Felix was still ruminating on the disaster of the day gone by when the sun set and plunged the expansive palace into darkness. It didn’t matter how many lanterns and lights they installed – the sheer size of the building, combined with the tall ceilings always made it feel dark and foreboding. Felix preferred to stay in his room and whittle away the final hours of the day reading.
Few people travelled past these parts at this time of night. In fact, nobody could be found wandering this area of the palace. Felix was the other handful of residents in the wing who were left to their own devices. Consequently, any small sounds coming from outside could easily be heard by a pair of attentive ears.
Felix’s curiosity drew him to the door, which he opened and peered through. The sight that awaited him on the other side was breathtaking. Quite literally at that! He almost forgot to inhale because of what was awaiting him on the other side.
She was standing by the window outside of his room. Her perfectly sculpted face stared out into the gardens below with a serene expression. Felix felt his heart skip a beat. She truly was the most beautiful girl he had ever laid eyes on. She was the doll-like beauty that every noble bachelor wanted to claim for themselves.
It was extremely unusual how prolific rumours about Maria were. Those stories rarely breached the walls of the palace, but Maria was special. Everyone was stricken by her looks, her manners, and the influence of her family.
But the question that sprung to mind was why? Why was Maria outside of his room?
There was only one answer.
Felix was beside himself. Maria Walston-Carter was wandering the halls outside of his bedroom! He didn’t think for one second that Maria never learned where his room was, but that didn’t matter to him in the moment. This was the kind of forbidden midnight rendezvous that all of the novels in the library spoke of.
He straightened out his night clothes, swept his hair aside and ensured that every fine detail was in the right place. When that process was done he opened it wide and stepped out to meet the woman whom he hoped would soon choose him to marry.
“Lady Maria, what are you doing here so late at night?”
“Oh, Felix – is this where your bedroom is located?”
He smiled, “Yes. I and a few other distant relations stay in this wing of the palace.”
Felix finally noticed that they weren’t alone. Maria’s personal attendant was standing a respectful distance away with his hands folded over his lap.
“I’m honoured that you came to see me-”
Felix stopped in his tracks.
Looking too desperate would only push her away. He needed to be the better man in this situation and be even-handed towards his competitors. Surely Maria would appreciate his restraint and sense of fair play. He switched tracks mid-sentence without thinking twice about how odd it sounded to her ears.
“The others won’t think it’s fair for us to fraternize outside of the interviews,” Felix said, “I understand that you might feel that we have a special connection – but you really ought to wait until the final day.”
Felix deployed his winning smile, pearly white teeth gleaming in the low light of lanterns that lined both sides of the corridor. He smiled and smiled and smiled some more, but it started to waver as Maria stared a hole through him and didn’t respond to his well-considered reply.
“Is... is something wrong?”
“No. I am simply taking a late-night stroll. I am a restless sleeper, and using my legs makes it easier for me.”
Felix tried not to let the implication of her words settle in, lest he spoil the satisfaction he felt about his smooth proposition. That tiny voice in the back of his mind saying that ‘Maria wasn’t here to see you, idiot’ was drowned out by his overpowering ego. Felix decided instead to savour the new nugget of personal information that he had gleaned from their interaction, guarding it jealously like a dragon sitting on their hoard.
“Ah. I myself prefer to read a few books before turning in for the night. We all have our own ways of wearing ourselves out.”
“I see. I do hope that nothing amiss is happening around this wing of the palace after what happened earlier.”
Felix had heard all about it once the word got out. Someone had broken into the palace grounds in a staff uniform and smashed up a vase in one of the studies, only to be found unconscious with a loaded firearm tucked into his belt. The guards had promptly apprehended him and hauled him away for questioning.
“Hm. If one wanted to sneak into the palace and conceal themselves, this would be a good place to do so. There is little foot traffic at night and many empty rooms one could hide and rest inside of. Do you worry about the security arrangements? You can speak with the guards if you are concerned.”
Maria offered a wry smile; “Not at all. I’m certain that they’re the best of the best. The palace would demand no less, would it not?”
Felix tried not to look too excited about Maria expressing concern for his safety and wellbeing. She may have been frosty and stern on the outside, but she was really a kind girl beneath the outer shell! She was more generous and understanding than any of the other noble girls who visited for the same purpose before. He wanted to fall to his knees and propose on the spot!
No, no. It was too soon to make a bold move like that. He had to bide his time.
“Y-Yes, the Royal Guard are indeed the best when it comes to securing the palace. They know the floorplan like the back of their hand! I’ve lived here for some years and still got lost occasionally.”
“Hm. Luckily I have a very good sense of direction then,” Maria replied, “I’ll leave you to enjoy your evening then. I hope that you will join us tomorrow for the next round of discussion.”
“Naturally. Good night.”
Felix retreated back through the door and locked it shut, clutching his pounding heart with one hand. A few hours ago, he was convinced that his chances of achieving victory were done for – but now everything had been turned on its head! Maria was eager to speak with him again!
He wasn’t merely going to attend the next round, he was going to win it all there and then. He could finally prove to his parents that the time they spent raising him and rubbing elbows wasn’t a waste, standing proudly at the top of an extremely wealthy and influential family. Getting to wed a beautiful girl like Maria was enough of a reward in itself too.
Felix floated back to his bed and collapsed down on it with a beaming smile. It was all going his way now. He simply had to keep his nerve and secure what he believed was an incoming victory.
----------------------------------------
“Why was he so happy to see me?”
Franklin pulled a sour face, “I don’t know. Aren’t they all excited to become your spouse?”
“Yes – but he was the one who kickstarted the despair spiral when Theodore showed up earlier. I was certain that he had completely given up on winning the contest.”
We had been wandering the lonesome halls of the palace for almost an hour at this point. Farnham was very tight-lipped on the specifics of where he hid his packages, but the lesser visited areas of the property would be his likely destination. The sheer size of the complex meant that someone could hide an item in any of these rooms and they wouldn’t be found until it was too late.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Honestly, what did they even need this much living space for?
At least half of the rooms we investigated were the same. Shelves lining the walls, couches and chairs to sit on, and maybe a dining table near the windows. Was there a huge demand of social settings that most of the palace had to be made up of them? They came in every colour and atmosphere one could imagine too.
The process was simple; find a corridor filled with unused rooms, alternate them between me and Franklin, and scour every inch of them for any signs of the package that Farnham claimed to have left behind for another killer to pick up later. That meant under and inside every piece of furniture, in suits or armour, between the books, and behind the paintings on the walls, and those were the most obvious spots that came to mind.
We cleared another pair of stuffy rooms and reunited at the junction at the end of the corridor.
“This place is driving me mad!” I complained, “It’s all the same. I thought my Father had a dull taste in interior design. This family has all the money in the world yet not a single innovative idea to use with it.”
“We are here to stop an assassination, not critique the interior decoration of the palace.”
“I’m trying to distract myself from this tedious job.”
It was too risky to let the plan progress further in the hopes of making them easier to catch. A single lapse in security could lead to a dead legitimate King and a hell of a lot of trouble for the entire country. As important as that was, it was presently being expressed as a series of hidden object games all contained within the same room layout duplicated hundreds of times.
“We’re never going to find what we’re looking for at this pace,” Franklin sighed.
I stopped in my tracks and leaned against the wall, “I hate to admit it – but you are correct. We haven’t been left with any good options though.”
I was more critical of this plan than anyone. It was primitive and stupid in equal amounts. The size of the palace had exceeded my initial estimate by several magnitudes, no wonder the common folk were so testy when it came to the royal family at times. They must have blown a decade’s worth of the state budget building this compound!
Elegant. I needed an elegant solution.
So why on earth couldn’t I come up with one? I should have pressed Farnham on where he left these damn things, but would he even remember at that point? He might have been given directions on a piece of paper and gotten rid of them once he was done with the delivery.
It would be easier for me to find the odd one out among the staff. The security team in charge of the palace were smart. They found out about what happened to Welt and immediately took defensive measures to keep the new man in charge from storming the palace and killing the former King. More guards were posted, the mail was closely vetted, and the servants were rotated out early to disrupt any potential plans that were already in motion.
Getting an insider into that rotation was the most obvious route of attack – but getting close to Thersyn was another matter entirely. Only the most trusted individuals were going to be told which room he was staying in, and they’d be searched from head to toe every time they passed through to offer their service.
They’d need to know where he was, have someone inside the palace to do the job, and have a window of opportunity to execute with the tools that Farnham had smuggled inside. Pressing the management team for personal details about the new hires was not going to work.
“Are you sure we can’t leave this to the Royal Guard?”
“We’re already here. We may as well do our part to find out what they’re planning.”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m fully aware of what you intend, and what you’ve done – and in many ways I agree with it. I still find your motivations mystifying. You’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, and for what?”
The patterns on the tiled floor drew me in.
“It’s difficult to trust a stranger with something important,” I said, “Does it not stir you to action when the world is going mad?”
“Yes, but that’s a different issue from running from end to end, trying to be there when the first shot is fired. You are only one girl. You cannot expect yourself to be everywhere, at all times, all at once.”
This wasn’t the same as before. When I was an assassin I chose who to kill. There was no pressing threat of complete global annihilation. All of that was too big for me. Those were the decisions made by presidents and dictators, holding the nuclear codes and a briefcase with a big red button inside.
The paranoid state I was in was always what Durandia intended. She had placed me into the position of the ‘protagonist’ so that I would run myself ragged. When there was a problem, I was the only one around who could deal with it. It wasn’t enough. Xenia’s talk about not understanding the gift we’d been given rang in my ears.
Durandia also knew they were going to say that to us. They passed through the Veil and into this world, under the watchful eye of the Red Tree, and thus willingly submitted to the whims of fate. What was I missing? The books I borrowed did not reveal any secrets unknown to me.
‘Nihility’ had to be more than a way to separate molecules by filling their bonds with energy. It was a glorified way to boil water. Xenia mentioned that these powers encroached on the realm of divinity and that Durandia would have to have received special permission to give them to us.
Regeneration and destruction – two sides of the same coin. These were primordial abilities that could go as far as we wanted to take them, the building blocks of an entire universe. My mind was wandering. I was totally lost again. I sneered and kicked the wall with the back of my shoe, jolting Franklin back to attention.
“Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend.”
“No. You did nothing wrong. I am only angry with myself.”
If I understood these powers could I really be a hero and prove Franklin wrong? Could I be everywhere, at all times, all at once? Or maybe Durandia intended for these powers to be like a key, used once at an important moment and discarded afterwards.
“It isn’t reasonable for me to become the sole problem-solver like this.”
I was half intent on paying penance for my misdeeds and half devoted to trying to eek out a little extra life after having my last one cut short. I wouldn’t be surprised if Durandia pulled the plug on me once the threat was resolved – but I had to get there first to find out. Franklin knew neither of those facts. Hell, he didn’t even know how I had turned into a trained killer. He assumed it had something to do with Veronica.
“My duty is to ensure that you are kept safe, Maria. Your Father entrusted me with that task a long time ago, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to fail in fulfilling that mission.”
“I appreciate it. I’ve already asked too much of you in these past few weeks. You deserved to have more answers than I can offer.”
“I trust you. What’s happened is disturbing, but I feel that you have everyone’s best interests at heart.”
That made at least two people who thought I was secretly a nice person beneath the sneer and a loaded gun. It was a shame that I didn’t find the rhetoric convincing in the slightest.
“Maybe the answer is to put ourselves in the killer’s shoes. What would be the easiest way to get to Thersyn when he’s being kept in isolation within a certain wing of the palace?”
Franklin looked to the windows, “Could they break in from the outside?”
“That would get them in, but it’s probable that there are guards outside of every major chokepoint and on every hallway crossing. It would be almost impossible to move without being seen.”
“Then they would have to gain entry to the wing legitimately.”
Was there someone in Thersyn’s inner circle who was willing to betray their oath and organize a hit on him? I could not rule out the possibility. A disgruntled employee was a source of operational weakness that I exploited dozens and dozens of times before, although in those cases it was for the sake of gaining a key into a restricted area or the password for a computer network.
This disgruntled employee would either have to escort the killer through the heavily guarded area, be one of those guards, or do the difficult task of grabbing the packages and doing it themselves. That was a big ask for anyone who made a living cleaning bedsheets and serving tea.
Okay – so how could we gain entry into that restricted wing without breaking the rules ourselves? The last thing I needed was to commit an additional act of social suicide by getting kicked out of the palace for trespassing. Letting Welt’s friends know that I was a murderous psychopath was more than enough to tarnish my reputation.
Not that I cared about my image, but it was a useful tool in getting what I wanted.
My connection with Theodore was the best bet, or somehow trying to connect the marriage interview process with Thersyn. I’d heard him described as a shockingly personable man despite being one of the most powerful rulers in the world. It was not unusual for him to become interested in the ongoing events among the branches of the family.
If I could get Theodore to talk to him about it, then he might become interested and invite me to speak with him. It was a long shot, but no less of a long shot than scrounging through every damnable room in the palace for what could potentially be a tiny package that might have already been taken by our target.
But covering all of the angles was the best way to stop an assassination from happening. Working the building like this was a prerequisite to success, and I could build a mental map of where things were in case it became urgent in the future. The only resource I was spending was downtime.
“Let’s head back to our rooms before any more of my suitors get stupid ideas.”
“Indeed,” Franklin concurred.