Chapter 424: I Know What My Eyes Are Doing (He Did Not)

The sound that left Solveil’s throat was two voices twisted into one, his own and something beneath it, braided together, one demanding, one commanding, both clawing for control of the same mouth.

"Your Majesty," the junior healer began. "Let me get the Master Healer. Your body has been through significant trauma and you need time to recover before—"

"WHERE. IS. SHE."

Each word was its own detonation. Landon’s hand ripped the sheet off his body. His legs swung over the side of the bed and his bare feet hit the stone floor and the stone lit up beneath him in a pulse so bright the junior healer shielded his eyes.

The gold in his irises surged again. Flickering. The second tone in his voice pushed forward, louder, deeper, drowning out his own like a tide swallowing a shore.

"WHY DOES IT FEEL DIMMED?"

His hands found his own chest. Both palms pressed flat against his sternum, fingers spread, pressing into his own ribs like he was trying to reach through bone and grab the thing inside him that was wrong. The wrong was a frequency. A signal he could feel but could barely hear. A connection that should have been singing and was whispering instead and the distance between singing and whispering was making the second voice furious.

The junior healer’s back was flat against the wall. His mouth was moving but words were a few seconds behind because the King of Light was standing in front of him with eyes that were cycling like a furnace and a voice that carried two occupants and neither of them was interested in bed rest.

"Your Majesty, please, your vitals are—"

Landon’s hand closed around the bedpost. The wood cracked beneath his grip. The fracture traveled up the post in a line of splintered grain that reached the canopy frame and kept going.

"Why does it feel dimmed?" he repeated, and this time the second voice was quieter. Desperate.

The junior healer hit the door behind him, fumbled for the handle, and fell into the corridor.

"THE KING IS AWAKE."

???

The Master Healer entered the chambers at a pace that said urgent, but his knees said please slow down. He had been three corridors away when the junior healer’s scream hit the hallway like a fire alarm made of vocal cords, and the sprint that followed was the fastest his body had moved in a decade and the last time it would ever move that fast again.

He found his king standing beside a bed with a cracked bedpost, barefoot, bare-chested, radiating enough heat to fog the windows and enough fury to fog everything else.

"Your Majesty," the Master Healer said, catching his breath in the doorway. "You’re awake."

Landon Solveil turned his head. The gold in his eyes was still cycling. Still flickering between the amber that belonged to him and the molten version that belonged to whatever was sharing his skull. His chest was heaving. His hands were fisted at his sides and the tendons in his forearms were standing at full attention.

"Where is Guinevere?"

The name came out in the braided voice. Both tones. Both registers. The man asking and the thing inside him demanding and neither willing to wait for the answer the other was owed.

The Master Healer adjusted his spectacles. Then removed them. Then put them back on. The routine bought him two seconds and the two seconds were spent assembling a response that would keep his king in this room instead of through the wall.

"She is in custody, Your Majesty."

The temperature in the chamber spiked. The ambient glow coming off Landon’s skin brightened by three degrees and the stone beneath his feet pulsed in response, light spreading outward from his soles in concentric rings that traveled across the floor and climbed the walls.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Commander Veyron issued a warrant, Your Majesty." The Master Healer took one step forward because proximity was part of his job and his job was currently trying to kill him. "You have been in a coma for over two days."

Landon went still.

The stillness was total. His chest stopped moving. His eyes stopped flickering. The light radiating from his skin held at its current brightness like a sun that had paused mid-burn to listen.

"Two days," he said.

"Yes, Your Majesty. You were found unconscious in your chambers. Two puncture wounds on your neck. Your blood contained a substance we could not identify. The fever set in within the first hour and has been sustained since. She was the last person with you and ran from law enforcement." The Master Healer clasped his hands behind his back because his hands were shaking and hiding them was preferable to explaining them. "You have been unresponsive to every treatment we administered."

Landon’s hand went to his neck. The skin was smooth. Unmarked. Warm from the fever that was still sitting in his body like a tenant who had signed a lease and was in no hurry to leave.

"The wounds have healed, Your Majesty," the Master Healer added. "As of this evening, there is no trace of them. Commander Veyron documented them via crystal capture before they closed. The puncture pattern was consistent with teeth. A matemark in dragon and wolf culture." The Master Healer paused. "Your Majesty, are you alright? Your eyes are—"

"I know what my eyes are doing."

He did not know what his eyes were doing. He knew something was wrong with them because the healer’s face was doing the thing that faces do when they are looking at something they cannot explain and the inability is producing fear, and Landon Solveil had never once in his life made a healer afraid by standing still.

The gold surged again. His vision doubled for half a second, the room splitting into two overlapping images that snapped back together with a jolt that made his jaw lock.

"Has she been in that cell for two days?" His voice came out layered again, two braided together.

"She arrived in Kingsguard custody earlier today, Your Majesty. Prior to that, she was in Drakencrest. Commander Veyron retrieved her." ⅇ

"Veyron went to Drakencrest."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"Veyron went to a foreign kingdom and arrested a woman who I have been trying to protect."

"Yes. He brought her back in warded cuffs, Your Majesty. I’d imagine that is why you cannot feel her. Standard protocol for—"

Landon’s fist hit the already cracked bedpost. The wood did not crack further because the wood had nothing left to give. The post snapped clean in half. The top section fell to the floor with a thud that shook the room and the canopy above the bed sagged to one side like a flag that had given up.