with the assumption that Sarad Nukpana was going to be in the temple when we went after the Saghred. It’d been only a few hours ago, but I’d taken Nukpana’s shooting as a sign that Lady Luck had teamed up with Fate, and both had come over to our side. Sarad Nukpana was out of the temple. We were going to make it. We were going to destroy the Saghred, and we were going home alive. Deidre’s crossbow bolts had brought death to Sathrik and a world of hurt to Sarad Nukpana. He’d been taken to the palace, and while he was there, we would be coming here while the temple was a blessedly Nukpana-free zone. I knew he was going to recover quickly, but not this fast.
“Sarad was shot two hours ago while on the palace balcony with your brother,” Tam was saying.
“So it’s true,” Chigaru said. “He told me that my brother had been assassinated—by your mother. Is that also true?”
“Sarad dropped the shield around the king,” Tam said. “He knew my mother was there, waiting.”
“To kill my brother.”
“To kill them both.”
“When this is over, remind me to make her a duchess.” Chigaru paused and frowned. “Sarad may have been wounded then, but he’s not now. He was with the Saghred, with both hands on it. He was shirtless with blood on his chest and back, but I didn’t see any wounds.”
My mouth dropped open and I let it stay that way. Sarad Nukpana was covered in blood and the rock didn’t eat him—it healed him. It was like Kesyn said: the rock got a better offer. The Saghred officially considered me expendable, and I was on my way to stab the thing. I didn’t know if the rock had actual emotions, but I knew it wouldn’t like seeing me again. Then again, maybe it would; it’d get a chance to zap me into a goopy puddle on the floor.
“Sarad said that my brother had named him as his heir,” Chigaru said, “so he is the king now.” The muscle in his jaw clenched tightly. “He told me that he would wed Princess Mirabai tonight and he wanted me there to witness it as his special guest. Then I would be the first sacrifice of the evening—with Mirabai forced to watch.” Chigaru blew his breath out through his nose and I was reminded of a bull right before it charged. “Mirabai was standing in the open doorway, being held back by two guards. She heard everything that monster said. She started screaming. I tried to fight my way to her. I broke free, but one of the guards slammed into me and knocked me against a wall behind the altar. At least I thought it was a wall until it opened and I fell through.”
“There’s a door directly behind the high altar,” Kesyn said. “After a sacrifice has been made, they chuck the body through that door.” He took in Chigaru’s battered, scraped, and dinted armor. “A chute that goes all the way down here to The Pools.”
Chigaru nodded. “It was one hell of a ride.”
“I’ll bet it was.”
“I was fighting to get back up to the temple,” the prince said. “To find and free Mirabai.”
A prince trying to slay a dragon to save his beloved princess.
Death by cliché.
“Didn’t you get a snoot full of that navinem stuff back at Tam’s place?” Kesyn asked carefully.
“Yes, I did.”
“And you haven’t been running around scared shitless?”
“I must not have been exposed to very much of it.”
Kesyn looked closely at the prince. “Uh, yeah, that must be it.”
I looked at Piaras out of the corner of my eye. He shook his head once. That told me Chigaru did get a good hit of navinem, and he’d proceeded to take on Sarad Nukpana’s personal guards, and then attacked a pair of sea dragons to get back upstairs to have at those guards again.
I admit I didn’t know Chigaru all that well, because I didn’t like him all that well and didn’t want to make the effort. But he never struck me as the swashbuckling, save-the-princess type. If he’d gotten a snoot full of navinem and hadn’t been curled up in a corner having a good cry or scurrying around the temple with his figurative tail between his legs… that could mean only one thing.
Prince Chigaru Mal’Salin wasn’t nearly as much goblin as he thought he was, and Chigaru’s mom had been a very naughty girl at least once.
“That armor saved your life, Your Highness,” Imala said quickly.
Too quickly. I raised a quizzical eyebrow at her. She met my eyes for a brief instant, then looked away. Ditto for Tam. They knew. Chigaru was clueless. Well, that went way beyond interesting.
Chigaru’s black eyes were on me. “Carnades Silvanus was there.”
I swallowed. “At the altar?”
The prince nodded once, his eyes now glittering with barely contained rage. “He was with Sarad Nukpana.”
Chapter 15
“There were no chains or guards that I could see, but I wasn’t there long enough to know his status.”
Carnades Silvanus and Sarad Nukpana in the same room together could mean many things, but considering that Nukpana’s hatred of the elf mage had been simmering to the boiling point for years, it was probably bad news for Carnades.
But I knew one thing that it did mean—Sarad Nukpana knew that I couldn’t use my magic.
“But Carnades hates goblins,” Piaras was saying.
“He hates me more, and loves his own miserable hide just as much,” I said. “For a chance to get back at me, he’d be willing to breathe Sarad Nukpana’s air for a while.”
“And Sarad would be willing to let Carnades continue to breathe,” Imala said.
“He’s trying to make a deal,” Mychael said. “Carnades knows that if we make it back to Mid alive and his betrayal becomes known, he’s a dead man. But if he’s the only survivor, Justinius can’t prove that he had anything to do with our deaths.”
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.
“Agreed.”
“When we bust out those boys and girls upstairs,” I said, “you think we could talk them into adding Carnades to their ‘to do’ list?”
Imala flashed a fierce grin. “I’m certain they’d be delighted.”
“I’d love to do it myself, but considering my present circumstances, I don’t have a problem with someone else taking out the garbage.”
Chigaru’s dark eyes were still glittering and his right hand, and the sword it held, were twitching a little too much for my comfort. He’d fought Khrynsani and dragons, and now he was looking for something else to fight. Good old navinem. The prince stood tall, his head up, his shoulders back. At this moment, from this angle, Chigaru looked downright kingly. That gave me an idea. I rolled it around in my head for a moment and deemed it not to be stupid.
“Your Highness, you couldn’t have shown up at a better time,” I told him. “How would you like to free your people and inspire them in battle?”
Chigaru’s eyes lit with a berserker’s homicidal glee, and Imala shot me the queen of all dirty looks.
I raised a defensive hand. “I know, I know. Your job is to keep him alive long enough to get his butt on the throne, but if those men and women upstairs are as powerful and influential as you all say, they’ll be the ones who can keep him there.”
“She’s got a good point,” Tam said. “They had to have heard by now that Sathrik’s dead and Sarad is the king. Most of those people are in those cells because they favored Chigaru over Sathrik to begin with. With Sathrik dead, as far as they’re concerned, Chigaru
