Winter walked for ages. We passed through a dozen different buildings and wove our way toward the outskirts of the palace where the number of servants and guards thinned. He shared Elise’s round frame and dark curls, hair bound by a forest green ribbon trimmed in gold, and wore Erlend’s old colors hidden in the pleats and stitches of his clothes. He was easy to follow through the open walkways high above the forests where I’d lived as Twenty-Three. He finally stopped in a hallway populated by unlabeled, locked doors.
He slipped through a door and locked it behind him. Muffled voices echoed behind it.
I sighed. His faked illness, Seve’s note, and his life as Winter all pointed to some nasty plan brewing. Seve had been told to wait for Winter, but there’d been no notion of what the waiting was for. I darted back to the open-air path I’d followed and glanced over the edge. I’d not thought to bring lock picks to a party.
The ends of supports jutted out from the building, a broken pathway three stories above the swirling waters of the Caracol.
Best not fall then.
I leapt over the wall and onto a beam. Dimly lit windows shone in the darkness, and I stepped onto the next support. The remnants of an old bird’s nest crumbled under my feet, falling off the metal-enforced wood, and a handful of bird bones tumbled into the river. I focused on a far window as Winter’s voice leaked through the paper screen. A line of marching turtles decorated the bottom of the screen.
Turtles meant a Royal Physician—Isidora dal Abreu.
“Remarkable,” Winter said, Erlenian polished as Elise’s but the drawl all his own. His voice wasn’t rough or weak. “How did you notice? I can hardly tell when they speak, much less drink.”
“Noticing things you miss is my job.” Five’s familiar voice cut through any lingering doubts in my mind. Winter had bad intentions, and this was his endgame. “Celso and I used to do the same, and with him at her side, no one would ever think to poison her.”
I tilted my ear toward the window. Five was working for him, with him, and had to be talking about Isidora and Ruby. They did share drinks—they’d shared water tonight.
Hand-delivered by a blond, pale-eyed server.
A body hit the floor. Isidora let out a slurred cry, and Five laughed. I bit back the anger bubbling up my throat. Whatever he was plotting, she’d no place in it. She was a physician.
One of the good ones. One who’d never broken her oath and harmed someone even in the middle of war.
“Restrain yourself.” Winter crossed the room. “Your little revenge fantasy has already forced me to move well ahead of schedule. We need to make this believable.”
“Fantasy?” Five’s voice pitched, and metal clattered against metal. “I’ve already done this once. You messed up your end. That’s your problem.”
I curled my fingers around the window’s edge and pulled myself up. Memories and finger bones weren’t enough for Five. He had to have more, had to have revenge for a mage who didn’t deserve it. But Rodolfo da Abreu was dead, and Isidora had nothing to do with her brother’s actions. Why take it out on her?
“Lay her here.” Winter picked something up from the floor and snapped a piece of cloth. “Box there—opened.”
Cloth whispered over the stones, heels smacking wood. Five’s familiar quiet steps drew closer to me. The memory of Amethyst’s training still in my muscles, I pulled myself up by my fingers and peeked under the window screen.
Five stood over the prone Isidora dal Abreu. He was dressed as a server, but his tray had been traded for a sword. The room was plain and efficient, a writing desk in one corner and the walls lined with bookshelves. Isidora’s orange blossom water rested on the desk. Ruby’s limp body lay next to it.
He groaned. Five was on him in a heartbeat, crushing Ruby’s fingers under his heel.
“Nothing to protest yet.” Five leaned over him. “Haven’t even started.”
Shit.
I’d missed it. The runes lining his eyes, the shared freckles and eyes, the closeness, the anger at my outburst when he’d changed my disqualification to a probation. Ruby had lost everything.
His life as Rodolfo da Abreu.
He was the perfect Ruby—unquestionably loyal to Our Queen, prepared to do anything for her, and undoubtedly had been living locked away on family lands, keeping his entire existence a lonely secret. Being Ruby gave him back his life, gave him back a purpose.
And meant Five had every reason to want him dead.
Winter rolled his eyes at Five and sighed. I couldn’t think of him as Elise’s father any longer, not if this would end with his blood on my hands. I’d expected something suspicious but not this. Not tonight. “No broken bones. Shadows only take the flesh.”
Five turned, eyes bright and fingers twitching. “I know.”
“Then stop.” Winter picked up the water glass and turned toward my window. “We need this set before Nicolas arrives.”
That was it then. The last folks who knew how to create the shadows were to be killed as though they’d lost control of one they’d made. If the people thought Our Queen was a fraud who’d never banished magic and shadows in the first place, and she was making shadows on top of that, they’d tear Igna down before she could even mount a defense. Weylin and his lords could swoop in and take over without a fuss.
I ducked and flattened myself against the wall. Winter opened the window screen, tossed the water out, and took a deep breath of the breeze. I slid my hands over my head slow as I could. The orange slices splashed into the water far beneath us.
“You said I could do it!” Five’s voice pitched, wilder and more frightening than I’d ever heard it, all his careful cleverness gone. Metal clattered against stone—Ruby’s mask hitting the ground. Hard. “I suffered through days of your ‘stay low and stay alive’ shit with those fools you foisted on me, and I’m not walking out of here without his head and hands.”
Winter whipped around, window screen falling. I jammed one finger in the way before it could latch shut.
Five was replaying his brother’s death. When Ruby had been Rodolfo, he’d gifted the Erlend mages with a taste of their own medicine by flaying them like the shadows flayed their victims, and now Five would return the favor.
Two on one weren’t the worst odds, but I had to look after Isidora and Ruby. And Five wasn’t well.
The hitch in his voice, I knew too well. Ruby would not leave alive so long as Five still breathed.
“You’ll leave when I say you leave and with what I say you can have.” Winter moved away from the window. “He’ll be dead either way.”
“Shadows flayed the living.” Five grinned, pulling off his coat and revealing the paring knives strapped to his side. He pulled back his sword. “Three thrashed, but I’m going to pin you.”