Page 29 of A Chill in the Flame
Everything had changed when the tar-like serpent sprung from Ophir’s anger and pain.
Dwyn had to have known precisely what it would mean to be discovered a manifester, which explained why she’d moved so quickly to dispose of the evidence. Her hands had been on the snake’s body shoving it off of the cliffs before she’d even turned to address the shell-shocked princess.
“You knew,” he said, breaking the long silence.
Dwyn didn’t bother closing her book. She blinked back innocently. “Knew what?”
He stayed near the door. “You’re clever in many ways, Dwyn.” He kept his voice level, large hazel eyes trained on her with militant intensity. “You’ve gained access to the castle. You’re in the walls. You have her trust. Congratulations. But your acting needs work.”
He didn’t miss the way she refused to breathe as he shut the door behind him.
Fourteen
That Night
Ophir remained numb as she stared at her bodyguard. Harland watched the dark-haired stranger depart from her chambers. The princess snuck lovers into her bed more times than he or any of her former guards could count. This was different. Dwyn had told him what she’d done.
“Firi…” His voice was thick and low as he struggled to choke out her name.
“Don’t” was her quiet reply. Bathwater dripped from her still-soaked hair onto her shoulders. She stared at the sandy footprints on the rug as she waited for him to speak.
He looked at her unflinchingly, though she did not return his gaze. “She said you tried to drown.”
The man looked as though his heart had cracked. Under normal circumstances, Harland would have taken off after an intruder and interrogated them as to why they’d been present in the princess’s room. Nothing had been normal about that morning.
“Caris is dead,” she said, her voice somewhere between numb and asleep as she spoke from beneath the oceans of disbelief. He shook his head as he rejected the statement. These were just words. They had no meaning.
“I know.”
“…It took me until now to understand what I saw. And once I let it sink in—once I truly felt it—I didn’t want to be here anymore.” Perhaps he felt like she had. This was a strange, awful joke. A mistake.
“Murder is unthinkable,” he said. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. But this isn’t your fault.”
“It is.” She stared at the bathwater pooling on the rug near her feet. “I took her to a party, and it was like…it was as if they planned it. They separated us. They drugged us. The way it happened…” Her voice drifted. “You didn’t see the way they cut her open.”
He went rigid. “What do you mean,cut her open? Healers? The people who prepared her for the funeral?”
“Her killers,” Ophir said, not feeling the words. “They cut her down the middle. They took out the very things that made her alive like they were pulling weeds from a garden.”
She saw the mechanisms of his mind whirring behind his eyes as he pieced her words together. She understood the delay. It had taken her days to process the horrors.
“Ophir, are you telling me they killed her to take things from her?” When she said nothing, he emphasized, “Are you saying they killed Caris for her organs?”
Ophir went silent as Harland moved for the door and closed it behind him. His voice dropped a register. He spoke low and urgently as he pressed his back into it, barricading her from the world beyond.
“Are you safe?”
She nearly pitied him. The poor, good guard had no way of knowing that the threat was there in the room with them. She had taken herself into the sea. She had dragged Caris, against her will, into a party and convinced her to have a drink. Ophir had told Caris to relax and have fun. She’d encouraged her sister to drink the poison. She’d murdered her sister. She was the danger.
Ophir closed her eyes in a long, slow blink. She hadn’tslept. She had scarcely breathed, save for the odd moments she’d relaxed enough in Dwyn’s presence to allow herself to think she might be dreaming.
Harland made her tell him everything, and in those numb, early hours, she obliged. She hid nothing. She recounted everything from the way her sister’s hands had been tied to keep her on her back, and the colors of the men’s masks, to the location of the party and the sickening feel of entrails against her fingers when she’d pulled Caris to her. She knew in no uncertain terms that August had come looking for her. The warrior had died trying to save his charge, and within the next few hours Harland would doubtlessly be hearing as much from the other staff. She was vaguely aware that someone had been there to help her, though she could not describe him. His voice had been musical, she said, though Harland more or less chalked more than one bit of information up to shock.
Ophir had killed Caris. She had killed August. She had killed so many by insisting they go to that party—a den of sin that her sweet sister would have never willingly entered. It had been her selfishness, her wanderlust, her need for excitement and thrill of disobedience that had urged her out of the castle that night with their dresses and masks. They’d slipped past the guards, evaded detection, and overlooked every possible opportunity to abort their foolish mission and turn back.
“Ophir, look at me.” He was kneeling before her where she sat on the bed staring despondently into the distance. “I know this is hard, but this is very important. Explain what you meant when you said they cut her open.”
She felt herself disappearing with every passing second. She blinked at him again, struggling to understand the relevance in any of it. She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to be anywhere.
