Page 3 of The Crown’s Temptation

He has killed four between the Queen Dowager's estate and the palace gates. He kills this one the same way he killed the others — quickly, completely, without pausing to examine what he has done. The body drops in the outer corridor and he steps over it and keeps moving.

The palace is wrong.

He has known it since he turned onto the main road and felt the quality of the air change the way it changes when something has been disturbed. He could not name it precisely. He knows Asharin the way he knows his own breathing, the frequency of her, and something in that frequency has gone quiet in a way that makes the back of his neck pull tight.

He takes the children's corridor first.

He does not slow as he pushes through the door, scanning the room in a single pass, taking in Saurin and Cambra at the far wall and Kentan already turning toward him, one child against each shoulder.

"We are under attack," he says. "Take them to Urasal. Now."

They do not ask questions. Kentan is already moving.

"Colsar—"

"Go."

They go.

He turns and runs.

The Great Hall is at the far end of the east wing and he covers the distance faster than he should be able to, past guards who flatten themselves against the walls and a servant who drops something ceramic that shatters across the floor and a corridor that seems to stretch longer the faster he moves through it. The clock on the east wall reads seven twenty-one as he reaches the doors.

He pushes them open.

Nothing could have prepared him for what is on the other side.

He takes it in the way he takes in everything under pressure. In pieces, catalogued fast, and understood faster. The broken window, cold air moving through the hall in a way that does not belong to an evening like this one. The dead deathmage against the far wall, the lightcraft in the air around it still faintly present, sharp and clean, unmistakably hers. The blood on the table, at the head, on the floor beneath it, spreading in a pattern that tells him exactly whose it is without needing to be told. Sevrin's. He knows that blood. He would know it anywhere.

He takes all of that in.

And then he sees her. She is on the floor near the table, one hand slightly extended as though she reached for something and did not quite make it. She is still. Not the stillness of sleep or exhaustion or unconsciousness. This is a different kind of still. The kind that has no movement left underneath it.

He crosses the room. He drops to his knees beside her and his hands find her face and he is already talking before he has fully processed what he is seeing.

"Asharin." He turns her face toward him. "Asharin, wake up. Look at me." He presses his fingers to the side of her throat. Nothing. He moves them, presses harder. "Asha. I am here. Open your eyes." He pulls her upright against him, his hand at the back of her head, and he can feel it already, the particular weight of her, the way her body does not respond, does not shift, does not adjust to him the way it always does. "You haven't eaten. That's all this is. You haven't eaten and it has been too long and you pushed yourself and that is all this is." He is still talking. He cannot stop talking. "Wake up. Asha. I need you to wake up right now."

She does not wake up.

He pulls back and looks at her face and sees the dried white foam at the corner of her mouth and the pallor of her skin and he knows, he has known since he walked through the door, he has known since his hands found her and felt what they felt, but he is not ready to accept it.

He lifts his head.

The sound that comes out of him does not belong to anything human. It tears through the hall and the walls answer it, dust falling from the upper corners as the pressure of his power surges outward without direction or intent, cracking the plaster along the ceiling in a long jagged line before he pulls it back, drags it inward, forces it down into something he can hold.

A guard appears in the doorway.

"Get the healer," Colsar says. "Now."

The guard goes.

He looks back at her. He smooths her hair away from her face the way he has done a thousand times and his hands are shaking and he does not care.

The healer arrives breathing hard. She kneels on the other side and her hands move over Asharin's throat, her wrists, her chest, and Colsar watches every movement.

"She has been poisoned," the healer says. "Something I am not familiar with. Forced, given the bruising along the jaw." A pause. "The mode of poisoning is no longer relevant, Your Highness."

"Why?” he asks.