Chapter 386: The Table

She had to kill the High Mage.

The man who had stood in the square and spoken her mother’s "Lira" name aloud, and watched while the stones were thrown, and lit her on fire, was the one who had started everything.

Xenge had only been his hand.

The High Mage was the arm, the shoulder, the whole body.

He was said to hold the second-greatest power in the kingdom, below the king alone, and he was the strongest mage in the realm when it came to raw magic.

He lived behind the palace walls and rarely stepped outside them.

He came when he chose to come: for a royal ceremony, for a calamity that no one else could solve, for an enemy at the border, and then he vanished again until the next time he was wanted.

Tomorrow he would be wanted.

The spell competition was the one day each year when the academy opened its doors to the entire kingdom.

The students showed what they could do.

The strongest of them would be noticed by the army and offered high posts, and the whole town came out to watch and celebrate, because very little else happened in a town like this.

The king would sit in the stand. The queen would sit beside him.

The princess, the nobles, and the High Mages would fill the seats around them, and the High Mage himself would be among them, because an event like this was one that he never skipped.

He would be there, in plain sight, in front of the whole kingdom.

And she had no way to reach him.

Kiara pushed herself off the sill and began to pace.

Four steps to the wardrobe, four steps back.

The problem was simple to state and impossible to solve.

The stand would be packed. Guards would line every aisle.

The High Mage would have his own bodyguards, picked mages who were trained to see an attack before it landed.

And the man himself was powerful enough to kill her with a thought if she made one wrong move.

She stopped by the wardrobe.

What about the orb?

The thought arrived slowly, and then all at once.

It held a huge store of magic, enough to level a street.

If she could get it into that stand, if she could roll it, throw it, hide it under a seat and let the stored power rip itself loose, it would not matter how strong he was.

He would have no time to put up a ward.

The blast would reach him before he even looked down.

But...

A blast...

It would reach everyone.

Kiara’s breath caught.

She saw the stand, full of families who had come to watch their sons and daughters cast their spells. She saw the children sitting on their fathers’ shoulders.

She sat down heavily on the edge of her bed.

No.

She had not come this far to become the very thing she hated.

The men who had burned her mother had not cared who stood near the fire.

If she did the same, she would be no different from them. She would only be a better-prepared monster.

She had tried Silvia the evening before, in the back of the empty classroom after the others had left.

She had laid out the whole problem, as quietly as she could.

Silvia listened with her glasses in her hand, rubbing the bridge of her nose, and when Kiara finished, she said only one thing.

"Let it pass, Kiara. Let this year pass. We’re safe for now. That’s enough. Why are you in a hurry to kill him?"

That was all. It was not advice.

It was a plea from a frightened woman who had lost her peace and did not want to lose anything else.

Kiara lay back across the bed and stared at the ceiling, where the late sun was drawing a thin gold line along the plaster.

She could hear the hammers still.

Steady, patient, building something for tomorrow.

She had one night to think of something that did not exist.

A knock came at the door, two taps, unhurried.

Kiara knew that knock. She sat up and smoothed the front of her blouse before she could stop herself.

"Come in."

Lord Silverward stepped into the room carrying a small silver tray.

He had changed out of his formal robes and into a dark house coat that hung loosely from his broad shoulders.

His steel-gray eyes were tired at the corners, and the lamplight caught the first strands of silver at his temples.

A porcelain pot steamed on the tray, with two thin cups beside it, and the scent that drifted across the room made Kiara’s chest tighten before she understood why.

Rose petals. Honey. A little cinnamon.

"The servants said you had not come down for the evening meal," he said, setting the tray on the low table by the window. "I thought I would bring something up instead."

"You made tea?"

"I made tea. Do not look so shocked. I have been making it for years, and I only burn the leaves twice in five attempts." He lowered himself into the armchair opposite her with a small grunt, the way a man did when his knees had begun to remember old battles.

"Sit. Drink. It will go cold if you stare at it."

Kiara moved to the other chair and took the cup he poured for her.

The porcelain was warm against her palms.

She knew the recipe by heart.

It was her mother’s, the one she used to make on winter afternoons when the house felt too big, and her father had never once let a servant touch it.

He watched her sip. He waited, in the patient way that only a man who had spent years commanding armies and attending council meetings could wait.

"You look tired," he said finally.

"I’m fine."

"You have said that every day this week. Each time you say it a little faster." He tilted his head. "You have been standing at that window since noon. The maids noticed. I noticed. You are not eating properly, you sleep little, and when I passed your door last night I heard you pacing until almost dawn. What is it that has you so worried, Kiara?"