CHAPTER THREE: THE BACKLASH (1)

KAELEN

The blade that wasn’t mine hit me in the ribs at two in the morning.

That was the precise, humiliating part. I was sitting at my desk, three hundred years old, trying to read a report about border tariffs, when a hot line of pain seared across my left side — sudden, shallow, human — and I doubled over my own inkwell like a first-year soldier who’d forgotten to duck.

The ink spilled. The report ruined. My dignity in tatters.

“Your Majesty?” Ian was at my side in an instant, armor clanking, hand already on his sword, the very picture of a man who’d been waiting for this exact moment his whole career. “You’re hurt. Allow me. One stroke. Whoever did it —”

“Nobody did it to me.” I gasped it out, gripping the edge of the desk. The pain was fading already, receding the way it had come — sharp, then distant, then nothing, leaving behind only the echo of a heartbeat that wasn’t my own, hammering fast and terrified. “It’s not mine. It’s—”

And then I knew.

Because the bond didn’t lie. It had never lied, not since she’d walked through my doors and my soul had stood up and screamed. I could feel her across the distance of the palace — a flare of light-pride, a spike of fear, the warm wet shock of a wound I had not taken. She was hurt. She was bleeding. Right now.

I was on my feet before the thought finished.

“Where is she?” I said. “Where is the princess right now, Ian.”

Ian’s face did something complicated. “Her suite, Your Majesty. Under ward. The guards—”

“She’s not in her suite.” I was already moving, cloak in hand, the leftover pain throbbing a ghost in my side. “She’s bleeding. Somewhere in this palace, my prisoner has a knife wound and a heartbeat that’s currently trying to sync with mine from three floors away. Find her.”

I told myself I was moving because a dead princess was a useless princess. I told myself a great many things, striding through the shadowed halls of my own palace, and Ian — bless his brick wall of a soul — did not say a word about the fact that his king had just come unglued over a girl who had spent half a day trying to poison him.

The truth, which I did not say aloud, was colder. I had three hundred years of dead in my wake. Kings I’d beheaded. Courts I’d burned. I had watched assassins die on my doorstep a hundred times and felt nothing but the boredom of a job well done. But the idea that a blade somewhere in my own house was currently seeking the throat of the only living thing the bond had ever given me to feel — that idea sat in my chest like a shard of ice, and I did not care for it.

EIRA

So. Escape plan. Reviewing.

Phase one: locate the weakest ward in my suite. Phase two: be the weakest thing it’d ever met. Phase three: vanish into the Shadow Court’s darker corners, find a border, find the Light Court, explain to the High Priestess that the assignment had developed complications, like a king who drank my wine and a soul that kept trying to do the cha-cha with his.

Phase two went wrong almost immediately.

I was out the window — wards briefly fooled by a light-charm I’d taped to the sill like a girl doing a science fair project — and three stories down, landingsilent, when the dark in front of me moved.

There were three of them. Light Court livery under traveler’s cloaks. Blades that glowed the cold gold of our own priesthood. They moved the way Light assassins move — fast, bright, no shadows to hide in, the kind of fighters who’d been trained to fear the dark and decided to drown it.

And they were not looking at me.

That was the detail that kept me alive. They were looking at the corridor behind me — the corridor that led to the king’s private wing. They’d come for him. I’d stumbled, in my little cat burglar costume, directly into the middle of an assassination squad that was on its way to kill the man I’d come here to kill.

The universe had a sense of humor. I hated it.

“She’s early,” one of them muttered. “The Vail girl wasn’t supposed to be out.”

“Kill her anyway,” another said. “Silence orders. No witnesses.”

The first blade came for my throat. I met it with the wrist-dagger I’d taped to my forearm — improvising, always improvising — and the shock of it ran up my arm. They were good. Light Court good. Our best. The kind of fighters the High Priestess kept in her back pocket for jobs she couldn’t afford to confess to.

We fought in the dark. I took a cut across the ribs on my second parry — shallow, burning, stupid — and as I grunted, the strangest thing happened: through the bond, I felt someone gasp, far away, deep in the palace, as if my knife wound had just arrived as a delivery to someone else’s door.

Distracted. That was my mistake. A third blade glanced off my shoulder. I went down against the wall, light flickering, blood hot along my side, and for one furious, terrified second I thought: Of course I die in the monster’s hallway to monsters. Six years of planning and the Light Court itself shoots me in the back of my own hit.