Of Whispers and Daggers ✓ [TLRQ #2]

Chapter 29 - Aster

The guillotine slams into his neck, and Jacin's severed head tumbles neatly into the low brass dish in front of the device. Blood sprays the beams and pools in the dish. The head fell at just the wrong angle, and now his wide, blank eyes stare in soulless accusation at the alcove my siblings and I sit in. Bile rises in my throat, and I tear my eyes away to gaze straight ahead.

I hate this.

I hate this war. I hate Jacin for getting himself killed. I hate the Ladies for having no regard for human life. I hate the Voices of the Book for taking Agraund instead of me, I hate politics for killing the sister I once had, I hate whatever traitor stole my mother's life, and I hate myself for failing to stop any of it.

Beside me, the Queen stands, giving some speech about everyone playing their part to stop the Kadranians and how we have to work together to defeat them.

Sick of the hypocrisy, sick of death, sick of playing by everyone else's rules when they don't, I scoff and push out of my seat. I leave, the door slamming behind me.

I walk through the hall, slowly picking up speed until I'm running, rushing down the empty corridors. The castle, empty and dead.

I know this building better than anyone else. This castle is my home, these halls my childhood. I slide around a corner, the one I cracked my head on when I was seven. I take the stairs two at a time, up to the second floor. The baking tray I borrowed to slide down these when I was six was not big enough. My fingers brush the curve in the stairs where I was finally thrown off the tray. I sprint past hall tables. The bejeweled egg the Bedeveirians brought my Mother when I was twelve glitters in the glow crystal light.

I skid to a stop in the dead-end hall Jeanna once trapped me in when I didn't want to go to my language tutor. The tapestry at the end beckons to me, and my fingers brush it. Heart still thrumming in my throat, I reach down and push a stone at the base of the wall. It groans, and I slip behind the cloth into an old, familiar passage. I press a stone inside the hall, and the door creaks shut once more. Dusting cobwebs from my face, I sink into the corner of the pitch-black corridor.

This is my home. This is my home. The Ladies may live here, and Selenia may rule here, but the stones of this castle raised me. Yet somehow the snakes and savages have twisted this place into a prison.

I had a family. It was tense and distant, but it was family. Now I have a sister I don't know and a brother who only agrees with me when he has to. Everyone else is dead.

I had a role in this castle. It was tenuous and strained, but I was doing what I was supposed to. Now the Ladies stole any credibility I might have, threw it away with my reputation, sullying it with lies of romance and manipulation.

I had a voice. Now my people are going to walk into a slaughter, and there's nothing I can do about it. Letting myself be in a position where my voice could be taken from me is just as much my fault as if I had simply stayed silent.