Chapter 133: Bishop Takes Queen? Nah. Reverse The Scene.
Kael: Gwen. What is the situation?
Guinevere: One that will require you to say fuck the rules, and one I have no right asking for your help but I am anyways.
Kael: Where are you?
Marek’s eyes moved to Solandris. The glance was brief, a fraction of a second, the kind of look an employee gives a boss when the pitch isn’t landing and the client hasn’t picked up the brochure.
Filed.
Guinevere: Solandris’s tent.
The jester’s bells slowed into a sickening lullaby rhythm.
"Jingle jangle, tattle tale,
Mindlinks crack and mindlinks fail."
Lovely. Guinevere had the distinct feeling that her mindlink did not go through.
The jester touched Guinevere’s face with its hand. Like a solid object would, not a ghost. That was different than before.
"SKREEEEEEEEK."
The noise that came from its mouth sounded like a dozen tea kettles screaming at the same time.
She looked straight ahead in its eyes like it wasn’t there.
Right as that registered, it picked up her whiskey glass, then turned it upside down. The whiskey poured out in a slow, steady stream across the wood, pooling against the parchment, soaking into the cord that bound it.
Beta Draven’s eyes dropped to the glass, which was either floating mid-air upside down to him or he finally cracked and acknowledged the thing on the table.
Her father’s eyes dropped to it as well, but he did not react. Interesting.
RULE 10: Threats are a man jerking off at the negotiation table. If he could finish, he wouldn’t need to tell you about it.
Touching her face meant it could pick up objects. If they wanted her dead, that jester would have picked up a blade or done something to her by now.
"Oops." It dropped her whiskey glass on the ground, then spun Solandris’s knife on the table.
A knife that looked like it was utility meant for opening letters. The kind of object no one tracked because it wasn’t a weapon until it was.
The blade lifted off the table.
Beta Draven’s eyes locked onto it. His mouth opened.
The knife rotated in its hand as it chanted.
"Round and round the blade will go,
where it stops, the blood will flow.
Spinny spinny, who’s it for?
One of you won’t reach the door."
It launched.
Guinevere moved so quickly, her chair kicked backward. She caught the blade mid-flight, two feet from Draven’s neck. The edge bit into her palm but she did not care.
She didn’t pause. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t look at the blood running between her fingers.
She threw.
The knife crossed the tent in a line so clean it didn’t spin. It punched through the sleeve of Marek’s robe, right arm, just below the elbow, and buried itself into the tent post behind him with a sound like a door slamming shut.
The fabric pulled taut. His arm jerked to a stop, pinned, and the surprise on his face lasted exactly long enough for her to confirm what she already knew.
He hadn’t expected that.
He looked genuinely bewildered.
She was already moving. Beta Draven’s blade was in her hand before Marek’s expression finished rearranging, pulled from the sheath at Draven’s hip in a motion that Draven didn’t resist because Draven was still processing what the hell just happened.
The blade touched Marek’s throat.
The tent went very still.
Marek’s pinned arm didn’t move. His free hand stayed at his side. His eyes, which had been clinical and fascinated for the entire evening, were now the eyes of a man recalculating every assumption he had made about the woman in the pajamas. She hoped "don’t fuck with this bitch" made the updated list.
"Your creature," Guinevere said, and her voice was low and even and carried no heat because heat was wasteful, "just tried to kill a man under my father’s protection. In a tent you invited me to after a hallway you orchestrated. Put it away. Now."
✦✦✦
MINDLINKS SINCE HER LAST: 3
CONCERN LEVEL: Climbing.
The War Chamber was clearing.
Kael’s iron eyes had gone flat thirty seconds ago. The expression on his face was the one he wore when information arrived that he hadn’t requested and couldn’t ignore.
Kael: Gwen. Answer me.
The void answered back with more void.
His jaw tightened by a fraction so small that only two people in this room would have noticed. Both of them were looking at him.
Kael: Guard station seven, King’s quarters. Report.
Every head snapped to Kael at this. He did not make it private
"Guinevere mindlinked me that she was in a situation a minute ago. But hasn’t responded."
He left out the rule part of it. She had worded it a certain way that wasn’t lost on Kael.
Commander Black: Breach in the King’s quarters. Windows smashed, glass debris throughout the chamber. Site is hot.
Maddox was up, running before the mindlink finished, Kael behind him.
Maddox: Guinevere.
Nothing.
Maddox: Baby, answer me.
The silence through the mindlink was the kind of silence that sits inside a man’s chest and rots.
Maddox: Guinevere. Talk to me.
Nothing. The word "nothing" doesn’t do it justice. This was the absence of her. The mindlink channel was open. The other end was empty.
They moved.
Maddox led. Sterling flanked left. Kael flanked right. Ryker, who had been halfway to the door when the temperature in the room dropped by fifteen degrees, pivoted and fell in behind them. His hand was on his blade.
They reached the King’s quarters.
Maddox pushed the doors open.
Every lamp in the chamber was blown. Glass scattered across the stone floor in a pattern that radiated outward from the center of the room, as if the lamps had detonated from the inside.
The windows were cracked.
Sterling’s bracelet was vibrating. He looked down at it.
"Dark magic residue," Jaxon said, his voice low. "This room is saturated with it. She mindlinked me an hour ago, but then told me it could wait."
Kael’s head turned and watched as Jaxon replayed the conversation in his head.
"For future reference, ’I’m fine’ for her means she’s not," Kael said flatly. "For any woman."
"Ryker, lock the Keep down. Full sweep of the camp," Maddox ordered. "Jaxon, find me the anchor point and origin of this portal. Sterling, pull every guard rotation log and find the gap."
Four men moved like a unit that had done this before, which they had, because Guinevere’s ability to find shit that wanted to kill her was apparently a goddamn talent.
Ryker: All units. The Keep is locked. Full containment protocol. Effective immediately.
The mindlink blast hit every soldier in the Keep simultaneously. Doors sealed. Gates dropped.
Maddox inhaled. His nostrils flared. His gold eyes went molten, the irises brightening the way they did when his dragon pushed toward the surface without permission.
He was already moving, tracking her scent like a possessed dragon being pulled by a leash he put on himself.
Bedroom to study. Study to corridor. Corridor to the east hall. Stairwell. His dragon had her trail locked and everything else in the keep had stopped existing.
Nothing.
Kael was already two steps ahead. Literally, physically, moving down the corridor toward the sub-levels where his dark mage was being temporarily quartered as of this morning, because Kael had insisted the man be housed inside the Keep for exactly this category of emergency.
Somewhere below, a dark mage was sleeping peacefully. That was about to end.
Kael descended the stairwell.
His expression was the expression of a man who had once scried on Guinevere from an obsidian throne for sport and was now doing it for another reason entirely.
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