Page 34 of The Scarlet Star

“If you touch her,” Xerxes said, sliding his grip off the ledge and sitting up, aware that his back and neck were fully exposed to the Chancellor, “I will kill you next.”

Belorme went deathly quiet. The coiling mist stilled in the room. Far across the chamber, a waterfall tumbled into one of the pools; the only sound remaining.

Xerxes heard Belorme’s sandals shift over the floor at his back. His skin pulled tight as he imagined the sage quietlydrawing a blade. Xerxes glanced over at the rippling reflection of the Chancellor in the water.

“I warned you not to threaten me, Xerxes,” Belorme said calmly. Articulately.

Xerxes rose. He turned and took the last step toward the Chancellor, closing the gap and towering over the man by several inches. There was a time when Xerxes was just a boy at this man’s feet, but those days had passed long ago. It was time the Chancellor realized.

“Have you forgotten who I am?” Xerxes asked. “I’m the King. With just one word, I can have you executed for disobedience before this whole kingdom. I can have your reputation ruined for ten generations—I can have you written in the history books as a shameful traitor.”

Belorme’s black eyes flickered back and forth between Xerxes’s. A slow, terrible smile spread across his face. “Can you?” he wondered, and Xerxes frowned. “I don’t think you have it in you after what you did.”

Xerxes’s hands balled to fists at his sides, his toes curling.

How dare he? How dare this foolish man bring up the one thing Xerxes dreaded talking about the most?

“I have helped you at every turn, Xerxes. You would be a raging beast in the garden without me. What do you think would happen to you if I was gone? What would happen to your tree? To your only source of medicine? Don’t you think I would have a plan in place to have it burned, should any harm come my way?”

Xerxes staggered back, his stomach dropping as he imagined his tree up in flames. Suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to race down to the basement and make sure it was still there, to stand guard, to keep it safe.

“Destroy him!”

“Keep our tree safe!”

Belorme had the nerve to raise a hand and shake a finger in Xerxes’s face. “Careful,” Belorme warned, like he was scolding a child. “Don’t forget how much you need me.”

Xerxes clenched his jaw as the Chancellor turned and glided from the pool room in slow, easy steps.

“Belorme,” Xerxes called, and Belorme stopped at the arch. “We were friends, once.” It pained Xerxes to say it aloud, to have to beg for the Chancellor to remember the time before he became Chancellor. Back when Xerxes’s father was still alive and the King. Back when Xerxes got along well with the Intelligentsia. Back when the Intelligentsia taught him many important things—things that had raised the only great parts of him. Belorme used to sneak Xerxes sugar-coated peanuts after council meetings, and he’d bring double if Xerxes memorized a whole chapter of the Divinities record books.

Belorme’s face had looked different back then. His eyes had been a little brighter, his smile more genuine—not the dull, forced thing it was now.

The Chancellor cast a look over his shoulder. Xerxes studied the man’s unblinking eyes that were looking his way but still didn’t appear to see Xerxes standing there. And Xerxes’s shoulders dropped. By the expression on Belorme’s face, Xerxes knew once and for all that what he feared was true.

The man he once considered an uncle was gone. Belorme saw Xerxes as nothing but a tool to be used now.

After Belorme left, Xerxes stood in that very spot, staring at nothing for a long time.

“We want her dead.”

“She is our enemy.”

“She is dangerous! Hurry, before it’s too late!”

“Kill her!”

“She must be stopped—”

“WHAT IS THAT NOISE?!”

Xerxes’s eyes peeled open.

Somewhere in the darkness of his bedroom, a clock was ticking. The sounds were evenly spaced apart:tick, tick, tick… He’d lived in this bedroom for almost four years now, and he never knew there was a clock. He lifted his head from his pillow to look around, finally spotting it far across the room—a small oval of gold high upon his wall, blending into the gilded framework of diamond paintings gifted to him over time. Xerxes studied it, realizing it was the middle of the night.

The quiet buzz of a bug lifted by his window. His gaze darted to it. The tiny insect landed on the closed drapes.

Xerxes climbed from his bed and wandered over. He took hold of the drapes, but he didn’t draw them. Instead, his hands hung there, fingertips grazing the velvet. He waited for someone to tell him something. Anything. He waited for dark instructions and cruel messages.

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