A knock at the door.
The sisters and wives of the king’s vassals had come calling at the queen’s receiving room.
“Come in.”
The birthday banquet had drawn nobles and lords from every corner of Lotsa to Nadirotsa Castle. The guest quarters were filled with their families, and among them, the ladies of rank had gathered to cultivate their acquaintance with the queen.
When the queen gave her permission to enter, the foremost among them caught up her skirts in a curtsy. Margarite introduced Hyderlin to the assembled women.
“This is Hys, wife of Sir Sarg Gloriosa. She is a guest of His Majesty and myself, staying with us at the castle…”
One of the ladies drew a sharp breath, as though startled. Some leaned toward one another and whispered. Odd, sidelong glances drifted toward Hyderlin at intervals.
A quiet commotion.
The lady at the center of the gathering put on a painted smile and opened her mouth.
“Ah. So this is the one — I have so wanted to meet you. You truly do look like the Count of Biche.”
They had evidently taken a keen and consuming interest in the rumor that a woman who was the very image of the former Knight Commander had married into the Gloriosa name.
The ladies asked their questions without pretense — pointed, yet careful enough to preserve their dignity. Hyderlin gave the answers she and Sarg had rehearsed together, doling them out at a comfortable pace.
This is more manageable than I expected.
She handled the ladies with considerable ease. But her confidence did not last long before it was thoroughly demolished.
“Oh, and this must be your firstborn. What a darling she is — do you have plans for a second child?”
Something cold and clammy crept across her skin.
It was going to be a very long day.
People do not die easily.
There was a time in her boyhood years — if they could even be called that — when she had been beaten so badly she walked with a limp, and somehow survived. There was a time she had wandered through snow-buried mountain passes until her fingers and toes had gone black with frostbite, and somehow survived. There was a time she had felt herself drowning in grief and longing, certain death was at hand, and somehow survived that too.
If I had known it would hurt this much, I would have called her name at least once while she was still alive. Why couldn’t I have done that?
“Because we were nowhere near the same station.”
That was true.
She had been so far above him — and he had known it. Known it so well that he could not call her name, could not offer a single warm word, could not show her even a glimpse of the dry kindling burning inside him.
And yet she had said it to him.
“Go back to sleep.”
Sarg had done exactly that.
Either way, he had suffered for a long, long time.
He had lived through mornings when numbness hit him the moment he opened his eyes, making him shudder and despair — and still he had lived. He had lived through the mornings after pouring several bottles of cheap, gut-scorching liquor into himself, convinced he might become the first man in history to die of a hangover. He had lived when he was quite certain he was finished.
This life is remarkably stubborn.
The slanted morning light stabbed at his corneas.
Sarg opened his eyes. It was later than he usually rose.
He looked around and, for a moment, wondered if he was still dreaming. The tapestries on the walls, the carpet beneath him, the bed in which he lay — all of it was obscenely opulent.
Only after some time passed did he realize he was in one of the royal palace’s guest chambers.
He rubbed his sleep-heavy face several times over. The traces of whatever he had dreamed dissolved instantly, leaving no trace.
He stood fully in the present.
He shaved. He combed his hair. He buckled his sword-belt. The man looking back at him from the mirror wore a face that was both familiar and strange. Sarg regarded him for a moment, then walked out.
People do not die easily. That held true, of course, only when one was not on the receiving end of something fatal.
For a warrior, the nature of a person shifted somewhat. The tenacious creature that refused to die became instead a fragile thing of flesh — the kind that could be ended by a single sharp edge. Eat the wrong thing and die. Bleed enough and die. Take a blade to the heart and die. Lose your head and die.
A king was no different.
No noble bloodline granted its bearer the immortality of the undead. Poison, steel, an arrow — any of these would do. And for a man who had spent his entire life holding a sword, who had studied the vulnerabilities of monsters and men alike, ending the life of an ordinary human being who happened to carry somewhat finer blood in his veins was no great feat.
The difficulty lay in what surrounded the king.
He traveled with the most impenetrable guard in the kingdom. To reach the king, one would first have to cut through them. Even for Sarg, that was not possible alone.
Hence the alternative he had settled on: poison.
A silver goblet, lacquered with toxin and presented as a gift. The moment it was used, the poison would take hold — and without an antidote, whatever life remained would end in agony.
Had it been the king’s birthday, this plan might have served beautifully. But with Margarite’s birthday as the occasion, things grew murkier. It was entirely possible that Margarite would be the one to drink from it.
Sarg had not let this concern him overmuch. Margarite, after all, could not die from poison.
She could not end herself either.
The inability to die by ordinary means was something like a curse laid upon both of them — or perhaps a blessing, depending on the angle from which one looked at it.
In any case, whether the king died or Margarite drank from the cup, it would eventually be traced back to Sarg.
That would make him an assassin of royalty. He would meet an end not unlike Hyderlin’s own.
Even someone as stubbornly alive as Sarg could not survive a severed head.
And then, he had thought, he might find his way to wherever she was wandering in whatever afterlife existed —
“So I made a double who looked just like her, beat her to within an inch of her life, and sent her to the scaffold in my place. No one suspected a thing. And so the life of poor Hys came to its end.”
The smile that lingered at the corner of her mouth had looked strangely bitter. Sarg found himself caught between two equally powerful and opposing currents.
You kept yourself alive by sacrificing someone else.
The woman who died in your place — doesn’t that weigh on you at all?
Thank God it was the double who died.
How can a person be so utterly selfish?
Thank God it was you who survived.
Contempt and relief clashed inside him with savage force.
“She spent her whole life as a counterfeit, but at least her death was worthy of royalty. That should be glory enough for a woman of low birth.”
Relief won.
When Sarg learned she was alive, he had abandoned every plan. He was at her side now. There was no need to follow her into death.
“To hell with that. To hell with poison and crossbows — you hate everything? Then try this: shoot him with a crossbow. A bolt through the window from a distance.”
It had been Hyderlin’s suggestion.
She had the floor plan of the great banquet hall mapped in her mind. On the night of the queen’s birthday banquet, the hall would be packed with congratulatory envoys from across the kingdom and beyond. The plan was to take aim at the king through the crossbow, then vacate the position before the soldiers could locate the firing point.
“Don’t worry about the guard on duty. Bribe them — they almost always cooperate.”
Sarg stood at the third-floor corridor window of the east wing, looking out at the great banquet hall below. The hall’s wide-arched windows were currently covered with curtains, but on the day of the event, they would be drawn back to let the light pour in.
According to Hyderlin, when accounting for the crossbow’s effective range, the ideal firing position was precisely here — the third floor of the east wing.
Any closer and there would not be enough time to escape. Any farther and the bolt would lose its power.
The role of slipping away during the banquet to take the shot had fallen to Sarg. Hyderlin’s task was to maneuver Chesa into position near a window if his movements were limited — or, in the event the shot failed, to execute Plan B.
Hyderlin had not told Sarg what Plan B entailed. He had not asked. The first plan was meant to succeed. And after that, if they escaped cleanly —
For the first time in a very long time, he found himself thinking about what came after killing the king. The possibility of a future — one lived beside her. To make that possible, they would have to walk away without being identified as the assassins.
Hyderlin, who knew nearly everything there was to know about Nadirotsa Castle by virtue of having served there for years as Knight Commander, had also told him the escape route.
She had recommended the secret passage through her old room.
It so happened that the firing position was directly across from her former quarters. Sarg ran his fingers over the lock on Hyderlin’s old door.
I’ll need to get the key… Actually, no — that’s unnecessary. With the right tool, a lock like this can be opened in no time. A needle ought to do it. Now, where would I find one?
Any lady would carry an embroidery needle. He supposed he’d have to ask Margarite later.
It was at that moment that Sarg became aware of a presence nearby and turned his head. Chesa was walking toward him.
“I am at your service, Your Majesty.”
“Sir Gloriosa. What brings you to this part of the castle?”
Rather than answer, Sarg looked at the firmly locked door. Chesa smiled.
“If your wife knew you were still doing this, she would be deeply hurt.”
Sarg replied with faint stiffness.
“Did you come for a reason, Your Majesty?”
“Why so prickly? It wounds me.”
Well, he supposed — Hyderlin’s blood was her blood. The same particular manner of slipping past a question ran in both of them.
“Walk with me for a moment?”
A king’s invitation was, in all practical terms, a command. Sarg complied without resistance.
The east wing’s third-floor corridor was genuinely beautiful. The bases and capitals of the granite columns supporting the vaulted ceilings were carved with intricate reliefs — lions, eagles, figures wrought in painstaking detail.
Light fell through the narrow, tall windows in the continental style, casting the shadows of the latticework across the floor in clean, repeating patterns.
“Sir Gloriosa. Where in the world did you find a woman like your wife? I have to say, I was utterly astonished.”
Chesa spoke in that light, unhurried way of his. Sarg replied with equivalent composure.
“Hys does bear a strong resemblance to the Count of Biche.”
When they had met again at Hyderlin’s grave, Sarg had been beyond astonished — he had been staggered, and at the same moment had felt a pang of grief for the double whose life had ended in Hyderlin’s place. Once he understood that the woman before him was truly Hyderlin herself, that grief had turned to relief — but the memory of it remained.
“Exactly. I kept thinking — is it really possible for someone to look that much like another person without being twins, or the work of a sorcerer?”
Chesa’s tone stayed pleasant.
“Has it ever crossed your mind, I wonder — that someone may have approached you wearing my sister’s face, intending to use you for their own purposes?”
He was probing.
Sarg considered briefly — whether to deny it, or to play the part of a man half-persuaded.
“…It doesn’t matter, either way.”
“I’d like to know why.”
“Because even that version of her — even a counterfeit — is someone I am fortunate to have beside me.”
“Ah. Love.”
Sarg did not answer. Silence stretched between them.
He saw no reason to break it, and Chesa showed no inclination to dismiss him. Instead, the king turned to look out the window.
Autumn. The trees were stripping themselves bare.
“At that dinner — my wife and I showed you something rather embarrassing. The truth is, Margarite is very unwell. There is no one here in the castle she can speak to freely, and I think that loneliness makes her suffering worse.”
Silence from Sarg.
“I intend to take her to Larrochelle for the winter. I want to give her a reliable escort, and I have found I don’t have many people I can trust. Someone she could lean on without hesitation would be ideal.”
Chesa turned to look at Sarg and smiled — a smile whose depths were impossible to read.
Every time the king looked at him this way, Sarg felt a deep, instinctive unease. Nothing pleasant had ever followed that expression.
“I’d like you to be at Margarite’s side. To guard her.”
He had known it would come to this.
“I have a family now. Traveling to distant places is not something I can easily do anymore. Therefore, that proposal —”
“Your wife may come as well. If you accept this post, I will see to it that every transgression you and she have committed against the crown is buried and forgotten.”
You and your wife. He had said it plainly. What exactly did he know? Sarg held his expression still and studied the king.
“…I was not aware that working to prove Count Biche’s innocence constituted a transgression.”
“That is not what I’m referring to. You took my daughter. You kidnapped her.”
