2024-09-09 05:35:46
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Chapter 769
Alexander stepped back behind Felicia.He did it the way the old Alexander would have done it — shoulders up, chin down, one hand bunched in the back of her coat like a child in a crowd.She felt the tug and spread her arms without thinking, a nineteen-year-old woman in a travelling coat trying to hide a grown man from twenty rifles.The Second Queen watched them and almost laughed.Behind Felicia's shoulder, Alexander's lips barely moved....The voice did not come from him.It came from everywhere at once, and from an inch inside every ear in the front of that hall — the Queen's, and each of the twenty men in armour — low and dry and very old."I warned this house not to let anyone enter."Twenty visors turned at the same moment."And since you have come anyway," the voice said, "you can die here."...The line of knights broke step.Not much. Half a pace. But these were palace men, picked and drilled, and half a pace from palace men is the same as a scream from anybody else."What
Chapter 768
Alex kept moving."It was always a choice," he said. "Be killed by him, or be killed by me. You chose him. You chose to hit me. So this is your payment.""Please. Please don't. I'm sorry—"The man turned to run. Alex took both his arms before he made the second step.And Alex kept moving.Every one of them had been part of it. The side that killed his mother. The people who had treated him like nothing for fourteen years. This was the bill for all of it."Think of it as karma," Alex said, and moved on....That night is the one nobody in that province will ever write down.Thirteen people in that castle lost both arms at the shoulder inside twenty minutes. Every one of them was alive when it happened. Every one stayed conscious for a few minutes after, screaming, shouting, trying to survive. But a human being with both arms gone does not last long. The veins pump the blood straight out.They shouted until they stopped shouting.By half past two, nothing was moving on the west side of
Chapter 767
"Please stop!"Felicia got her body across him on the floor and took the next boot on her hip and did not move off."If he dies, every single one of you in this room dies with him! Do you understand what he is? Do you understand whose son that is?"That was what stopped it.Not her crying. Not the blood. The word son.Because a prince is still a prince even when he cannot hold a spoon, and there is a difference between kicking one and having killed one, and five men found that difference somewhere around the fourth second of standing there breathing....One of them spat on the floor beside Alexander's head."For a loser like him," he said, "dead's better than alive. Everyone knows it. His own family knows it."Then Vincent came through the middle of them.He had his napkin still hanging off two fingers, and he put his boot into the side of Alexander's head one more time, unhurried, the way a man kicks a door that has been sticking."You have to learn to fear me," Vincent said. "Do yo
Chapter 766
Jericho and the others stayed frightened for nine days.Then nothing happened.Then more nothing happened.And nobody can stay frightened forever of a boy hitting a book with a rock.By the end of the first month Jericho was back at the head of the long table with the silver out.The house adjusted, the way houses do.The curse became one of the facts of working there, like the draught in the east wing.You went blind. You went down to the study. You got it off your chest.You came back up able to see, and by supper you were laughing about it.Some of them found it almost convenient.And when somebody had a bad week of it — three days blind, four trips down to that rug before it took — they did what people do.They stood in the kitchen with a c
Chapter 765
"Not now."Alexander muttered the restraint to himself, hovering just two feet behind the man's chair. A single strike would have settled it. Simple.Yet killing one solved nothing—he wanted them all. Precision required patience; he had to separate the sheep from the wolves before the slaughter. No emotional slips. No gray areas. He would strike only when the targets were indisputably marked.He lowered his arm, letting it rest against his thigh...He crossed the rug without a sound and sat where he had been sitting two hours earlier, cross-legged, primer in one hand, smooth grey stone in the other.And he began knocking the stone against the cover again. Slow. Even. Exactly the rhythm a broken seven-year-old had kept for fourteen years.Behind him, Jericho went on talking.He talked the way a man empties a bucket he has been carrying too long — about the coal accounts, about a horse he had sold and written off as dead, about a girl in the village and what it had cost him to make tha
Chapter 764
The head butler's room smelled of wine and old smoke, and the window seat where a queen used to sit had a boot on it.Alexander stood in the dark by the wall.Jericho had been asleep for forty minutes.Alexander took the needle out of his sleeve....It was a sewing needle. He had lifted it out of the tin on the shelf in Felicia's corner of the room, the one she kept her thread in.Four hours of cultivation. That was all he had.He balanced the needle on the back of two fingers, sighted across ten feet of dark room, and put it into the base of Jericho's skull with an underhand flick.A hand's width left of the spine. One inch up. Depth of a fingernail.Jericho grunted and turned his face into the pillow.Alexander took out the second needle and put it into the meat below the left shoulder blade, at the point the Xia texts call the gate of the arm.Then he crossed the room, drew both needles out, wiped them on the blanket, and left....He got back into the servants' room without a sou
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Next time, you will not fool around anyone.