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Chapter 46: Conspiracy (Part Two)

Gerald said nothing. The silence held the answer Timothy had already known.

“Get rid of you?” Timothy folded his hands behind his back. “No. That does nothing for me. What I needed was someone to blame. You obliged.” He moved to the window. Outside: darkness, the smell of blood still drifting from the corridor. “If I’d honored Father and waited five years, I would have had to face Garcia’s fleet. You do know what she’s been doing in Clearwater, don’t you?”

Gerald’s jaw was tight. He hadn’t known. The distance between himself and his brother had become something he couldn’t measure.

“She organized her army before Father even issued the decree. Before any of us knew there would be a contest.” Timothy’s voice held something that might have been genuine admiration, or its cold imitation. “I won’t pretend I didn’t admire it. Clearwater has been under her hand for years — a harbor city, soldiers and commerce both. Valencia, my city, is good for trade. It is not good for raising an army capable of matching a fleet.” He paused. “I couldn’t afford to wait five years and then face her with a merchant’s guard. I needed to be on the throne and moving first.”

“You murdered your father.” Gerald’s voice had gone very quiet.

“I needed the throne.” The matter-of-fact calm of it was somehow worse than cruelty would have been. “Tomorrow you’ll stand trial for the assassination. I will return to Valencia tonight, before word of Father’s death spreads. I will be grief-stricken. I will accept the crown only because duty demands it. And you, Gerald — you’ll be executed. I’m sorry. Truly.”

Gerald lunged.

The distance was too great. Two knights intercepted the sword before it reached Timothy, and the third put a blade through Gerald’s calf. He went down hard, one knee hitting the stone, and the guards were on him before he could rise, pinning his sword arm, pressing him flat.

“You think a trial means anything? I’ll tell them — I’ll tell everyone what you are—”

“No,” Timothy said, not unkindly. “You won’t.” He reached inside his coat and produced a small glass vial. “The Alchemic Workshop developed it some time ago. Sand lizard venom, processed and diluted, mixed with milk. They call it Forgotten Language. It dissolves the ability to speak without causing pain — the flavor is actually quite pleasant, or so I’m told. You won’t suffer.” He looked at Gerald for a moment. “If you have to blame someone, blame Garcia. Her actions forced this timeline. Without her, I would have found another way.”

The Knight Commander crossed the room and helped Gerald to his feet, roughly. Gerald was still trying to speak, but the fight had gone somewhere inside him that wasn’t outward anymore, and what was left was a man being walked out of a room.

The door closed.

Scholar Ansger stood alone with Timothy in the bedchamber, the only sound the slow drip from the ruined bedclothes.

“Your Majesty.” Ansger bent deep. “Now that your ascension is certain — I will use the address you have earned.”

“You have done exactly what I asked of you.” Timothy looked at him with an expression that was almost warm. “When I sit the throne, you will have the position we agreed on. Chief Astrologer. I won’t forget.”

Ansger straightened, visibly relieved.

“But,” Timothy said, “watching my brother just now — I realized there’s a provision I failed to add to our agreement.”

“Your Majesty—”

“I simply want assurance that you remain mine.” Timothy produced a small pill from a different pocket — not the vial he’d shown Gerald, something smaller. “This dissolves over seven days. Enough time for me to make the journey to Valencia, receive the news, return to Graycastle. After the coronation it will do nothing. But between now and then—” He tilted his head. “I find I sleep better with certain assurances in place.”

Ansger’s face had gone the color of old wax. He looked at the pill for a long moment.

Then he swallowed it.

“Wise.” Timothy nodded once. “You may go.”

When the palace was empty and the guards stood outside with careful instructions not to enter, Timothy sat on the edge of his dead father’s bed and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes.

The porcelain from the side table was on the floor in three pieces. He didn’t remember throwing it.

This is not how I planned it.

He’d planned something cleaner. Something that didn’t require touching his father at all.

The design had been elegant, he still believed that: control Ansger, and through Ansger control Gerald — feed the first prince’s ambitions through carefully worded letters, lead him by degrees to the one act that would end his candidacy. Then bring evidence of Gerald’s plans to Wimbledon III, who would deal with his traitorous eldest son in the appropriate manner. Imprisonment. Exile. Something final, but handled by the King’s authority, not Timothy’s hands.

After which, the King would notice Garcia. Her fleet, her army, her harbor. The second eyesore. And Timothy could position himself as the stable son, the reliable one, the natural choice when the King finally looked around and saw what his children had become.

It was not a simple plan. But it was a good one. Timothy had been proud of it.

Then he had gone to his father. He had laid out everything he knew about Gerald’s approach, the dates, the signal, the replaced guards, and his father had listened with the patience of a man hearing something he’d known for some time. Had nodded. Had reached, calmly, under his pillow.

And had pulled out his own dagger and driven it into his chest.

He’d smiled.

Timothy had stood there and watched his father die and done nothing, because his hands and feet and voice had all stopped working at once, and he couldn’t have said how long that lasted.

He’d gone through it a hundred times since. Had checked the body for signs of a double, had inventoried the old wounds he knew by memory — a scar on the left shoulder from a tournament thirty years ago, a burn across three fingers of the right hand. It was his father. It was genuinely, unmistakably his father, who had looked at his second son’s carefully constructed trap and chosen a door that wasn’t on the plan.

Why.

He had no answer. He’d used what the moment offered — Gerald’s arrival, the ready-made accused, the path to the throne he’d been building toward for years. The ending was better, on paper, than several alternatives. He was going to be King.

He just didn’t know why his father had helped him get there.

And that feeling — of being moved by a hand he couldn’t see, toward an outcome he hadn’t chosen — sat in his chest in a way that the crown was not going to fix.

Timothy Wimbledon sat in his dead father’s room and committed, in absolute silence, the private oath that every king-to-be eventually arrives at:

Find out who had done this.

And when he did — they would learn what it cost to play games with a Wimbledon.

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