Page 106 of Golden Queen
"Only what I needed to do for Windemere, Princess," he answered. The earnestness on his face stunned me.
I turned then to see Fenric standing with his back against the wall, his face ashen as he stared at an old man framed in the open doorway. He leaned on the amber-tipped head of a cane.
The long-faced man with the short-cropped beard and deeply lined face was limping into the room. His head, no longer concealed beneath the hood of a cloak, was covered by a thin layer of slick white hair.
"Hello again, Aelia, child," the man said.
As he rounded the table, I saw how frail he was. I relaxed slightly, but I still stayed alert, assessing the danger.
When I did not respond, he continued.
"You have given us a great deal of trouble these past few days."
My eyes shot to Markus. "You sent them for me?" The realization that he must have known I was in the city was a shock.
"No, no, he had no part in that," the old man said—the necromancer, I corrected as I saw the last two fingers were missing from both of his hands. "That was a bit of reconnaissance work, really. We had hoped to head off a lot of this nonsense from the start by taking a bit of time to make you...better prepared for the king's arrival."
"What is that supposed to mean? You nearly killed me," I ground out. My jaw ached from how tightly I was clenching my teeth, trying to manage the anger building inside me.
"No, my dear. You did that all on your own. Bastian would never have harmed you. He was one of my best men—very loyal. And you left his guts in the street, didn't you?"
"When you hold a knife to someone's throat, you forfeit the right to keep your guts inside your belly," I sneered.
The old man laughed harshly, and it was a crackling, horrible sound, like something meaty and wet moved inside his chest.
"Such a fighter, she is," he told Markus, almost proudly.
"Who are you?" I demanded. "And what do you want here?"
"I am High Actem, Aegis," he said, as though I should know what that meant. "And as I said before, I am here to prepare you for your upcoming marriage to Prince Refaedon, heir to the Shadowlands and Guardian of the Black Fire of Kaxa."
I only had a fleeting moment to think of the prophecy;black flame tears the sky in two, and then the rest of his words filtered through to me.
I laughed darkly. "I am already betrothed, you vile little toad. My armies are already on the march—my dragons, already in the sky. There will be no preparing me for anything. You will leave Windemere and give your message to King Magnus and his Prince Arseling, that Windemere does not welcome them."
"I am afraid it is much too late for that," Markus said with nearly sympathetic eyes. "A betrothal can be broken, especially one only signed by a proxy. Penjan has landed in Gold Harbor. Already, they march across the plains to the city. There is no turning back now, Princess."
"If you call me Princess one more time, uncle, I will come across that desk and put my dagger in you."
Markus gave a long-suffering sigh and shook his head sadly. "You must not speak in that manner when the king arrives," he told me.
I laughed incredulously. "I will not be here when the king arrives."
I turned to motion to Fenric that we were leaving. Part of me hoped Markus might put up some kind of fight to give the guard a reason to put a blade in his guts, but...Fenric was no longer standing at the door.
He was on his side with his knees drawn up to his chest, his face set in a silent grimace of pain.
I dropped to my knees beside him and tried to pull his arms away from his chest—to find whatever wound had sent him to the floor.
I darted my eyes behind me, making sure the necromancer and my uncle were still on the other side of the desk.
"Fenric, what's wrong?" I asked, pulling at arms that were locked against his body.
I whirled to the necromancer. "What have you done to him?"
"He will be fine, child," the old man said in his strangely wet, thin voice. "As long as you do not put up as much of a fight as you did when we tried to bind you before."
"Bind me?" I demanded. At first, the word had no meaning other than the literal. But then fear and dread had me surging to my feet as the context behind the word came to me.
