For a frozen moment it was as if the skin of her palms had fused with the metal of the throne. The guard's voice burned with rage, his message echoing within disbelief and terrible numbness.
Your Highness, the captain has been murdered.
The captain has been murdered.
There was blood on Hakim's tunic. The blood of his captain, the man who had commanded the royal guard as long as she could remember, who had served her father with ruthless loyalty, who had stood at her right hand without faltering once when myriad others had fallen away.
"How?" she asked hollowly.
"We found him near the west outer wall. He suffered many knife wounds, most of them in the back. An ambush by at least three men. He could not have fallen otherwise."
He would not have fallen. If he had not been caught off guard, he would have lived, he would have put down his attackers and hauled them bound and half-dead through the city to the palace to face her justice. He would have stood firm and deflected her alarm, turned her concern to fury toward her enemies.
But there was no deflection now, only the stark crimson of truth. She had been poisoned once, and saved by the edge of a miracle. Razoul had drawn the royal guard up as a living shield around her then, sparing nothing to keep her safe, far from assassins' blades and traitors' wine. How many more attempts had been made on her life, unbeknownst to her? How many had infiltrated the palace with the single-minded purpose of her death, and failed to cross the wall of his men?
And having failed to reach her, how many had banded together on the streets against her defenders instead? Or was it the work of foreign spies, sent to sow dissension and fear among her people?
"Bring him to me," she ordered.
She knelt beside the low table where the guards had carefully laid their captain's body, wrapped in a thick shroud. At her command they unveiled the sight of his bloodied, mangled corpse, and she saw for herself how he had died. There were several deep stab wounds in his vital areas, crisscrossed by more than a dozen long superficial slashes running the width of his shoulders and waist. They had been made by a scimitar, at deliberate leisure after he was already dead.
Hakim reached forward instinctively to stop her from touching the corpse, but she cared nothing for prohibitions of uncleanness or superstition. Her hand rested gently on Razoul's shoulder as she whispered a silent prayer, condemning herself for bringing this upon him. It had taken his death for her to realize the nature of the enemy she faced, her overconfidence and her blindness.
In another breach of what was known, she presided over the funeral herself, reciting the rites with the new guard captain standing solemnly at her side, and watched dry-eyed as the white shroud was lowered into unmarked earth. The graves of royalty and nobles and commoners alike surrounded them, lost and nameless in death.
"Hakim," she said softly, without condition. "This will not happen again."