it was meant to be simple
just one golden rule
just one golden rule
I
t was the last day - though of course none of them knew that. It was the end; but it had always felt like the end, since that first afternoon when silver Raum came wearing red blood and said the queen is dead. Elif had wanted to call him a liar then, but she did not think she would have been right.
Dread crawled up her throat and sat hunched in her mouth like a stone when she came into the city. It tasted bitter, acrid, like the ash that Solterra had tasted a dozen times before (she would strike anyone who ever again compared the Day Court to a phoenix). By now Elif was well-familiar with the taste of it, but on Raziel’s estate (Saudagar, but that still felt ridiculous on her tongue, like wearing silks and ribbons in her hair, like a home in a story-book) it at least had learned to wait in her stomach, biding its time like a viper in a lair.
But everything was out in the open now.
Elif didn’t know why the streets were in a ruckus; it almost felt like a festival atmosphere, except for the glossy shine of fear-or-madness in everyone’s eyes, and the jagged hip-bones, and the way the tension felt less like a surprise and more like a noose. Her whip was curled tight and tucked beneath a wing, little use that it was; it was comforting, like a lucky stone or a pet bird. She thought she might have to use it to get through the crowd, but she shouldered her way through instead, gritting her teeth, unafraid to shove. She followed the clamor to its source -
And stopped in her tracks when she saw who stood upon the bone-white dais.
Caine! She wanted to turn away - was suddenly dizzy with the need of it - but as soon as Raum cried out his name she knew she could not. Whatever this was - whatever he’d done - she would stay. Elif wanted to whip everyone in the crowd who jeered, who whistled, who watched like this was entertainment. She wanted to starve them like Raum had. She wanted to be dreaming. She wanted to wake.
The punishment I have deemed for this convict is to have his wings removed!
Elif gasped. What a dreadful sense of deja vu, to have that same cry wrung from her as she’d made when he announced Seraphina fallen. Worse, because she knew Caine, and she knew what it was to wear wings, what freedom it represented, and it was impossible not to imagine having her own cut from her. Trepidation anchored her as one monster left the platform and another, a hulking shadow large as a mountain, stepped nearer the pegasus. It was his laugh that shook her free, that chilled her to the bone, that sounded like a madman’s curse ringing and ringing over the crowd so that even they in their mix of horror and thirst fell silent.
She was pressing forward through the throng when the executioner brought his hooves down. She was near enough to see the blood color the pristine white with crimson and her heart clenched in her chest. When the next gaggle would not let her through she bit and kicked like a Davke until they stumbled aside, and she still she didn’t know what she was planning, only that it was something, something to put an end to this -
Too late. Too late, and her eyes were wide and spring-green as they watched the axe arc up and up then crash sickeningly down.
Elif might have screamed. She must have screamed, because afterward her voice was hoarse and raw, but all she heard was the ring of iron on stone and the crack of bones, and there was a blooming arc of blood (an image of the petals on the island flashed unbidden across her chaotic mind), there were his wings, flexing and fluttering like they were still trying to fly. Her own ached and ached, and her eyes stung, and her head was filled with a wasp’s-nest buzzing as she watched Caine sag on the marble and the man lean away and wildly, wildly she swung her gaze across the crowd looking for any sympathetic face. She prayed for O, for Eik, for Raziel, but their god was not attending.
Yet there - opal and marble, sunlight off the curve of horns, his face unreadable - Toro. The crowd was growing more unstable by the moment, though some were following the silver king, and some were weeping and turning home; but others wore bloodlust like the latest fashion from across the sea. They heaved like waves, pushing and receding, and she could not reach the horned man. Elif didn’t even know if he would help; their truce that long-ago day had been an uneasy one.
But desperation saw her calling to her magic even as she shouldered the rest of the way through the crowd, still heading for the black monster and the black man broken below him like his own shadow bleeding. The wind obeyed, swirling through the square, snapping and fluttering all the banners, kicking up the sand, finding El Toro.
As Elif climbed the steps of the platform the wind shoved at the alabaster man, then tugged at his hair and tails and the opal netting he wore, urging him toward her, begging his help. It would not ease until he obeyed.
He towered above her, this black giant, and this near the world smelled of bitterness and blood. She could not look at Caine, would not study too closely the mass of feathers and blood (was he even still alive? Could he be?). She raised her green eyes to the bull-crowned man with the axe, thought of the whip still coiled at her side, discarded the thought in the same moment.
Instead, for the second time in her life, she opened her mouth to beg for her people.
“Let me tend him,” she said, and sought any sign of pity in those beetle-black eyes. “You have carried out the sentence, let me make sure he survives it.”
