Sharon Shinn: Reader And Raelynx

How to kill the king-that was something Dalcey would decide as the moment dictated. Quietest, of course, was poison. Dalcey took a small silver box out of his bag and flicked it open to reveal an assortment of colorful fruit-flavored candies, a specialty from Arberharst. Wouldn’t Your Majesty like to try one? My favorite is the lemon-flavored drop, yes, the yellow one, though the red ones taste like raspberries and are very popular. Who wouldn’t take one, if only to be polite? Dalcey would eat one, too, or pretend to-sleight of hand would let him fake putting a confection in his mouth. The poison was fast and extremely effective. Dalcey could leave the room while the king was still breathing, nod to the guards at the front door while the king was gasping pitifully for help, slip out through the massive gates as the king fell to the floor dead. Poison would be his choice, if he had a choice-but Baryn might be too canny to take food from the hand of a stranger.

Dalcey pulled a wrapped bundle from the bag and slowly, lovingly unrolled it. Here was a nice weapon to take with you on a chancy venture! Here was the best of the Arberharst exports, if only the king of Gillengaria knew to trade for it! A small device, essentially a handheld crossbow with a single arrow. The trigger responded to the pull of a finger to launch the metal-tipped dart-very fast, but not very far. Dalcey had practiced and practiced with it; he knew his range, and he knew his accuracy. Using this weapon, he had killed a pig at ten paces. He was fairly certain that even a cautious king would allow a visitor to get that close during the course of a conversation.

Dalcey was not stupid, of course. He knew he would not be allowed to carry visible weapons with him into an audience with the king. He had a fancy dress knife he would wear belted over his waistcoat, and he would hand that over willingly the very first time someone announced in an apologetic voice that he would have to be searched before he could meet with Baryn. He would even go so far as to take off his boots, and to laughingly point at the sheath hidden inside the right one, and remark that he normally carried a spare blade there but he hadn’t wanted to seem to offer any menace to the king.

They would still search him, of course, but they would find only oddments. Dalcey would have disassembled the miniature crossbow. The deadly arrow would look like a child’s toy, and Dalcey was prepared to explain it away as a magnetized compass point that the king could float on a bowl of water. A gift for the king, something small, but he may enjoy it . The other parts of the weapon would be scattered through the rest of Dalcey’s things-the frame would be in with the shipping contracts, as if weighting them down; the trigger mechanism would be bundled up with a few quill pens that Dalcey had brought along. This was something else he had practiced and practiced: putting the pieces back together, locking them in place, and nocking the arrow. He could do it in under two minutes, even when the components were scattered.

He could not imagine he would not have two minutes to cool his heels between the time he was ushered to some waiting room and the time he was summoned to join the king.

If by some chance the crossbow was taken away from him-if the king expressed no interest in poisoned candy-then Dalcey was prepared to commit the murder with his bare hands. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d snapped a man’s neck, though he didn’t much relish the idea, and he considered it the option that gave him the least chance to escape. He had told Rayson that quite frankly.

“I’ll kill him any way I have to do it, but if I’m going to die, then you’re going to have to pay me before I go.”

Rayson had laughed. He was an overweight, red-faced, arrogant nobleman who had been driven blindly by one ambition for the past ten years: toppling Baryn from the throne. “Well, I will, but I don’t know how many dead men have ever had much use for gold.”

“Don’t you worry about that.”

And Rayson had paid him in advance, and Dalcey had hidden the money in his manor house-what passed for a manor house, at any rate, for semi-impoverished Thirteenth House lords who were dependent on their distant relatives for any true wealth or elegance. If he died, his brother and sisters would come swarming over it, fighting over who was to inherit. One of them would search through Dalcey’s closets and find the gold.

It didn’t really matter to Dalcey which sibling was enriched by his death. He just wanted to make sure that Rayson was forced to pay for Dalcey’s final act of loyalty, if indeed it turned out to be his final one. Regicide should not be done for free, not even by a zealot, and Dalcey was by no means one of those. Rayson was, and Halchon Gisseltess, and between them they had fomented this plot to overthrow the king, and they could talk of nothing else, nothing , to the point that a man would go mad if he spent more than an hour with either of them. Dalcey didn’t care if Baryn was on the throne, or his daughter was, or if Halchon Gisseltess seized it after a long and bloody war. He didn’t care if there was a war, he didn’t care if the Twelve Houses were turned upside down by civil conflict. He just wanted to earn his fortune-and this particular deed had been worth a fortune to Rayson-and forever after be seen by the marlords as a man who could be relied on and raised to high estate.

Rewrapping his clever little weapon, Dalcey put away everything except his court clothes. Draping those over his arm, he left the room and locked the door. As he’d expected, the proprietor was happy to promise that the waistcoat and trousers would be pressed for him and returned that evening; and, most certainly, he could order bathwater to be brought to his room first thing in the morning.

“An important appointment, I suppose, sir?” the innkeeper asked.

Yes, I will be going off to kill your king . “Oh, when a man’s in business, every appointment is important,” Dalcey said.

The innkeeper grinned. “And every customer is important, that’s what I say. We certainly appreciate your business, sir.”

Dalcey nodded and went out. Time to walk the city, to determine the best route back from the palace-as well as two alternate courses in case soldiers blocked his way. The walking made him hungry, so he stopped at an anonymous tavern, ate a hearty meal, left an insignificant tip, and headed back toward his room. It was even colder than before, and Dalcey cursed the wind. The weather never got this severe down south in Fortunalt. Dalcey was still shivering as he unlocked his room, and he built up the fire even before he took off his coat. Then he lit a half dozen candles and once again spread the contents of the valise upon his bed.

This was the ritual he always went through: focusing his mind on the great task before him, reviewing all the details of the heist or the assassination. For the hundredth time, he studied his diagram of the palace; for the thousandth, his map of the city. He unwrapped the tiny crossbow again, took it apart, put it together again, aimed it across the room, and imagined that the washstand pitcher was King Baryn’s face. His finger tightened on the firing mechanism, but he did not launch the arrow. He wanted its metal tip perfectly smooth, unmarred by dents and nicks.

He had disassembled the weapon again and laid the parts precisely across the bed when there was a knock at the door. “Your clothes, sir,” said a woman’s voice.

Dalcey tossed his spare shirt over the parts of the weapon and turned the palace diagram facedown before unlocking the door. “Very efficient,” he said as he opened it. “You can tell your master I said so.”

He was confused at the sight of the woman who stepped through, his coat and trousers folded neatly over her arm. She was quite tall, with messy pale hair, and she looked nothing like any serving woman Dalcey had ever seen. “Shall I just lay these on the bed?” she asked, crossing the room before he could answer.