Page 69 of A Crown of Darkness

Her hands were firm and assured as she tried to assess Elodie’s health, taking her temperature and pulse. Always the professional, a consummate healer.

Elodie swatted her away. Her hand hit against a metal bracelet on her cousin’s wrist, hard and cold as iron. Elodie’s eyes grew round with alarm.

‘Roland! Where’s Roland?’

Maryn just frowned, hesitating to answer, and Elodie somehow knew that everything was so much worse than she had feared. Endlessly worse. ‘Maryn? What has happened?’

Her cousin winced and then swallowed hard as she considered her possible answers.

‘Majesty,’ she replied in formal tones that warned Elodie that her fears were well founded. The Maiden of the Aurum wore a shadow-wrought steel bracelet which smothered her magic. How could anything be good in any of this? ‘I regret to inform you that Pelias has fallen. The regents’ council surrendered the city to the forces of Ilanthus. We are prisoners, you and I. King Leander of Ilanthus has taken Asteroth.’

‘Through what right?’ Elodie snarled. Leander? King? Not while she lived.

‘Through right of conquest, and through right of marriage. He has claimed Wren as his bride.’

CHAPTER 39

FINN

Pelias had fallen. That was the first problem and not what Finn had expected. It had taken them two days’ hard riding from the scene of the ambush to reach the outskirts of the city to find everywhere was quiet, terrified. The whole land seemed to have fallen under a spell of fear. The closer they got the more devastation they met. The land was ravaged, just as Leander had promised.

They had lost Wren, and Laurence too. And the crown. Now it appeared they had lost everything.

Roland rode like a man in a stupor, consumed by fever and the darkest of magic. Finn had done everything he could to bind him to life with the magic of the Aurum. He was not going to lose the Grandmaster. The wounds had been bad but somehow he had managed to stop the bleeding, and while Olivier had dressed them, Finn had poured as much light into Roland’s body that it ought to have lit him up like the sun. But the injuries weren’t healing and it felt like part of Roland was gone forever, had slipped over the edge into death and not come back.

And wherever that part of him had gone ahead, it was pulling the rest of him after it.

‘We need to rest,’ Anselm told him. ‘He needs to rest. And we need some reconnaissance before we go any further. I don’t like this, Finn. It’s too quiet.’

At least that was something they could agree on.

‘Make camp then, and see to Roland. I’ll ride ahead and?—’

‘No,’ Anselm said. ‘You’re not yourself and you might be all that’s keeping Roland with us right now.’ Anselm was never one to sugar-coat things. ‘I’ll go. I know secret ways through the city and who to talk to. I’ll be quick. You stay here. Olivier can help tend Roland and you…’ That look again, suspicion and concern twisted together. It wasn’t that Anselm didn’t trust him, Finn knew that instinctively, but he was wary.

The reports that had greeted them on the road, when they met fleeing refugees, were not good. Leander had arrived by sea with half his army and the others had poured south along the coast and through the forests. The city guards had died in their droves trying to hold back the onslaught. Rather than submit to siege, a completely unprepared Pelias had opened the gates on the orders of the regents’ council.

That didn’t seem possible. Finn tried to imagine Lady Ylena giving up like that. And what had happened to the Knights of the Aurum?

If anyone could find out it would be Anselm. Finn had to trust in that.

Olivier helped set up a camp in a small copse of trees and they waited. The night stretched out in silence. Roland slept soundly and Finn kept watch until Olivier relieved him.

‘Will he return to us?’ he asked. Of Roland, not Anselm. Finn knew to his core that Olivier had no doubts whatsoever about Anselm. Before long, their friend would be back with the information they needed.

Roland, however, was another matter entirely.

‘He needs a proper healer,’ said Finn. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. Elodie would. And Wren. But I…’

The Aurum might be blazing inside him constantly, just like the holy flame in the Sacrum, but it shouldn’t be. In battle it had felt like music, sweeping over him and through him in a wave he couldn’t control. He was lost in it and his body fought with a will of its own, with a fury he had never possessed. He had never felt so much like a Paladin, consumed in the power of the light, so powerful and yet so helpless at the same time.

The Aurum would destroy him. And he would let it. Gladly.

A sound in the trees brought the two of them to alertness in an instant. Finn nodded to Olivier, who rose slowly and backed towards Roland, intent on defending him.

‘What happened to him?’ a young voice said from the depths of the foliage.

‘Robin?’ Olivier gasped and Finn recalled the two witchkind children who Roland had said brought them to the College of Winter.

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