Page 67 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

“No,” I answered.

The king did not close his oily hands about my throat. Neither did he lower them.

Now to the matter of their love.

I glanced at the choking princess. “I have listened to the nature of your warped union. Over and over again. ’Tis time for the truth, Princess.”

Princess Raise was frightened beyond her fear that I would kill her with my stitch, and thatwas something to behold. She loved her king more than life itself. Princess Raise abandoned her choking to beseech me with a widening of face and utter slackening of posture.Please do not do this to me.

I was about to reveal her betrayal. She had taken her king’s place to save him, but he would feel a fool. A played fool. Princesses did not hold grudges, I had been told. Kings did not share that sentiment.

Her beseeching posture might not have convinced me, in truth, as I was not always warm and good, especially when obsession was involved, yet there was a heaviness in my stomach at her reaction. I had felt that heaviness when staring out at the barren haze recently. The feeling was a wrongness. A fear? A warning?

I could not say, but the feeling was fate altering. Yes, that was the description: Fate altering. If I drove a wedge into the Raises’ love, I could destroy them. Him and her. I could conquer a king that way.

I mightneedto conquer him that way. I could not say other than that the heaviness of the feeling in my stomach bid me to caution in revealing truths.

“What truth?” hissed King Raise. “What does she say, my wife, my love?”

What truth? How profound his question.

The truth was that unions were seams, and if I picked one apart, then whatever the union held together would assumedly fall apart, the seam destroyed. The seams were fraying, said the original poem of kings. And if golden fate deemed fit, she would mend them.

“Heal the warping of our union,” Princess Raise had begged, not realizing how ancients may toy with her so.

Toy with us all.

Here was the moment of my fate-altering choice, it seemed, and I had little to go upon. My purpose remained murky, and I was half mad with obsession that grew stronger by the minute. I was meant to conquer kings, meant to enter the barren haze, andnotmeant to love.

All that to contend with, and another crucial choice was upon me.

Would I mend seams? Did I deemfitto do so?

Princess Raise was right, or at least in this instance. I believed in monsters and in their worthiness, and in their futures. I always had. To safehold these futures, monsters would need a world, and while I had little idea how to save a world sliding to The Real End, I could not see how that would come to fruition through ruining anything.

“What truth?”boomed King Raise.

Princess Raise bowed her head.

I answered him, “That you are sick. Or will soon be so.”

The princess stilled.

King Raise lowered his hand. “What? You jest to distract me.”

“No, King Raise. I do not jest. Perhaps the sickness of kings does not yet affect you, but it soon shall. King Bring is already rife with the plague. Princess Take keeps her king’s sudden ailment a secret. No wonder he had ceased negotiations with me without further letter. No wonder he has not met with you as usual, though you might ally with him against me. At dusk, I observed the startings of plague on King Change too.”

King Raise’s chest halted in its rhythmic rise and fall. He knew of what I spoke. He had already felt a change within himself.

My thoughts flicked to King See. I had not noticed change in him, but I had only processed the news that Princess Bring had wiggled out of Vassal, and had not thought to inspect or interrogate See.

“You have set the plague upon us,” said King Raise grimly.

The princess gasped from where she knelt, my stitch about her throat. “You are sick, my one and only?”

He faced her.The smallest signs. The cure is defeating this queen.

The opposite, I wagered. “’Tis a good question. Why are only kings plagued with this illness? How sudden, how terrifying. For you have always been the five powers of the world.”

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