RAELYN AND HERsoldiers smile, the only people in the room not rocked by disbelief. They’repleasedby this chaos.
My body stiffens with shock, that single emotion shoving all others away so that all I am, all I feel, is action. I rear my knee up and hit Theron in the gut, shoving him off me, and dive at Raelyn. Angra isn’t here, and that lingering fact makes me dizzy, because if he’s causing this much pain and he isn’t even present, what’s happening to the rest of the world? I may not be able to fight him now, but Raelyn—Raelyn will die. Someone will suffer for this—
I leap for her, but the ballroom shifts, retracts, and before my feet connect with the stage, a wicked force sweeps my legs out from under me. I crash onto my elbows, pain reverberating up my already bruised arms from my earlier chase across the rooftops of Rintiero.
Dazed, my mind swirls with the wrongness of soldierslowering Noam’s body to the ground and taking Cordell’s conduit out of his belt. The wrongness of Mather and his Thaw trying to get to me but struggling against soldiers, of Conall and Nessa kneeling over Garrigan, Nessa cradling his head in her lap and mumbling a lullaby through the turmoil.
“Lay your head upon the snow,”she sobs, stumbling over the words, and the more she tries to force them out, the more my body wells with misery.
The force that yanked me to the ground pulls my attention, but I can’t get it to make sense with everything else. I only see that word pulsing through me,wrong,wrong,wrong, and the numbing, empty blanket of shock that clings to me, becomes me.
Theron tips his head and surveys me like I’m an animal he brought down in the hunt, some prized trophy he’s deciding how to skin. The expression itself isn’t what makes me tremble—it’s seeing that expression on Theron, who has never in all the time I’ve known him looked at me with such possession.
“My king!”
The voice precedes an object thrown into the air. Theron catches it, his eyes never leaving mine, his fingers tightening around the hilt of the dagger through the purple haze it emits. Cordell’s conduit—hisconduit.
He’s the king of Cordell now.
That thought alone would be enough to cripple me,but when another sight catches my eyes, I dissolve entirely. Every bit of fight, every last flicker of drive—it all evaporates as someone else emerges from the door beside the stage, stepping out of the shadows and into the light as if he’d been lingering there all along.
I could almost dismiss him as another vision or something in my own head, except for the way Raelyn looks at him too. And Jesse, and my Winterians, everyone staring with either joy or horror at the king of Spring.
“Convincing, King Theron,” Angra purrs, meeting his eyes. “Convincing indeed.”
I can’t look back up at Theron. For once, I choose to focus on Angra, to keep gaping at him rather than face the horrifying reality that Theron is just as possessed by Angra’s Decay as Raelyn. And now that Angraishis conduit too, the Decay is limitless. It can spread to anyone who doesn’t have pure conduit magic in them.
Without thought, I reach for the magic within me and will it into the Winterians in the room, filling them up in a protective burst of icy chill.
But Angra took Theron. Started working on him long ago, in Abril, when he used the Decay to worm into Theron’s mind and pinpoint his weaknesses. Those weaknesses are all Theron is now, has been, for months. I should have seen the change in him . . . I should have pressed him more about why he was so hurt, should havehelpedhim. . . .
But does he even know the Decay has him? Does herealize that’s what it is? He is the wielder of Cordell’s Royal Conduit now, but if the Decay is already planted deep in his mind and he doesn’t know to use the magic to block it or fight . . .
The magic is all about choice. It won’t save him unless he wants it to.
I scream again and try to claw my way up the stage to Angra. There’s nothing left inside of me but desperate, pure instinct, fingers curved in deadly hooks and teeth gnashing like a rabid wolf. I will stop this, I can still fix this, I can still—
Someone grabs me, fingers tight over the fabric of my shirt, and I wither, knowing whose hands they are, how very, abominably different this is to all the other times he held me. I catch a glimpse of Cordell’s dagger tucked into his belt and as Theron pulls me to my feet and Raelyn turns to Jesse, who watches all this happen with the empty eyes of a man in complete disbelief.
“Please stop this,” Jesse murmurs, his voice sad and brittle.
“If you want your soldiers to obey you,makethem.” Raelyn’s statement is a dare. “But you won’t, because you are weak. And we will not stand for weak rulers anymore.”
She signals one of her men to rip Ventralli’s conduit off Jesse’s belt. The soldier tosses the crown to Raelyn, who catches it. It’s powerless in her hands, though—this object-conduit only reacts to Jesse. But she doesn’t needobject-conduits anymore. She has Angra’s Decay.
“Such a pretty bauble,” she coos, lacing her fingers through its spires. “And so fragile too.”
I gape. She can’t mean what I think she does—Angra wouldn’t let herbreakit. Jesse would become like us, endlessly powerful.
Raelyn squares her shoulders. “Something awfully fantastic happens when a Royal Conduit is broken in defense of a kingdom, I’ve been told. But if it were to break byaccident. . .”
Jesse dips forward, watching his wife in numb terror.
She turns to him and steps closer. Before anyone can intervene, she cuffs him over the jaw with the crown. Jesse rears back, blood exploding around his face as the ballroom resonates with the delicate sound of two of the crown’s spires snapping off and hitting the floor.
It broke. His conduit broke.
The gray glow instantly snuffs out.
