“Yes, they are. I’ve won.”
“Hardly.” Sigis’s fists clenched. “You’ve only won two out of three. If I can—”
I brought my hands out. No one noticed the empty vial that I dropped, because every light in the Great Hall went out.
Magic pooled and pulled, growing between my fingers, sparking across my hands as it reacted to my touch, my thoughts. My borrowed blood.
Transformative, constructive, destructive. Links formed, white and cold as ice, stretching in a chain from my hand. They shot out to coil around Urso, around Eirhan, around Sigis. I took a deep breath, and when I spoke, my voice boomed as though a hundred of me spoke at once: “I am grand duke.”
Urso hissed as the chain burned his bare skin. Sigis broke his with a grunt, but I knit it back together with a thought. Fresh magic was almost too willing to obey. I sent another chain flicking toward Svaro. Father’s throne cracked beneath him with a sound like thunder.
Then I pulled the magic back. The links burst into a charm of hummingbirds. They fled to hide among the winter roses. “I am grand duke,” I repeated more softly. “For the next thirty minutes. Then I will sign papers of abdication, drawn up by Minister Reko”—I nodded to Reko, who seemed too shocked to respond—“in favor of a parliament operating as a joint governing body with my brother Lyosha Avenko.”
There was complete silence. Then Svaro leaped up to stand on Father’s broken chair. “You can’t do that.”
“I can do what I want. I’m an autocrat.” For thirty more minutes.
He drew a knife from his belt and hurled it at my head.
The knife spun wide to bounce hilt-first against the chest of a stunned delegate. All the same, the hall erupted. Inkar leaped in front of me, jerking her ax out of its loop. Everyone began to shout.
I put a hand on Inkar’s arm before she could do something reckless. “Have him removed,” I shouted over the din. Aki started forward.
“Don’t.” Eirhan held up a hand imperiously. “Everyone stays where they are until we work this out.”
I had the satisfaction of seeing him utterly bowled over for the second time as Aki ignored his orders, pinning Svaro’s arms to his sides and lifting him from the chair. She grunted as he kicked at her legs, and another guard stepped in to help. “It’s not fair,” Svaro screamed as they wrestled him down to the doors, watched by over a hundred aghast faces. “I’m grand duke. I’m grand duke.” His tantrum echoed down the corridor long after the doors closed behind him.
Sigis came forward. Inkar turned to face him, too. He moved his shoulders first, as if to remind me how massive he was. “Impressive display, little Ekata. But what does that mean, exactly, with my army at your door? Is it worth the risk, not to let me finish what I started?”
“You’d never get across the moat,” I replied easily. “The duke Below will never let you.”
Sigis smiled, a dangerous flash of white in the dark. “The duke Below tried to kill you.”
I held myself tall—not like Father or Mother, but like myself. Drawing my confidence around me to be my cloak. “Revenge was my father’s vice. It seems that mine is compromise.” Because Below did deserve amends, for my father’s actions and for mine. Grand dukes commanded grand respect, and I’d forgotten that my counterpart Below was as grand as we were.
The guards, taking their cues from Inkar, moved in and stood to either side of me. Not as my oppressors, but as my protection. They moved forward, crossing their halberds so that Sigis had no choice but to fall back. His face twisted. “I hope you’re ready for a siege, little Ekata,” he spat around their shoulders.
“I’m not,” I replied cheerfully. “Luckily, Inkar’s father is ready to break one.”
His expression was even better than Eirhan’s.
I raised my voice to compete with the growing hubbub. “Urso, consider yourself under arrest.” The last arrest I’d ever make. “And, Prime Minister—when my brother is well, he’ll no doubt want to murder every one of us. It might be useful if he didn’t have the absolute power to do so.”
I was grand duke for many more hours, as it happened. Even with Reko’s extensive plan to guide us, the matter of even a proclamation of a parliament had to be debated and redebated. But no one liked the idea of facing Lyosha after their multiple complicities—not without the option of being exonerated by their peers. Only Bailli complained, and nobody much cared.
When the meeting was done, most of the ministers hurried from the cabinet room as if they expected me to cackle that grand dukes made grand jokes and kill them all on the spot. Only Eirhan stayed behind, scratching at correspondence. At last, he put down his pen, blew out the candle beneath the inkwell, and looked at me. Shadows lingered under his eyes. “Why, Your Grace?”
“Technically, I’m not duke anymore.” I waved at the papers that a secretary gathered from the table. I knew what he asked. Why hadn’t I arrested him, too? “I realized why you never defected to Sigis. You were afraid he wouldn’t gain the confidence of the ministers. So you helped me until you thought I couldn’t win. You like to slither, Eirhan. As long as you look after yourself, the rest of us can die as we like, can’t we?”
“I don’t entirely agree with Your—with my lady’s assessment.”
“I don’t really care.” I made a show of examining my fingernails. “The truth is, I’ve done you a favor. You owe me.” I pointed to the parliamentary documents. “You will keep me alive until that goes into effect.”
Eirhan didn’t blink. “Or?”
“Or Inkar will tell everyone the part you played. They’ll find the story in my notes, or diaries, or secret places you won’t think to set on fire. Some way, Lyosha will find out. And even if he’s the one who kills me, he’ll think he has to make an example of you.”
Eirhan considered this. “I do hope my lady’s university days come with haste,” he said at last.
Inkar and I left the cabinet room together. “This has been a day,” I muttered.
“Also a night,” Inkar said, pointing to a low-burning candle clock.
“At least I don’t have to wake up early tomorrow.” Or for the rest of my days, I hoped.
Inkar was quiet on our way back to our rooms. I thought she was being watchful for Svaro or other murderous siblings, but when we were inside, she sat on the bed and spoke hesitantly. “My father will be here in a few days.”
“The mysterious Erlyfsson.” I flashed her a grin as I reached behind me to unclasp the top of my dress.
Inkar wasn’t smiling, for once. “I have decided to reject your offer of marriage.”
To my credit, I paused only a moment before tugging the dress off my shoulders. “Okay.” I tried to ignore the strange feeling in my belly, as though I’d lost something and wasn’t sure whether I wanted to cry or not. I’d known Inkar for a week. I didn’t even want to be married. I could hardly fault her for feeling the same way.
Ironic, really. I’d gotten what Eirhan wanted, and now it was irrelevant. And I shouldn’t be surprised, I thought as I finished unbuttoning and stepped out of my dress. She’d held her title as long as I’d been grand duke. Now I was back to being no one, and that wasn’t what she’d agreed to.