Chapter 122: The Third Act

The third act was already underway by the time I finished laying out the lemon cakes.

I’d climbed the stairs with the real tray during the scene change, in the dark, without spilling a drop. The guards had waved me through without even looking up. Now I was kneeling beside the little side table, arranging the cakes on their plate one by one, with the weasel curled up asleep in the front pocket of my apron.

The Queen had two cakes in her lap already. Hex was standing behind her chair, grinning down at the stage. Pryce sat in his plain seat to the right, with his hands folded on his knee.

I stood up and smoothed out my apron.

Before the plan started for real, I let myself take one last look at the stage.

[It’s good. It’s really good.]

Then I turned my eyes to Pryce’s coat, and I didn’t look at the stage again.

I knew exactly when it was coming. In the original, he’d struck while the music swelled and the whole hall was watching the kiss. Every head in the great hall would be turned toward the rain.

I stood beside the side table, three steps from his right hand, with my back against the wall. I started running Tide through my body, slow and steady, and kept it rolling back and forth between my right arm and my legs.

Below us, the rain machine opened.

The sound of the water hit the whole hall at once. I heard Lily call out, "Sir Knight, you came!" and then I heard Serena answer her, low and steady.

The Queen leaned forward in her chair. Hex leaned forward behind her. Every person in the box turned toward the stage, except for me.

The orchestra swelled. The audience gasped all together, and I knew without looking that Serena had just pulled off her mask.

Pryce’s right hand unfolded from his knee and slid into his coat.

I moved.

I didn’t think about it at all. Forty tries on Sabine’s floor had worn the motion into my body, and it happened on its own. Tide surged into my right arm, I crossed the three steps in one stride, and my hand closed around Pryce’s wrist just as his fingers wrapped around the hilt. The tray was still in my left hand when I grabbed him. Then I let it go, and it fell, and the teapot shattered across the floor.

Down below, the whole audience roared.

They were cheering for the kiss. Hundreds of people were clapping and shouting all at once, and the sound came up through the railing so loud that I couldn’t even hear the china breaking. Nobody below us heard a thing.

Pryce’s head snapped toward me. For the first time since I’d met him, he wasn’t smiling.

He twisted his wrist sharply, and the black glass came an inch out of his coat.

It touched my forearm.

I had Coating on my arm by then, a full layer of mana packed over the skin. The black glass slid through it as if it wasn’t there, then through the sleeve of my uniform and into my skin, and a long, hot line opened up along my forearm from my wrist toward my elbow. Blood ran down into my palm.

[It’s actually eating my mana!]

There was nothing to block it with, and there never had been. All I could do was hold on, so I clenched my teeth and did exactly that.

Pryce pulled. He was stronger than he looked, and his wrist started to slide in my bloody grip. He was twisting it back and forth, trying to get the angle to pull the blade the rest of the way out, and I could feel my fingers slipping.

I shoved every bit of mana I had left straight into the joints of my hand and Snapped.

My grip locked down on his wrist so hard that something crunched. Pryce made a sound through his teeth.

"WEASEL!!!" I screamed. "LIGHT!"

The weasel exploded out of my apron pocket.

It shot straight up into the air above the Queen’s chair, and the whole royal box went blindingly, painfully white. It was so bright that I squeezed my own eyes shut, and the light still burned red right through my eyelids. I heard Pryce cry out and felt him flinch away. Somewhere behind me, a chair crashed over.

Through the glare, I heard Hex’s voice.

"PRYCE!"

I heard her boots hit the floor, then the scrape of the Queen’s chair as it was shoved aside, and then the heavy thud of a body landing on top of another. When I squinted one eye open, Hex was on the floor with her whole body wrapped over the Queen, shielding her completely.

I still had Pryce’s wrist in both hands.

The black glass blade was still half inside his coat, and my blood was running down over both of our fingers.

Below us, the audience was still cheering. The light from the weasel only lasted a few seconds.

When it faded, the first thing I felt was Pryce’s wrist sliding out of my hand. My fingers were slick with my own blood, and the Snap had burned itself out, so there was nothing left holding my grip shut. He tore free and stumbled backward against the railing.

His right hand hung at a strange angle. He didn’t even look at it. Instead, he reached into his coat with his left hand and pulled out the black glass dagger.

The lamps in the box dimmed the moment it came out.

Then he turned toward the Queen.

Hex was already on her feet. She stood over the Queen with her sword drawn and her silver hair hanging in her face, and she didn’t say a single word. She just stepped forward to meet him.

They crashed together in the middle of the tiny box. Hex swung, and Pryce slipped under it. Pryce slashed, and Hex twisted away so close that the black glass split her sleeve. A chair went flying over the railing. The lemon cakes went everywhere.

[Okay, this is a bit too chaotic for my taste.]

I was sitting on the floor with my back against the wall. I didn’t remember sitting down. My right forearm was split open from my wrist almost to my elbow, and the blood was running down my fingers and pooling in my lap.

I looked from my arm to the fight and back again.

The sensible thing to do was stay down. I had no sword, my right hand barely worked, and I’d already done my part. Hex was the captain of the Queen’s Guard, and fighting was her actual job.

Then I watched her take another step backward.

Hex was losing.

Every time she tried to block, she had to pull her sword back at the last second, because the black glass would cut right through anything she’d strengthened with mana. Every time she lunged, she had to stop short to keep from walking onto the blade. She was fast and strong and clearly very good, but she kept flinching away from her own attacks.

Hex was a fighter, and a great one. However, every single thing she had ever trained her body to do ran on mana, and Pryce was holding the one weapon in the world that ate it. All her years of training were working against her. Each time she started a move the way she’d been taught, she had to stop halfway through it.

In other words, Hex couldn’t win this fight, and she was going to keep trying anyway, right up until the moment she died.

I had to think.

I couldn’t Coat or Tide or Snap my way through that knife. The only thing I had that didn’t need to touch him was the Beam, and the Beam needed a blade.

I looked around the floor, and I saw it lying in a puddle of tea beside the shattered teapot. It was the little silver cake knife from the tray.

I grabbed it with my left hand, which was the only one that still worked. Then I pushed every last drop of mana I had into that tiny, stupid, three-inch blade until it started to glow.

Beam landed where I aimed about one time in three, and it always pulled low. So, I aimed at Pryce’s chest and hoped.

At that exact moment, Pryce spun away from Hex and turned toward me. He must have felt the mana gathering. He lunged at me with the black glass raised, and as he lunged, he ducked down low.

His head dropped straight into the line I was aiming at.

"GET AWAY FROM US!!!"

I swung the cake knife, and the Beam came off the edge in a flat sheet of white light.

It hit Pryce right in the face.

When the light faded, there was nothing above his collar. His body took one more step. Then it folded and fell across the broken teapot, and the black glass dagger slid out of his hand and skittered under the Queen’s chair.

The box went very quiet.

Hex was standing there with her sword still raised, breathing hard, staring at the body. Behind her, the Queen was slowly sitting up on the floor with her shawl over her head.

"...Kohaku?" Hex said.

I tried to answer her. I really did. However, the cake knife slid out of my fingers, the whole room tilted sideways, and the floor came up to meet me.

The last thing I heard was the audience below, still cheering.

[... Blood loss is no joke.]

---

{Serena}

When I finally pulled back from the kiss, the rain machine was still running, and the curtain was coming down in front of us.

Lily was staring up at me with her eyes huge and her mouth still open. I set her back on her feet. Neither of us said anything.

Then the curtain swept open again, and the noise of the whole hall hit us at once.

Everyone was on their feet, clapping and shouting. Hugo was sobbing somewhere in the wings. The whole cast spilled out onto the stage around us, Fenna and Marisol and the rest, and we all joined hands in a line and stepped forward to bow.

I bowed with them. Then I straightened up and looked straight down at the front row.

The seat in the very center was empty, with a silver ribbon still tied around the armrest, soaking wet from the spray of the rain machine.