Reign Shadowfell's Arc

Chapter 25 of 29

The room was too thin for what Reign needed to do. The walls were plank, the floor creaked, and the innkeeper slept one landing below. A scream would carry. A spilled cup of blood would soak through to the boards downstairs by morning. Reign looked at the prisoner in the chair and knew he could not cut him here. He crouched instead and put his face close to the slack one. The amulet warmed against his chest, red stone catching the candle. He let its weight press through his voice. "You want to tell me," he said. "You have wanted to tell me since I took your jaw in the street." The man's mouth opened before Reign finished the sentence. The words came out in a tumble, quiet and steady, as if someone had pulled a stopper. He said there were more than the four in the street. He said they were a group, twelve at the core, more at the edges. He said they meant to move against the demon king. They had watched Reign since Portlandia's gate. They knew what his eyes meant. They had thought if they took him alive they could trade him at the throne room door. Reign kept his hand on the man's knee and pressed harder. "Who leads you?" The prisoner's throat worked. He named a man Reign did not know, and then he named him again by a title Reign did know. A close aide to his mother. One who had stood at Merida's shoulder in the years before she died. The prisoner said the leader had loved her. The prisoner said the leader believed the king had failed her, and that Reign's existence proved it. Lyla moved by the door. Vixen did not move at all. Reign let go of the knee. He stood and walked to the window and sat down on the sill. Lux climbed onto the bed and watched him without speaking. Reign put his hands on his own knees and looked at the floor between his boots. His mother had a man who loved her. That man was raising a knife at the grandfather Reign was riding to meet at first light. In a few hours Reign would kneel before a king whose own house was rotted from inside by someone who had once brushed his mother's hair back from her face. He turned the amulet in his fingers and felt the raven's edges. "Bind him," Reign said. "Gag him. Under the bed. He lives until I decide." Vixen bent to the rope in her pack. Lyla drew a strip of cloth between her teeth and tore it. Reign did not watch them work. He watched the candle and counted the hours to first light and thought about which truth he would carry through the throne room door, and which he would keep behind his own.