.” He flushed as we continued to stare. “The book by Charles Dickens, I mean. A Christmas Carol. The Spirit of Christmas Present carries around two wretched children called Want and Ignorance. A girl and a boy, the offspring of mankind. It’s, uh . . . meaningful.”
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