Seven Ways to Kill a King by Melissa Wright

Author:Melissa Wright [Wright, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melissa Wright

Chapter 18

Cass should have never told Miri how he felt. It was a weakness, one that would have had him thrown out of the guard. He was bloodsworn to the queen—a queen who was dead at the sorcerers’ hands.

He pressed his heels into his horse’s flanks as they rode through the forest, kicking the beast faster between a break in the trees. They’d barely escaped Kirkwall with their lives, and until he had Miri safely inside the boundaries of Ironwood, he would not count her out of harm’s way.

Miri’s confession regarding her mother made his duty infinitely more complicated, and he wished he’d had time to leave a message for Terric. Someone on the inside, close enough to have taken her blood, had betrayed their queen. He couldn’t imagine how the queensguard would manage the sorcerers if they held a queen’s blood—not that they’d been able to conquer them yet—or how to discover who had betrayed the queen. Blood magic was not a subject Cass had studied. No one aside from the sorcerers had been allowed knowledge of the dark arts, by order of the oldest laws.

He could only hope they didn’t have Miri’s blood and that it was merely the presence of the queen’s inside of her—the connection of mother and daughter—or the nearness of Miri’s exposure to that dark magic while soaked in her mother’s blood that had caused her reaction to the sorcerer’s presence in Pirn. She had nearly frozen, her eyes had gone misty and far away, and only distance from the sorcerer had made her recover.

If Miri could not function in proximity to a sorcerer, she would not have a single chance of setting foot near their home at Stormskeep. There, sorcerers were everywhere. Like the hungry wolves of Blackstone’s forests.

For Miri’s part, she’d been quiet, barely a word spoken since the flood of memories she’d shared at the inn. Cass understood why she’d held it so near. He understood, too, that what drove her was not bloodlust or the need for revenge. It was the vow—a promise made.

Miri was no fool. She knew the lives she risked outside of even her own. The sorcerers were beholden to the kings because magic required blood—life. Had the sacrifices been made on the streets, they would have been called murders, but under the protection of the crown, the killings were deemed necessity in their duty to the throne and to law.

Their relationship to the queen was governed by much older laws, bindings that protected the realm. The Lion Queen had been more than sparing in her use of the sorcerers, and because of it, they had turned on her. They had yearned to be set free, and with the lords who desired the throne, they found their way. That left the queensguard figuring out which of those kings held the blood of the Lion Queen, which had control of the sorcerers in a way the others did not.

Blood was power, and by the way Miri reacted to the sorcerers, they clearly held at least some power over her.

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