Rhy’s brow furrowed. Not the answer he’d expected. Alucard pressed on.
“You are the face for their ills. You are power and they have none. You have wealth and they are wanting. It is not Rhy Maresh those people hate. It is the throne itself.”
A long pause, and then, “Would you wear the crown?”
Alucard laughed. Not a merry sound, but pointed, withering. “Not for all the gold in Arnes.”
“It would look good on you.”
“Oh, I have no doubt of that.”
“Not as good as it looks on me, of course,” murmured Rhy sleepily.
“Of course.”
Rhy said nothing after that. His breathing slowed, the only motion now the pulse of silver, rising and falling with the current of his heart. Alucard lay beside him until he was sure the king was asleep.
And then, carefully, he rose, and tied his robe, and went to find the queen.
VI
Alucard considered himself a man with very few fears.
He was not afraid of death, having faced it several times. He was not afraid of pain, or darkness, spiders, or the open sea. But he maintained a healthy discomfort for the idea of being buried alive, and that was how it felt, descending into the Queen’s Hall. Lamps burned on the walls, and spellwork caused their light to carry and meet, creating an unbroken ribbon of pale gold, but every downward step carried him farther from the surface. His footsteps echoed on the wide stone stairs, the sound like a whisper dropped down a well.
The palace was a dazzling spectacle, suspended on a bridge over the river Isle. But there was no magic to the feat. The bulk of its weight was held aloft by four large pillars, sunk into the river floor. Two of those pillars were solid stone, but the other two were hollow. One contained the royal prisons, cells that had once held Cora Taskon, one of the Veskan heirs who’d tried to end the Maresh line, and even once, briefly, Kell Maresh, when the old king jailed him in a fit of pique （Alucard couldn’t blame him）。
The other hollow pillar had been given to the queen as a wedding present.
There was a rumor, in some of the London pubs, that the queen of Arnes was in fact a prisoner, held in the sunken chamber against her will. But Nadiya Loreni was no one’s prisoner, and while she did spend most of her nights entombed in the bowels of the soner rast, it was entirely by choice. She had been given splendid rooms in the royal wing—a luxurious bed she rarely slept in, a glittering lounge in which she never entertained—but the various servants and guards had taken to calling this her private chamber.
The hall bore no resemblance to the prisons in the other pillar, nor did it retain any trace of its own past, as a hidden training ground for the Antari prince.
Now it was a series of interconnected chambers, each as wide and open as the great halls above, and filled with just as much treasure. It was an impressive feat, all the size and grandeur of a royal estate, if that estate were windowless and housed at the bottom of the Isle.
Alucard hummed softly as he reached the bottom of the stairs, to let the queen know he was coming. She had scolded him once for sneaking up on her in the middle of a half-formed spell, warned him that if her hands had been less steady, she might have brought the entire palace down on their heads. To this day, he wasn’t sure if she’d been joking.
He made a lazy circle around the chamber. She’d been busy. She was always busy.
There were a dozen surfaces, and every one of them was covered in something; the beginnings of a new device, or the remains of an old one. On one table he even saw a pistol—a weapon he’d recognized only because of Lila Bard’s devotion. Its chamber was open, unloaded, but gilded spellwork was now laced along the barrel. Alucard left it, as he left everything in Nadiya’s workshop, untouched.
In the next room he found her, head bowed over a table, a glass of wine at her elbow and her crown cast off, the golden circlet hanging from a nearby lamp as if it were a tunic, shed in the midst of passion. She was studying her work as if it were a Rasch board in the final motions of the game. The only movement was a ribbon of fire that circled around her fingers, as thin and precise as a healer’s blade.
Her dark hair hung loose, and ended just above her shoulders. She’d come to court with a mane of it, cascading down her back, the kind of locks that men loved and women envied, and her first act as queen had been to hack it off. People gossiped, of course （not that it stopped them from trimming theirs to match）。 The same ones who shouted that she was a prisoner said that Rhy had cut it in a fit of pique, because he was jealous of her beauty. Others claimed he’d done it because he wanted her and Alucard to be a matching set.