Crush the King (Crown of Shards #3)(77)

Dahlia had said that Maeven loved her children, and this evening Maeven had shown far more worry and concern for Leonidas than I’d expected.

After all these months of battling the bitch, I could finally do something to hurt Maeven the way she’d hurt me. I could finally take something away from her the way she’d taken so much away from me.

I could kill her son and send his body back to her in bloody pieces.

Maybe I was a horrible person for even thinking such an awful thing. Maybe the mere idea made me just as cruel and heartless as Maximus. But the longer I looked at Leonidas, the more I could hear the screams of Isobel, the cook master who’d been like a second mother to me, along with Cordelia, Madelena, and my murdered cousins ringing in my ears, and the more I could see Maeven smiling while the turncoat guards cut down everyone on the Seven Spire lawn, including the children.

So many dead, bloody, broken children.

Leonidas must have seen the play of emotions on my face, because he straightened a bit more. “I don’t care what you do to me,” he repeated. His voice didn’t waver, but I could smell his dusty resignation. “But please don’t hurt Lyra. Please?”

His last word came out as a low, ragged whisper, and tears filled his eyes. The tears, along with the sharp scent of his worry, made me think that he wasn’t crying for himself, but rather at the thought of all the horrible ways I could torture his beloved strix.

In that moment, I realized that I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t kill this boy in cold blood, not even after he’d halfheartedly tried to kill me. That was a line I just couldn’t—wouldn’t—cross, not even to get my much-desired revenge on Maeven.

I let out a tense breath, backed away from him, and lowered my sword. “I’m not going to hurt you or Lyra.”

Leonidas stayed stiff and frozen up against the support pole. Suspicion filled his face. “But you thought about it.”

“Yes. I thought about it.”

He frowned and cocked his head to the side. The quizzical look and bobbing motion reminded me of how Lyra had studied me earlier. The strix was still in her cage, peering through the bars at us.

“Then why didn’t you go ahead and kill me? Uncle Maximus would have. So would Mercer and Nox.” He paused. “And my mother. None of them would have hesitated.”

“I know. But that’s not the kind of person, not the kind of queen, I want to be.”

As soon as I said the words, I realized how true they were—and how wrong I had been about my Regalia strategy.

An assassin’s arrow and wormroot poison were Mortan games. I might be able to engage in such plots, but my heart wasn’t truly in those sorts of sly machinations, which was one of the reasons my efforts to kill Maximus had failed so far.

I needed to change my strategy to play to my strengths. That meant focusing on the things Serilda and Xenia had taught me—how to fight and how to spy. That’s how I had won my crown, and that’s how I would keep it, along with my life.

“My mother would say that makes you weak,” Leonidas said in a chiding, singsong voice, as if he were repeating something he’d been told many times.

“I am not weak,” I snapped. “I will do what I must to protect myself and my kingdom. But there is a difference between being strong and being cruel, and killing you would just be cruel.”

Leonidas’s frown deepened, as if he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t killing him anyway, despite my explanation. Then again, I doubted the boy had seen anything other than cruelty in his life, so I couldn’t blame him for not understanding the concept of not indulging in it.

Leonidas opened his mouth, probably to ask another question, but then his eyes widened, and the scent of his surprise washed over me.

That was all the warning I had before I was attacked—again.

*

My gladiator training, survival instinct, or maybe even luck took over, and I whirled to my right, barely avoiding the knife that whistled past my body. I whipped up my sword and turned to face my enemy—

And ran straight into someone’s fist.

Well, I supposed it was less about my running into their fist and more about them actually hitting me, but pain exploded in my jaw, my feet flew out from under me, and I landed hard on my ass. White stars winked on and off in my eyes, and everything blurred. I blinked and blinked, trying to focus and ignore the ache that radiated out from my jaw and pounded up into my skull.

Two men and a woman were looming over me, their black cloaks marking them as Fortuna Mint geldjagers. One of the men was grinning and cracking his knuckles. He must have been the one who’d hit me, and he had some mutt strength, judging from the pain still rippling through my face.

“Stay down.” He sneered. “Or I’ll put you down again.”

I started to scramble to my feet, but he slammed his fist into my face again. This time, my whole body snapped back against the ground, including my head, and I groaned as a fresh wave of pain exploded in my skull.

“That’s enough, Jerome,” the woman said. “We need her alive, remember?”

Jerome cracked his knuckles again. “I think you mean mostly alive, Kenna.”

She shrugged. “You know what I mean. Now get her up.”

Jerome leaned down. I had managed to hang on to my sword, so I lashed out with it, trying to cut him, but it was a weak, awkward blow. Jerome wrested my weapon away and flung it across the tent.