Osian froze in shock.
Wystan’s gaze finally widened as the bindweed curled around his hand. He looked at his brother. ‘Help m—’
Forked leaves tumbled from his mouth, coiling around his neck.
‘Wystan!’
The bindweed crawled out through the holes between his buttons. His clothes bled dark. It twined around his wrists, his head, the tops of his boots. Sprouting flowers whilst his eyes still saw. Still reflected.
Osian lunged, tore at the vines encasing his brother’s chest. But they only replaced themselves faster. Long strands thickened and resisted. Wystan’s face was disappearing, eyes wide and weeping, fixed on Osian. Bleeding. Beseeching. Begging—
Aldreda’s sword impaled his heart.
Then she stepped out and cleaved his head from his shoulders, in the form she had mastered when she was nine.
The once-human congealment of bindweed stilled. Wystan’s body crumpled in the aisle of the Great Hall, between his two siblings.
Aldreda’s cry of frustrated fury and grief was the first sound to restart Meilyr’s locked lungs.
Osian stood before Wystan’s body, sword loose in his fingers, his pain an ache in Meilyr’s blood.
‘Gods protect us.’ One of the nobles who had spoken out before. ‘Prince Wystan…’
‘Did anyone see?’ someone shouted. ‘Did anyone see who did it?’
‘We all saw!’ Another turned on Meilyr. ‘The prince was moving to attack the prince consort! It’s him, it has to be!’
‘Silence.’ Aldreda’s voice was cold, detached steel. ‘If he is the sorcerer, do you truly believe him foolish enough to choose then to strike? With all our eyes upon him?’ But her youngest brother lay dead at her feet, and she had dealt the blow. She signalled her knights. ‘Take him to the Eagle Tower, under guard. If he resists, kill him.’
There was continued bristling, but it stayed subdued beneath the weight of the Heir Apparent’s rage.
Meilyr wanted to grab Osian and run from the hall and never look back. He wanted to be gone from this, from this horror.
Demelza’s hand shook once on his wrist. She had stopped him moving between Osian and Wystan’s knife. As she opened her fingers, she took him under the elbow, face wet with silent weeping. He held her arms as she held his, as Aldreda’s crownsblood marched them both from the hall.
‘Cover the body,’ Aldreda said. ‘No one else leaves until I say so. Osian, with me. Now.’
The nine-sided tower room was more suffocating with Osian and Aldreda side by side. With their father’s words thick in the air, heavier than the dust and the cloy of refracting water, the near-blinding striations from the off-golds of the rained-upon windows.
‘My King,’ Osian replied, Aldreda’s shock silent beside him. ‘You cannot—’
The nature of the pool changed, and with a rush King Oswald’s watery visage rose.
His children dropped to a knee, heads bowed.
The king never showed himself. But if there were ever a time…
‘Ican,’ the king said. His water-self mirrored the bitterness in his expression, the way he stood, formidable even with his long-injured knee. His crown was framed with the rest in constant-running, constant-reforging water. ‘I can, and you should have, long before this. I gave you the Denelands to regain control, to bring the Marches to heel. You have disappointed me – failed me. Your methods would have us all dead, one after the other.’
‘My King,’ Osian tried again. ‘The sorcerer must be someone at court. Please, if you allow us—’
‘I will not allow more failure. More death.’ The water shivered, concealing something. Perhaps grief, or merely disappointment. ‘You have been blinded, my son. How easy it has been to fool your soft heart from your own bed.’
‘Father—’
‘I should have seen it. You are truly too much like her, gods protect her. Yet I understood your weakness, your hope. And now my youngest heir is dead. You are to blame, Osian. For Wystan, and for all that comes now. Do not forget that.’
‘Father – My King. Meilyr has nothing to do with—’