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Chapter 867: A Meaningful Smile

This man was absolutely insane.

George Nery could not understand how the situation had deteriorated so completely, so quickly. He could not understand why Roland believed that six female guards could arrest more than sixty armed men. He could not understand the smile.

That smile—still there, still composed, still carrying some private amusement in the back of his eyes—remained the most troubling element in a scene that contained a great many troubling elements.

He thinks the witches can guarantee this. But the nobles were all wearing God’s Stones of Retaliation. Witch ability was negated by the stone. Whatever Roland’s witches were capable of normally, they were nullified here.

Unless he knows something about these particular guards that I don’t.

Two of Roland’s guards moved immediately: one to the door of the hall, the second positioning herself between Roland and the crowd. The remaining four drew their daggers and began to advance through the assembled nobles—four women moving unhurried into sixty-plus armed men as though the odds were merely inconvenient.

Every noble in the room drew his sword. No man in that crowd intended to surrender to six guards when the numbers were this strongly in their favor.

“Your—Your Majesty!” Delta had gone pale. “Everyone calm down. If there is a grievance, it can be discussed—”

Too late. George caught Guye’s eye across the room. They had agreed on a contingency: if circumstances forced action before the castle plan could be executed, they would take Roland here in the villa. The location wasn’t ideal—open space, difficult to hold—but with the majority of Redwater’s nobles present and united, seizing the king quickly would bring the rest of the room to his side. As Roland had said: strength decided. The question was only whose strength, and in this hall, the strength was George Nery’s.

Guye walked out of the crowd with his sword drawn. His usual diplomatic composure had burned off entirely; what was beneath it was harder and older than George had expected to see.

“I cannot accept this,” Guye said, his voice carrying across the hall. “I could say nothing if you were proceeding on the basis of valid evidence and proper trial. But this—” he shook his head, and his voice took on the high-pitched precision of a man who has decided to say the true thing—“nobles are not to be trifled with. Even King Wimbledon III himself could not have asked this of me and received compliance. Your Highness, you have driven us to this.”

His four attendants formed up behind him—four men who each qualified as a probationary knight, who stood with the settled posture of people accustomed to violence, who made Roland’s guards look slight by comparison. Guye Yurianne had been born with unnatural strength. At fifteen, he had taken two knights and eliminated a river-estuary bandit company. He had spent his young adulthood mastering every weapon form available to him and had never been beaten in the noble fighting matches. Those who knew him called him “Guye the Giant” and said that if he’d been born a common man, he would have been remembered as one of the finest knights in history.

With Guye’s four attendants, Roland could not escape on his own.

“Go help him,” George said quietly to his own men. “Watch Edith.”

They moved. Several more nobles joined the motion.

Guye strode toward Roland, who was still smiling—still wearing that expression that George now found deeply and specifically alarming. Ten steps away. The earl could not help the thought that formed itself: go ahead and laugh. This is the last time you get to be arrogant.

“Attack!”

Guye’s sword came down at the female guard beside Roland with everything he had—all that legendary strength behind it, the blade moving fast enough to pull sound from the air.

She could not evade it. There was no space to evade it. She could only block.

Clang—

Sizz—

Two sounds, in rapid succession: the clear bell-ring of metal on metal, and then something wet and conclusive that George had heard before on battlefields.

A broken sword tumbled through the air, spinning, and buried its point in the floorboards.

Guye’s head followed a separate trajectory, falling from his neck, bouncing twice on the polished wood and coming to rest in a spreading pool. The blood traced a bright line behind it.

George’s mind stopped.

Did someone just behead Guye the Giant—and break his sword—with a single blow?

Before his thoughts could reassemble themselves, the four female guards launched simultaneously from their four corners and the hall became a different kind of place. He could barely track their movements—not their strikes, not their feet—and what they did to the nobles who engaged them was not what combat looked like. Objects became weapons in their hands: a serving fork, a chair back, a decorative rail. Their physical strength was not the strength of human beings. One of them caught a sword stroke on her forearm without armor and the man who struck it screamed and fell, clutching a broken wrist. They moved through the room like forces of nature wearing human faces.

Monsters, George thought, though he could no longer quite remember how to speak. No mortal body does what those bodies are doing.

But if you make any rebellious action, your conspiracy becomes concrete fact. When that happens, you will be sentenced to death.

Roland had said that—said it quietly, conversationally, at the moment he passed his sentence. George had heard it. He had stored it. He had not truly understood it until now, in the middle of a fight that had somehow arranged itself to happen.

He turned, with difficulty, toward Roland Wimbledon.

Cold crept from the soles of his feet upward, steady and deliberate, and somewhere between his ankles and his spine he understood.

This was a trap.

The First Army remained outside the city. A hundred guards at most. Six women at the banquet. The extraordinary show of mind-reading, the deliberate provocation of the final sentence, the refusal to back down from the confrontation—all of it designed to push the holdouts across the line from conspiracy to open rebellion. Because conspiracy sent you to the mines, and open rebellion earned you death, and Roland had needed the distinction between them to be clear before he arrested anyone.

He hadn’t been disappointed when the nobles had drawn their swords.

He had been waiting for it.

That was what the smile had contained. Not triumph—nothing as hot as triumph. Something cooler and longer. The expression of a man watching a sequence complete itself that he had designed some time ago.

“Spare our lives—”

“I surrender, Your Majesty!”

“The Levitan family pledges its allegiance—”

“Please, I’ll give you whatever you want—”

The hall filled with the sounds of men discovering that they were losing a fight they had believed they were winning. The nobles still vastly outnumbered the four guards—but they were kneeling. The guards had not so much fought them as moved through them, and the difference in what they were had become undeniable.

George’s sword hit the floor before he consciously decided to drop it.

Disobedience. Rage. The shapeless terror of having been outmaneuvered at every step. These cycling through him until they dissolved into something that was simply fatigue. The last thing he felt clearly was the hilt of a longsword striking the flat of his back.

The hall tilted.

The floor rose to meet him through a widening pool of dark red, and the sounds of fighting and begging faded together into a single undifferentiated noise that grew soft, and then softer, and then stopped.

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