Hostage in the Lower court

I did not knock on Kael's door. I hit it.

It was nearly midnight, the corridor was dark, and my fist was already bruised by the time the latch snapped back and the door swung open. He stood there in a loose white shirt with his hair tousled and a dagger in one hand, and for a moment I think he mistook me for an assassin.

"Mara is gone," I said.

The dagger lowered.

"Her window is smashed. There is blood on the sill. Her tea is still warm." The words tumbled out of me in a rush. "Someone took her, Kael. Within the last hour. They cannot have gone far."

He did not ask a single question. He had already turned and snatched his sword belt off a chair. "Dorian," he said, to the dark of the room behind him, and I realised the Beta had been asleep on a couch by the window. He was on his feet and pulling on his boots before the name had finished leaving the king's mouth.

"Where?"

"The infirmary wing. Wake Rhys. Seal the gates."

"Majesty, if they have already gone over the wall—"

"Then we find out how."

Kael looked at me. The light from the corridor lamp fell on his tired, sharp face, and for an instant I thought he would say something about the loft, the glowing hands, the question I had refused to answer.

He only said, "Show me."

It took all of eight minutes to learn that whoever had taken Mara had planned it well.

Rhys found the guard who should have been posted at the infirmary corridor lying unconscious behind a pillar, a single neat bruise on the back of his skull. The lamp at the corner had been snuffed. A rope hung from the roof of the herb store, and another from the courtyard wall, a quick, silent way over for anyone who knew where to look.

"They came from outside," said Rhys, stooping over a muddy bootprint. "Four, maybe five. They did not care who saw."

"Because nobody was supposed to," said Kael. He stood in the middle of Mara's wrecked room with his arms folded, and I watched his eyes move over every detail: the overturned cup, the smashed glass, the smear of red. "This was not a kidnapping for ransom. A ransom note would have been left at the door."

"Unless it was," I said.

I had seen it a minute earlier, wedged under the teapot where the steam had loosened the wax. A small square of coarse paper, folded twice. I had not touched it. I held it up between two fingers now, and Kael took it from me.

He read it. His face did not change. But the paper crackled in his grip.

The old court. One hour. Bring the Keeper. Come alone, or the healer dies.

"Keeper," said Dorian, very quietly.

"It is what the mark is called," I said, before anyone could ask. My voice was steady. "It is the name Ezekiel used in the council. Whoever wrote this was in that hall."

"Or heard about it from someone who was."

"Which is half the citadel."

Kael folded the note and slid it inside his shirt. "The old court. Dorian, how long since it was used?"

"The Lower Court? Forty years. Not since the old king stopped holding public trials." The Beta rubbed the back of his neck. "It is a sunken amphitheatre under the south wall. There is one way in and one way out. If this is a trap—"

"It is a trap."

"Then we cannot—"

"We are going," said Kael. "All of us. But not alone."

"They said alone."

"They also said Bring the Keeper," Kael said, and for the first time that night his voice went sharp. "They want her. I will not hand her over like a parcel. We go together, in force, and we find out who they are."

"I am coming," I said.

"Obviously."

I blinked.

"I am not going to leave you behind where someone can snatch you in the dark," he said flatly. "You are going to stand behind me, you are going to do exactly as I say, and if I tell you to run, Elena—"

"I run."

"Good."

"But I want it understood that I am doing this for Mara."

"I do not care why you do it," said the king, "so long as you do it."

The Lower Court lay at the bottom of a long spiral stair cut into the living rock, so deep that the air turned cold and smelled of wet stone. We descended in silence, six of us, torches guttering in the draught. Rhys went first, then Dorian, then Kael, then me. Two silent Silver Guards brought up the rear.

At the foot of the stair, a pair of iron-banded doors stood open.

Beyond them lay a vast, round pit, sixty feet across, ringed by tiers of stone benches rising into darkness. At the centre, on a circular dais of black marble, someone had lit a ring of braziers. The flames cast tall, wavering shadows across the walls. And at the heart of the circle, tied to a wooden post, with her head hanging and her hair loose over her face, was Mara.

"Mara!" I gasped.

She lifted her head. Her lip was split. Her left eye was swelling shut. But she looked at me with the clear, desperate green gaze of a woman who had been trying to shout a warning for an hour, and she shook her head violently, mouth working against a gag.

"Trap," said Rhys, very softly.

Torches flared on every side.

Figures rose from the benches. Dozens of them. Men and women in grey wool cloaks, with their hoods pulled low and their faces shadowed. They stood without a sound. Some carried swords. Some carried crossbows. And all of them stared at us with the same blank, patient expression, like cattle waiting to be led.

"You came," said a voice.

A man stepped out from behind the post. He was tall and thin, dressed in a long grey coat, with his hands folded loosely in front of him. He had a pleasant, forgettable face, and he spoke softly, almost kindly.

"The king himself. I confess I had not dared to hope."

"Release the healer," said Kael.

"In a moment, Majesty." The man smiled. "First, I believe you have something that belongs to us. The Keeper. The girl who wears the mark."

Kael's hand drifted to his sword. "You are mistaken."

"I think not."

"She is my wife."

"Of course." The man bowed his head. "And she is also what we have been waiting for. It would be an act of great mercy to let her come quietly. No one else need be hurt."

"No," said Kael.

"I thought you might say that." The man sighed, and lifted one hand. "Then I am afraid we must do this the other way."

The grey cloaks moved.

I will say this about fighting alongside Kael Blackthorn: it was like standing next to a thunderstorm.

He did not wait for the enemy to reach him. He went straight through them. A sword flashed in his hand, a short, vicious arc that took a man's blade clean out of his fist. His shoulder crashed into another. He flowed through the first line of grey cloaks like a river through reeds, and Dorian and Rhys followed in his wake, cutting down anyone who tried to close the gap.

I stayed where I was told, in the angle of the doors, with a guard on either side of me and my back to the wall. I was no fighter. But I could see.

I saw it as the first men fell.

Every one of them was leashed.

It was so clear that I could not believe I had missed it. The torchlight illuminated their threads, a hundred glittering silver cables stretching up from their chests into the black air above the court. Flat. Bright. Unnaturally straight. They did not move as the men moved. They hung in the dark like a spider's web, and every strand of it ran to a single point somewhere high above the amphitheatre, in the shadows beyond the highest bench.

Someone is watching, I thought, with a cold shiver. Someone is pulling.

"Elena!" Kael's voice rang across the dais. "Get down!"

A crossbow bolt whistled past my ear and buried itself in the doorframe. I dropped to my knees. Another guard fell beside me with a grunt. And ahead, in the thick of the melee, I saw a young man in grey, no more than twenty, stumble backward from Dorian's blade with his hands raised.

He was crying.

He was crying, and his thread was stretched so tight that it trembled, and the expression on his face was not hatred, or ambition, or loyalty. It was panic. The panic of a child who had been told to hit someone, and did not know why.

"Please," he sobbed. "I do not want to. I do not want to—"

Dorian raised his sword.

"No!"

Dorian skidded to a halt, his sword quivering an inch from my face. His breath came in great ragged gasps. His brown eyes, wild with battle, flicked from the boy to me and back again.

"My lady," he said hoarsely. "Get out of the way."

"He is leashed. Look at him! He is crying! Somebody is forcing them all. If you kill him, you are killing a puppet!"

For one long breath, nobody moved.

The grey-cloaked man at the post let out a thin, startled laugh.

"How delightful," he said. "She truly can see."

I turned.

He was smiling. And in that smile, I understood that I had just done exactly what the note had been designed to make me do.

Bring the Keeper. Not to take me. To make me show them.

"Now," said the man, and his voice rang across the court like a bell. "Now we may begin."

Behind me, Mara screamed through her gag.

And in the stunned silence that followed, I heard the quiet, careful crunch of a boot on the stone beside me. Slow. Measured. Unhurried.

I did not need to look. I knew whose it was.

Kael was standing very close behind me, his sword at his side, his breath warm on the back of my neck. He had not been fighting for the last ten seconds. He had stopped. He was only listening.

And he had heard every word.