Everything seemed peaceful and still. There was no thunder, no darkness, no Konstantin Black. I tried to tell myself that it was just a strange dream brought on by stress and exhaustion, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had really been talking to Konstantin. That somehow he’d managed to visit me in a lysa to warn me that there was a bounty on my head.

TWENTY-EIGHT

denunciation

It was in the fishbowl of the meeting room that everything went completely insane, and this was coming from someone who’d just been visited in a dream by Konstantin Black.

The meeting room stuck out from the rest of the palace in a bubble, with one interior wall and one exterior wall of glass domed out around us. It left me feeling as if the lake were engulfing us, as if it were a sea monster trying to swallow us all.

At the end of the long table in the center of the room sat King Mikko, with his Queen sitting to his right and his brother to his left. Lisbet sat next to her granddaughter. Other than Kasper and me, they were the only people in the room.

“This is Bayle’s meeting, isn’t it?” Kennet asked, looking over his shoulder at the large bronze clock hanging on the wall. “Doesn’t he know it’s rude to arrive late to your own party?”

“When you arrived late to your own birthday party, you told me that was arriving in style,” Linnea reminded him.

Kennet smirked. “That’s because everything I do, I do in style.”

Kennet might have joked, but nobody else here seemed to be in good spirits. Bayle’s making us wait—twenty minutes so far—wasn’t making things any better. Kasper and I were close to the end of the table, a polite distance away from the royalty, and Mikko kept shooting icy glares in our direction.

I had a feeling if we didn’t solve things quickly, we never would, because it seemed like we had begun to wear out our welcome.

“Oh for Ægir’s sake.” Lisbet let out an exasperated sigh. “My King, perhaps you should send someone to fetch Bayle. This is getting tedious.”

“He will be here,” Mikko said, apparently immune to the same tension the rest of us were suffocating under.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Bayle finally arrived, with guards in tow. They were senior guards I’d met earlier in the week, decked out in their uniforms. Bayle had added a vest made of platinum, with carvings of fish scales. It was real metal that he wore over his jacket, armor to protect against attacks.

Looking back, that was the first sign that something was going on. Who wears armor to a meeting?

“I’m glad you could grace us with your presence,” Kennet said dryly.

“I am very sorry, my liege, but I had important business to attend to, which will become very clear to you all in a moment,” Bayle said. To his credit, he actually sounded winded, like he’d been hurrying.

He seemed nervous, though—staring about the room, swallowing and licking his lips a lot, and stammering a bit when he spoke. The guard behind him held a thick manila envelope, and he would only stare at the ground.

“That’s fine,” Mikko said. “Just get on with it.”

Bayle began to rehash what we all already knew—Cyrano’s attempt to kill Mikko, my thwarting of it, Cyrano’s wife and daughter running off, the sapphires, and the fact that the only people who had access to the vault were in this room.

“We spoke to all of you this morning, asking when and why you last accessed the vault,” Bayle said, and he put his hand on the bell of his sword. “Marksinna Lisbet had been there three months ago with the record keeper, for accounting purposes. Prince Kennet was there two days ago, showing Kasper and Bryn.”

Bayle cleared his throat. “Queen Linnea and King Mikko claimed it had been so long ago that they couldn’t recollect when they’d last opened it.”

“So?” Kennet arched an eyebrow. “That doesn’t really tell us anything does it?”

“No, not by itself.” Bayle turned to the guard behind him and took the envelope. “We checked the database to see if anybody else had gotten in the vault, and according to the, uh, the computer, the last person in the vault was, uh, King Mikko, two hours before the attack on his life.”

Mikko didn’t say anything immediately. He just shook his head. “That’s simply untrue. I wasn’t in there. I had no reason to go in.”

“Sire, the fingerprint scanning says you were,” Bayle said.

“The King is not a liar,” Linnea hissed.

Lisbet held up her hand to hush her granddaughter, her eyes fixed on the guards. “What does all this mean?”

“Well, it, uh…” Bayle cleared his throat again. “We believe that King Mikko paid Cyrano Moen to attack him, making it appear that Cyrano would kill him but knowing that a guard would intervene and protect him.”

“That’s preposterous!” Linnea shouted. “Why would Mikko fake an attempt on his life? That makes no sense.”

“We believe that King Mikko is the one behind your attempted kidnapping, and that to shift blame from himself, he planned the assassination attempt,” Bayle explained. “He wanted us to think someone else was behind everything going on here.”

Kennet sat back in his chair, almost slouching, and only glanced over at his brother once. Mikko, for his part, seemed unmoved by what Bayle was saying. He just kept shaking his head.

“Mikko would never hurt me,” Linnea insisted. She leaned forward on the table, as if that would make Bayle believe her.