Someone with Cyngaleg blood had killed Lord Leighton. Someone with…
His heart beat too fast. His chest hurt, and he shivered violently.
They would think he had done it.
He tried to grasp at the sounds beyond the tent, beyond the camp. The sensation of the wind and the forest. But the trees were knotted with darkness and blood, echoing with voices long dead.
He curled into himself and trembled, and trembled, and trembled.
‘Osian,’ Aldreda began, in the hurriedly clawed privacy of her tent.
‘He is not involved.’
‘Osian.’
‘He isnotinvolved.’
There was no other reason she had separated him to talk. The main tent had clamoured with accusations from nobility, from the Marches in particular, the sound still ringing in his ears. They had – together – halted the call for Meilyr’s immediate arrest, but that would not last.
‘Is that your heart telling you,’ Aldreda asked, ‘or do you have proof?’
‘I saw his eyes, his fear. He is not involved.’
She sighed, allowing herself to show a fraction of weakness. ‘I almost wish you were wrong. I sided with you in there, but they want blood, and this doesn’t look good. You pluck a nobody from the valleys and suddenly a Marcher Lord is murdered by gods-forsaken Denelander sorcery?’
‘Then we find the culprit.’
‘I gods damn hope so, and fast.’
They stood brimming with shared frustration, shared horror.
‘He will have to be investigated,’ his sister said. ‘You know that.’
Osian squared his shoulders. ‘For tonight, I will take my knights and—’
‘Absolutely not. I’m not having you careening around the forest in the dead of night with – this happening. I forbid it.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Blasted why? Because I said so, and—’ She bit it back. Regrouped. ‘Because we don’t know what this is, Osian. We don’t know how they did this, and we need to be ready here, to ride back to Eascild when the knights return with nothing.’
‘It is not like you to fall back.’
‘I’m notfalling back. I want to tear whoever has done this apart with the hooves of my horse and my bare hands. But this is sorcery, and the sorcerer will certainly be long gone, assuming… well. I’ll stay the chaos here and try to buy you some time.’ Weariness. Resolution. ‘Go be with him. Save the rest for morning, and be ready.’
It was a sorry way to leave things. Even days ago, he would have fought more to be out there amongst the trees with his knights and the crownsworn. He had never been one to assign them duties he would not take up himself, and sending them to search for a sorcerer who had already killed once that day was not something he wished to abandon them to.
But there was an urgency tugging at his flesh, pulling him to a singular fixed point. He could no sooner deny it than he could deny breathing.
He needed to get to Meilyr.
As he left the tent, he almost stepped into Pedr. ‘Forgive me, Majesty,’ the knight said urgently, quietly, glancing inside at Aldreda. ‘I believe His Highness may be going into shock.’
It was very dark when a cool hand brushed across Meilyr’s forehead.
‘You have a fever.’
Osian.