Chapter 6: The King Who Should Be Dead (1)

Mira's POV

I took his hand.

I don't know why. Perhaps because there was no one else left in the world to take it. Perhaps because Lyra had already bowed, and some part of me trusted her more than I trusted myself.

Elias didn't run for the main doors. He crossed to the wall beneath his own portrait, pressed his palm flat against the carved wooden panel below the frame, and pushed.

The panel swung inward.

I had catalogued this hall a dozen times. I had measured its windows and recorded the condition of every frame. I had never known that door was there.

"After you," he said.

Behind us, torchlight flooded the bottom of the staircase. I ducked through the opening. Elias followed and drew the panel shut, and the dark closed over us like water.

We were in a narrow chamber, barely larger than a wardrobe. It smelled of dust and old wax. As my eyes adjusted, I made out shelves along the walls, crowded with small wooden boxes, and a single slit of moonlight high in the far wall.

"The old Seal Room," Elias murmured. "Where the kings of the north kept their signets. Before the council decided kings were an unnecessary expense."

"How do you know it's here?"

"I built it."

On the other side of the panel, boots spread across the Hall of Fallen Kings. Voices. Orders, curt and low. Someone kicked over a bench.

And then, very close, that same cold voice.

"She was here." A pause. "She's still close. I can smell the roses on her."

I pressed my hand over my mouth.

Elias leaned toward me until his lips were almost at my ear. "That man knows your name."

I nodded.

"That should not be possible. Everyone who stood in the Moon Hall tonight was touched by the bells. Everyone." His voice was barely a breath. "Unless he carries true silver."

"What's true silver?"

He didn't answer. He was staring at the panel as though he could see through it.

Footsteps. Then fading. The searchers moved toward the far doors, their voices thinning, the torchlight shrinking beneath the gap at the bottom of the panel until only a thread of it remained.

Then that thread went dark.

I let out a breath I felt I'd been holding for an hour.

"Is he gone?"

"No," Elias said quietly. "He sent the others away."

Three soft knocks sounded on the wooden panel.

I stopped breathing.

"Your Majesty." Kael Arden's voice, perfectly calm, from less than an arm's length away. "I'd prefer not to break this door. It's older than both of us, and I'm told you're sentimental about it."

Elias's hand went inside his coat. When it came out, it held a dagger, long and narrow, the blade black as a crow's wing.

"Captain Arden," he said. "I suggest you explain yourself."

"I will. Preferably on your side of the door. In about two minutes, Lady Thorne's personal guard is going to come back through this hall, and they won't knock."

Elias looked at me. I didn't know what he was asking. I didn't know anything anymore.

He slid the bolt.

The panel opened.

Moonlight from the hall fell across a tall figure, and Kael Arden stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him.

Up close, he was larger than he had seemed in the Moon Hall. His fur cloak was gone. His black uniform was torn at the shoulder, and there was blood on his collar. Not a great deal of it, but fresh, and not, I thought, his own.

He slid the iron bolt back into place without taking his eyes off Elias's dagger.

"Give me one reason," Elias said, "not to put this through your throat."

Kael glanced at the blade with mild interest.

"Because the men following me would appreciate the delay."

My stomach tightened. "What men?"

"Twelve. Possibly fourteen. I stopped counting when they started loosing crossbows at me." He finally looked at me, and his voice didn't change at all. "Lady Victoria Thorne has given her personal guard an order. You're not to be captured, Miss Veyne. You're to be killed on sight. Quietly."

The floor seemed to tilt.

Ronan's mother. Standing at the gallery railing, waiting for a signal.

"And you?" I heard myself ask. "What are your orders?"

"Mine come from the High King, not the Thornes. I'm to bring you to the capital alive." He tilted his head. "I mentioned that to Lady Thorne's captain. He disagreed. Strongly."

I looked at the blood on his collar.

"So you're helping me."

"I'm arresting you," Kael said. "I'd simply prefer you to be alive when I do it."

He said it so plainly that for a moment I couldn't tell whether he was joking.

He wasn't.

Elias moved between us. "And how exactly did you find this door, Captain? Even the Thornes don't know it exists."

Kael held up his right hand.

A small key dangled from a chain wrapped around his fingers. It was silver, no longer than my little finger, and even in the dark it seemed to hold a faint light of its own. Etched along its shaft was a symbol I had seen less than ten minutes ago, on the cover of the Lost Names Register.

No. Not quite the same. A crescent moon, yes. But pierced by a black star instead of a quill.

"Because I made this," Kael said. "And it pulls toward whatever the bells tried to erase."

Elias went very still.

"You made a true-silver key. You."

"I had a good teacher." Kael's mouth twisted. "He's dead now. Most of them are."

I stared at the key, at the faint light moving along its edge like a slow heartbeat.

"That's how you remember me," I said. "When no one else does."

Kael's grey eyes met mine. They were darker than Elias's, with flecks of silver that caught what little light there was.

"The key remembers what the bells erase. Names. Faces. Bonds. The spell can strip those things from a mind, but it can't touch them in true silver, and it can't touch the mind of whoever's holding it." He paused. "When the bells rang, I had it in my fist. I felt the spell go through the hall like a tide. And then I looked up and saw a woman in a silver dress, and I was the only person in the room who still knew who she was."

Something in his voice had shifted, just slightly. Then it was gone again.

"Why doesn't everyone carry one?" I asked.

"Because making one is forbidden. On pain of death."

"Forbidden by whom?"

His expression darkened.

"By the same people who rang those bells tonight."