Chapter 5 - Shadows in the Garden of Thorns
The midnight bell tolled from the great clock tower of Oakhaven.
The silence that settled over the High Tower was heavy, suffocating, and thoroughly false. Outside the heavy oak doors, Elia could hear the rhythmic clank of iron armor—Cassian’s northern guards patrolling the corridors. Queen Aurelia had finally collapsed from exhaustion an hour earlier, heavily sedated by Matron Verna with a draught of valerian root, sleeping in the adjoining master suite.
Elia could not sleep.
She stood by the arched stone window of her bedchamber, looking out over the sprawling city. From this height, Oakhaven looked like a sea of amber stars. Down there, in the lower rings by the docks, was the small, rotting wooden hovel where she had lived with Martha. Down there, people were sleeping on straw mats, worrying about whether they could afford a loaf of rye bread tomorrow.
And here she was, draped in emerald silk, waiting for someone to slit her throat.
A faint scuff of leather against stone behind her made her spin around, her heart seizing.
"Quiet," a voice hissed from the shadows near the corner terrace.
Prince Cassian stepped into the moonlight filtering through the high window. He had discarded his heavy ceremonial armor, wearing a dark leather brigandine, twin daggers sheathed horizontally across the small of his back. His dark hair was damp with night mist.
"How did you get in here?" Elia whispered, clutching the front of her gown. "Your guards are outside the door."
"I built the defenses of this wing three years ago," Cassian replied, stepping closer with silent, predatory grace. "The outer balconies connect to the buttresses of the garden wall. If I can climb it, an assassin can climb it."
He walked to the large silver flagon of wine resting on the small side table—a gift delivered less than an hour ago from the palace kitchens, bearing the seal of the Royal Steward.
Cassian pulled a small glass phial from his tunic. He dipped a thin silver rod into the wine, then into the phial. The liquid inside the glass tube turned instantly from clear to an oily, curdled black.
"Wolfsbane," Cassian said grimly, sliding the phial back into his tunic. "Concentrated. Two sips, and your heart stops beating within four minutes. The healers would have called it a sudden apoplexy brought on by the shock of today's events."
Elia felt the room tilt around her. She reached out, steadying herself against the stone sill of the window. "They really want me dead. They won't even wait for dawn."
"Valen has spent twenty-two years securing his grip on this kingdom," Cassian said, his voice quiet, devoid of anger now, filled only with cold tactical assessment. "My father was a weak king, broken by your disappearance. When he fell ill four years ago, Valen effectively became the ruler. He diverted the treasury to his private garrisons. He forced the Council to draft a decree naming his daughter, Seraphina, as my only viable political match."
Cassian stepped closer, looking down at her. In the silver moonlight, his sharp, severe features looked carved from pale marble.
"If I had married Seraphina, Valen would have poisoned me within six months of the coronation. Seraphina would have ruled as Queen Regent, carrying a child of Valen’s bloodline, and House Aurelius would have been extinguished forever."
Elia stared at him, piecing the horror together. "And then I walked up to the crystal."
"You shattered twenty-two years of planning in five seconds," Cassian said, a ghost of a bitter smirk touching his lips. "You humiliated his daughter. You resurrected the Queen’s will to fight. And you completely invalidated his claim on the succession."
"Cassian..." Elia hesitated, the question burning in her chest until she couldn't contain it. "Why are you helping me? If I am alive, you lose your crown. You lose everything you were raised to be."
Cassian went silent. He looked out the window, his jaw tightening as he watched the distant patrol torches circling the lower courtyards.
"I never wanted the crown," he said softly, words he had clearly never spoken to another living soul. "I watched what the crown did to my father. I watched it drive my mother into madness and grief. I am a soldier, Elia. I belong on the northern borders, keeping the wild clans from burning the frontier villages. But I stayed because if I walked away, this kingdom would belong to a monster like Valen."
He turned back to look at her, his winter-frost eyes locking onto hers with an intensity that made her breath catch.
"I swore an oath when I was knighted at sixteen: to protect House Aurelius with my life. When the relic lit up today... when I saw the Queen look at you... I realized my oath wasn't about holding a throne. It was about making sure the people who butchered this family never sit upon it."
Before Elia could answer, a faint sound cut through the night air.
*Snap.*
It was the sound of a grappling hook catching against the stone balustrade of the outer balcony.
Cassian’s entire demeanor shifted in a microsecond. The weary prince vanished; the frontier killer took his place. He reached out, grabbed Elia by the arm, and pulled her behind him into the deep shadow of the heavy velvet bed hangings.
"Stay down," he breathed against her ear, his breath warm against her temple. "Do not make a sound."
He drew the twin daggers from his back, their dark, non-reflective steel vanishing into the gloom.
A dark figure vaulted over the stone railing of the balcony. The assassin was dressed in tight, dark leather, moving with eerie, supernatural silence. In his right hand, he held a curved stiletto coated in a dull, oily sheen. In his left hand, he held a pouch of suffocating dust.
The intruder paused, his masked face turning toward the grand four-poster bed. He took two silent steps across the marble floor toward the pillows.
He never reached them.
Cassian lunged from the shadows. The Prince didn't yell; he didn't issue a challenge. He slammed his shoulder into the assassin's back, driving the man into the stone floor with bone-shattering force. The stiletto clattered across the marble.
The assassin rolled instantly, slashing upward with a concealed blade from his forearm. The steel tore through the leather of Cassian's shoulder, drawing a line of red.
Cassian didn't even flinch. He trapped the assassin's wrist with his left hand, twisted it until the bone audibly cracked, and drove the hilt of his right dagger violently into the side of the man's temple.
The assassin went limp, collapsing onto the floor like a sack of grain.
Elia emerged from the shadows, her hands shaking, her eyes wide as she looked at the blood dripping from Cassian's arm. "Cassian, you're bleeding!"
"It's a scratch," he muttered, kneeling over the unconscious man. He ripped the black silk mask from the assassin's face.
Cassian froze.
The man had no tongue; it had been severed long ago, a common practice among the elite mute-killers of the Black Guild of the southern provinces. But around the man's neck, hung on a coarse cord of hemp, was a brass identification coin.
Cassian flipped the coin over in the moonlight.
Stamped into the brass was the private crest of the Royal Ministry of Justice.
The personal guard of Duke Valen.
"He didn't send a mercenary," Cassian whispered, his voice dark with a terrible realization. "He sent an officer of the realm. Valen isn't trying to hide his hand anymore. He's moving his pieces into position."
Cassian stood up, his eyes burning with lethal determination. "Pack whatever you can carry in a small satchel, Princess. We are leaving this tower."
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"Where are we going?" Elia asked, panic rising in her throat.
"Into the dark," Cassian replied, wiping his bloody blade against his leather trousers. "If we are going to survive the Solstice Banquet tomorrow, we need the one thing Valen has spent twenty-two years trying to destroy: the proof of how you were stolen."
