It Was Exhaustion

CHAPTER 10

RHAELEN'S POV

Maelora delivered her report at midmorning, standing on the other side of my desk with her leather satchel pressed against her chest.

"The girl carries no poison," she said. "There is no silver on her body, no herbs hidden in her clothes, and nothing in her blood that should not be there. By every sign I can read, she is harmless."

"By every sign you can read," I repeated.

"That is the most I can tell you, Rhaelen."

She did not meet my eyes. In all the years she had served me, Maelora had never looked away while giving a report, and now she stared at a spot somewhere over my shoulder. She bowed and left the study before I could dismiss her, which was something else she had never done.

I was still frowning at the closed door when Orren walked in with a mud-stained soldier, who dropped to one knee on the stone floor. "A message from the southern border post, Your Majesty."

"Speak."

"A band of rogues attacked the post at dawn. The watchtower is holding, but they have the garrison pinned inside, and the captain does not know how long the gate will last." The soldier lowered his head. "One of our men is already dead."

I stood up so quickly that my chair scraped against the floor. It was the same border where I had killed the rogues on the morning of the wedding, and I had not expected them to return so soon.

"Prepare sixty riders," I told Orren. "We leave within the hour."

Varek was waiting at the foot of the keep steps when I came down with my sword at my side. He had already put on his green cloak, and a groom was holding the reins of his horse.

"Cousin, let me ride with you," he said. "My men are fresh, and another blade will not hurt."

"No."

"At least let me guard the fortress while you are away."

"The fortress has its own guards." I mounted my horse, and I did not look at him again. If the curse took me at the border, I did not want a man I had not seen in four years standing close enough to watch it happen.

We rode south at a hard pace, with the cold wind cutting across our faces and the pine forests rushing past on either side of the road. I had not taken a single dose of medicine since the night of the poisoning. Maelora refused to brew another batch until she knew who had entered her laboratory, and I had agreed, because I would not swallow anything again that I had not seen made.

By the time we crossed the first river ford, the ache behind my eyes had returned. By the second, it had become a hammer.

I told myself that it was only the last of the silver working its way out of my blood. I did not allow myself to think of anything else.

The watchtower stood at the mouth of a narrow pass, a squat gray building of stone with a single wooden gate and a slope of dead pines rising behind it. At least thirty rogues were pressed against the walls, shouting and swinging iron bars against the gate. Arrows flew from the upper windows, and two bodies lay in the snow near the base of the tower.

"Ride down the left slope," I ordered Orren. "Cut off the road behind them. I will take the gate."

I drew my sword and led the charge.

For a while, I fought as I always did. The first rogue went down under my blade before he even saw me coming, and the second managed to raise his bar before I opened his chest. My warriors poured down the slope behind me, and the snow turned red beneath our boots.

Then the haze came.

It started at the edges of my sight, a dark, creeping fog that swallowed the pines and the gray sky until I could see only the shapes in front of me. The pounding in my head grew so loud that I could not hear my own breathing. Somewhere behind the wall in my mind, something enormous turned over and woke.

A man stepped in front of me with a blade in his hand. His face was the face of the assassin from the southern border, the one I had left for dead in the snow years ago. I swung my sword.

I did not hear him cry out. I did not see his face change back into the face of my own sergeant. I only felt the blade strike, and then another man was in front of me, and another, and every one of them was an enemy that needed to die.

"Rhaelen!"

A voice came from somewhere very far away, and I turned toward it with my sword raised. A hand caught my wrist. I wrapped my other hand around a throat and lifted its owner off the ground.

"Rhaelen, it is Orren," the voice choked out. "Look at me. It is Orren."

Something hard struck the back of my head. The world went black.

I woke on a narrow cot inside the watchtower, with the smell of smoke and blood in my nose and a single candle burning on a wooden table. My hands were stained red to the wrists. None of it was mine.

Orren sat in a chair beside the cot with a bandage wrapped around his left arm and a purple bruise spreading along his neck. His eyes were tired, and he did not smile when I opened mine.

"How many?" I asked. My voice sounded like gravel.

"Every rogue is dead," Orren said. "Seven of our men are wounded. One of them will lose his arm. Two of the wounded were struck by you."

I stared at my hands for a long time.

I had hurt men before in the madness, more times than I could count. But I had ridden into that battle with sixty warriors who trusted me to lead them, and I had cut down my own sergeant because I could not tell him apart from an enemy.

"You hit me," I said at last.

"With the hilt of my sword, and it was the only thing that worked." Orren leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "Rhaelen, I have fought beside you through every battle since you took the throne. I have never once seen anything stop the madness before the blood was spilled."

"What are you trying to say?"

"Two nights ago, in your study, you had your hand around a man's throat. A servant girl took your hand, and your eyes cleared." His voice dropped lower. "Maelora's medicine did not do that. I could not do that. She did it in the space of a few breaths."

I turned my face away. "She may have been sent to do exactly that."

"Then why did she warn you about the silver?"

It was the same question he had asked me in the study, and I still had no answer for it. "I will not hang the safety of this kingdom on a girl whom I do not know," I said coldly. "I have never relied on anyone, Orren, and I will not begin with someone who may have been sent by the same people who poisoned my medicine."

"Then do not rely on her. Find out what she is."

"No."

"Rhaelen..."

"I said no." I pushed myself up from the cot, ignoring the pain that shot through my skull. "Leave me."

He stood slowly and left without another word. The door closed behind him, and the candle flickered in the draft.

I did not sleep that night. The pain behind my eyes only grew worse as the hours passed, and by the time the first gray light crept through the narrow window, I felt as if someone had driven a nail through each of my temples. My men kept a careful distance from me when we mounted our horses at dawn. Nobody spoke, and nobody met my eyes.

We reached the fortress in the middle of the morning. The cold wind had stopped, and the clouds hung low and heavy over the mountains. I rode through the gate with my jaw clenched and my hands tight around the reins, and I turned toward the eastern courtyard because it was the nearest way to the stables.

Halfway across the stones, the pounding in my head eased.

It did not stop all at once, the way it had in the corridor with Varek. It loosened slowly, as if a tight cord inside my skull were being unwound one thread at a time, and by the time I reached the foot of the eastern tower, I could breathe without it hurting.

I pulled my horse to a stop and stared up at the narrow window of the chamber on the lower floor, the one with two guards at its door.

It was exhaustion, I told myself. I had not slept, and I had lost a great deal of blood in the last two days. A tired man's body could do strange things.

Orren drew up beside me. He glanced at the window, and then at my face, and he said nothing.

"Orren."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"This afternoon, I will be in the war room reading the reports from the border." I kept my eyes on the tower. "Have Lady Isolde brought there and place her at the far end of the room. She is not to speak, and she is not to leave until I say so."

"And if it was only exhaustion?"

"Then she will have wasted an afternoon." I turned my horse toward the stables. "And if it was not, then I will know exactly what she wants from me."

Orren bowed, but he did not look convinced. I rode on, and I did not look at my hands again until I reached the stable door.

They were completely steady. They had been steady since the moment I crossed the eastern courtyard, and I had not told him.