Page 75 of The Darkest Oath

“Why Rollant?” she whispered to the empty room. “Why are you cursing me?”

The golden light streaming through the window appeared cruelly serene, as if mocking the storm raging in her mind. The house felt impossibly still, as though the walls themselves held their breath, unwilling to answer her question.

CHAPTER29

The Hour of Reckoning

PALACE OF VERSAILLES, OCTOBER 1789

Two daysafter Rollant’s report, King Louis reinstated Necker and promised to live in Paris to live closer to the people as the National Assembly requested, but the damage was done.

Paris had become a furnace of rage, its streets choked with barricades and smoke from burning homes. Officials swung from ropes in the public squares, landlords were dragged into the streets and beaten, and the nobility fled like rats from a sinking ship, leaving the king to fend for himself. Rollant had seen it with his own eyes, and yet, there at Versailles, the palace clung to its gilded serenity as though the revolution could not breach its walls.

But the cries for bread had turned into cries for the Queen’s head. In the eyes of the people, no one was more indulgent than Marie Antoinette, and their hunger for reckoning burned hotter than their need for food.

Pale light preceded the sun and crawled across the early October morning sky. Not hearing the growing rumble in the distance, Rollant sat on his bed in his attic room, with Amée’s rose and Élise’s scarf in each hand.

How cruel a punishment the sorceress had given him. It struck not at his vices, but at his very nature—to love, to protect, to hold—turning his greatest virtue into a death sentence.

The last memory of Ninette clawed at his mind, her small hands clutching his clothes, her gasping cries fading to silence. Ninette could have lived—if only he had let go as he had done with Élise. If only he’d known that love, when heldtoo longin his arms, meant death. Every heartbeat spent in his arms was a breath stolen by the curse. The truth had come too late—three centuries too late—and now Ninette’s death hung over him like a freshly woven noose.

His stomach churned. Bile rose in his throat as he clutched the rose and scarf tighter.

He was a monster, unworthy of anyone’s memory or love.

With a heavy sigh, he returned the rose and scarf to the drawer. Their weight was heavier than any weapon he’d wielded. Beneath them lay his knight’s surcoat, a relic of another life, yet the duty remained.

Death would never claim him, no matter how much he invited it. His dagger, his instrument of futility, was now Élise’s. He hadn’t bothered to replace it. He slammed the drawer shut, turned to the mirror, and stared at the unchanging face bound by a curse—immortal, untouched by time, and yet burdened by centuries of failure. He forced composure as he adjusted his uniform before descending the stairs.

Faint drumbeats echoed through the halls, joined by angry shouts. He stopped to listen. “Paris has come for their king,” he muttered with a scoff, wondering how they would dispose of Louis.

He hurried to the King’s Chambers to relieve his post for the day, though he doubted the poor guard would get much sleep or even live to see the day.

“Captain,” the guard addressed him before Rollant dismissed him, took his place, and knocked at the king’s door. Louis opened it and rushed Rollant inside, taking him to the balcony. Rollant’s chin dropped at the sight.

“They’ve walked all the way to my gates?” Louis muttered, his pacing quickening. “This is unthinkable. Unheard of!”

“Yes, and with the newly formed National Guard as well,” Rollant muttered, lofting an eyebrow, remembering when he told the king and his cabinet about the possibility of mobs attacking the palace with rebellious soldiers. “At least, Commander Lafayette is sympathetic to the crown.”

“If they stay behind the gates, they shall tire and leave,” Louis muttered, pacing the room as his fists clenched and unclenched. “I will reconsider the decrees vetoed only yesterday. Yes, and I will move the Assembly to Tours tomorrow, so we won’t have to worry about the Parisians.”

Rollant stared at the king, unmoving. He had heard such hopeful delusions before—kings clutching at the last threads of power, blind to the tide rising around them. He strained to hear the mob’s shouts beyond the gate. “It sounds like they’re here for the Queen’s head, Sire.”

Louis stopped, his face pale. “No . . . No! They wouldn’t dare.”

But at Rollant’s expressionless gaze telling him otherwise, Louis sank onto his bed.

“Father in Heaven,” Louis whispered, his voice trembling. “What have I done to deserve this? Help me in my time of trouble.” He clutched his temples, rocking slightly as the shouts of the guards grew louder, more desperate.

Rollant had seen palaces breached before and their kings slaughtered, but his heart raced every time, knowing he could not save the king from a mob even in his immortality. He’d always been killed, and by the time his body revived, the king was dead, and then he’d be killed again, thought to be a demon, enduring relentless death until he found himself reborn at the feet of the new king to explain himself. He rubbed his neck, remembering the few times he’d been beheaded; at least the later beheadings had been easier to bear.

“Sire, I hate to interrupt your prayer, but the crowds have found an entrance point through the Chapel,” Rollant said as he observed the crowd kill two bodyguards in their haste to the palace doors in the Royal Courtyard.

He walked to the door and ordered the bodyguard to block the entry to the King’s Guardroom and ensure the Queen and the children were in the antechamber immediately.

The first crack of splintering wood echoed like a gunshot through the halls. Frantic shouts rose over the clash of steel. The mob’s rage crawled closer every second. Rollant’s pulse quickened. He’d trained the bodyguards for this moment, but their number was too small.

The mob poured into the palace like a flood—men and women wearing the red-white-and-blue tricolor cockades, their pikes glinting in the morning light.

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