Page 33 of The Moon Blessed King
‘Elician,’ Cat calls. ‘Stop.‘ Elician’s fingers twitch. His head lists in Cat’s direction. ‘That’s everyone. I don’t sense anyone else who is dead.’
‘Oh.’ Elician breathes in time with the rest of them. He blinks, as if coming back to himself at long last. ‘All right.’ Then he pitches off his horse into Lio’s outstretched arms. Lio barely braces the fall, guiding Elician down to the ground as he struggles with the weight. Fen reaches towards them both. Her hand rests against her brother’s cheek. He is fine. Unconscious and exhausted but fine. Whole. Lio defended him well. Not a single blade or attack reached Elician in all the time he sat unmoving at the centre of the melee.
Cat stands with Marina’s help.
It’s over, Fen realizes.
‘Did you know he could do that?’ Rodans asks at Fen’s side.
‘No,’ Fen replies. She hadn’t known anyone could do that.
Noise erupts from the city.
Cheers.
It echoes over the city walls and surrounds all of them with a sound of joy and bewildered disbelief. Fen closes her eyes and feels the world breathe. Everyone within riding distance of Altas is alive.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Elician
This is a dream.
There are three children standing outside King Aliamon’s solar. Elician sees them, but he is not himself. He is a formless, shapeless thing, observing only from afar. He knows this is a dream, but it is also a memory. He has been here before. Been there, at that wall, before.
The boy he once was, fourteen, gangly, shy, stands at the centre. Adalei, newly eighteen, freshly returned from Kreuzfurt, is flush with health for the first time in her life. There is a lovely rosy red to her cheeks. Her gown is prudent yet magnificent. Her skin flourishes in the summer sun. A headscarf, held in place by a delicate band across her brow, hides her lack of hair but does nothing to diminish her grace and charm. Lio keeps looking at her, stunned stupid by her appearance. Already in love.
They stand with their backs to the wall, Adalei with her hands folded in front of her, Elician with his hands at his sides, Lio trying desperately to copy them both. He is farther down the line, less likely to overhear the royal party in the solar.
But Elician and Adalei hear everything. Every shouted word. Every furious riposte.
‘Elician isineligibleto ascend!’ Anslian yells. ‘He cannot take the throne!’
Aliamon roars, ‘The law is unclear—’
‘Thenchangethe law and make it clear! Change it and free that boy from what you’re doing to him.You’reKing, brother, not I. And that isyourson. Damn your reputation and tradition. If you are so insistent on putting him on the throne then change the law yourself!’
‘That law has been in place for a thousand years.’
‘And you are wilfully circumventing it by forcing your son to suit its whim. He isineligible.’
‘And you say this to promote your daughter, do you not?’
The boy Elician once was, the child listening to his family argue, glances up at his cousin. She does not look at him. She stares straight ahead, unmoving, unblinking.
‘She is the only valid heir we have,’ Anslian says.
‘Yes, because you refuse to remarry.’
‘You cannot force me to take another wife. And you are perfectly capable of doing the same.’
‘Glaika has made it clear they will cease supplying us with trade should I set Calissia aside. The responsibility to maintain our bloodline fell to you and you failed it.’
‘Failed? Adalei is standing just outside, alive and well!’
‘Until she catches a cold, or pricks her finger, or does any number of foolish things that send her back to death’s door. Truly, do you imagine that girl capable of carrying a child, let alone surviving the birth? You want to rest our line on a broken thing too ill to stand upright, let alone lead a country? No. I will not contemplate such an heir.’
Adalei takes the blow without remark. Elician cannot. ‘I’m sorry,’ the boy whispers. ‘He doesn’t mean it.’ But he does. They both know he does.
