♠︎♤♠︎
our names won't be remembered
if we die like trampled flowers
our names won't be remembered
if we die like trampled flowers
C
aine cannot pinpoint the exact moment he knows that he is standing on a knife’s edge. Only that he does, and that he is. Raum knows. Somehow, he knows.
He does not enter the room. Instead, the silver king is as pale as a specter as he lingers, statuesque, in the dark of the open door. For a moment Caine simply pauses, not looking up from the letters splayed on the desk, not looking down at the dagger sheathed by his shoulder.
So this king is not so easy to deceive as his preening nobles had been. Caine had planned for such a possibility, of course — he would have been the fool if he had not dug all he could have into Raum’s past, before encroaching in his very chambers.
He knows of the orphan who had crept the Denoctian streets, picking pockets and slicing necks. He knows of the Crow who had loved Rhoswen, the Crow who had loved Acton, the ex-Crow who had killed, either directly or indirectly, both of them.
Caine also knows, more than anything else, that this night could very well end with his neck in a noose — or, incomparably worse, with Fia’s rebellion known. He had not told her. He had not told her, because one of Agenor's first lessons had been: secrets only live if the ones who hear of it are dead.
He could surely die, but he would do so with the first and last attempt he’d ever made at honor — unsullied.
So he thinks of Fia and he thinks of starving Solterra, and he tries not to think of all he has put at stake. He breathes out, evenly, and summons every last shred of shrewdness Agenor has ever taught him to wield, before he turns light and sly and expecting (startling had been a calculated miscalculation he sweeps quickly under the rug) towards the ghost by the door.
It is not the first time he has played this game, Caine reminds himself. He has not even shown his hand.
“You are very punctual, King Raum,” he says, mildly. Shadows play with matches across his eyes and smile, but Raum is too far away to see. “It has made it easy for me to track you.” Too easy. Realization sets in like a swarm of locusts, but Caine does not stir from his vigil by the man's desk. He will not move until Raum does him the honor first.
“I was sent by a noble who wants you dead. One of many.” Caine’s tongue glides smoothly over his words, as a tongue can only sincerely do when it knows it bears the truth. In the months since Raum’s coronation, he has received letter after letter from nobleman after nobleman, offering him fifty, seventy, a hundred gold pieces for the blood king’s silver head delivered on a silver plate.
“By his words, you offend his house’s ideals of what the Solterran monarchy should be. Even Seraphina,” he speaks the late queen’s name with a touch of hesitation, “had been better fit to rule, because at least her blood had run Solterran.”
So far, Caine has spoken nothing but what Raum presumably must know for himself. The silver king may have been anointed with enough blood for a reckoning, but he is a solitary monster in a den of blood-drinking beasts.
All waiting, waiting, waiting, for the chance to lay their siege.
@Raum | "speaks" | notes: and the suspense mounts
