Reign Shadowfell's Arc

Chapter 26 of 29

Vixen finished the knots. Lyla knelt with the cloth strip stretched between her hands, ready to gag the prisoner. Reign stood from the sill. He was still turning the problem in his head. The conspiracy leader was a man close to his mother, and Reign did not know his face. In a few hours he would walk into a hall of the king's inner circle and smile at strangers. One of those smiles could be the one that killed him. He crossed to the chair. He crouched again and put his hand on the prisoner's jaw before Lyla could tie the cloth. "Wait." The candle sputtered. The amulet warmed against his shirt, red stone pulsing under the raven and the silver ring around it. Reign pushed the weight of the stone into his voice one last time. "Name him. Face, mark, anything." The prisoner's eyes rolled up. His tongue worked. He said he did not know the man's face. He had only ever met the go-between. Reign started to pull back. The prisoner spoke again, unbidden, still under the pull of the stone. He said the one who led them wore Merida's earrings. He said everyone in the circle knew it. He said the earrings were small, silver, shaped like a crescent, and that Merida had never taken them off in life. Then Lyla pushed the cloth between his teeth and knotted it behind his skull, and the room went quiet. Reign did not move for a long moment. He stayed crouched with his hand on the prisoner's knee and closed his eyes. Earrings. Not a ring, not a blade, not a seal. A woman's earrings, worn openly at court, worn like a trophy or a mourning. The leader of the twelve was a woman. She had been close enough to his mother to take her jewelry off her body, or to be given it. That meant a woman of the inner circle. That meant the daughter of one of his grandfather's keepers, or a keeper herself. The playing field shrank in his head from a hundred faces to a handful. He opened his eyes. Lux was watching him from the bed, tail curled around one small foot, head tilted. Reign smiled. He felt it happen slow, one corner first, then the other. Lux went still. The imp had known his mother. The imp had seen that smile before, maybe, on her. Reign stood and touched the amulet through his shirt. "Bind his feet too," he said to Vixen. "Under the bed. We leave at first light." Vixen nodded, watching his face. Lyla watched Lux watching Reign. Reign turned back to the window and the dark street below. In a few hours he would kneel to a king, and he would look for a woman wearing his mother's ears.