Ch 90: Blood

Olivia stood with her mouth hung open. She had been listening to everything from start to finish. And, she could not believe what she had just heard.

She could only imagine the devastation these assassins, whom she had been thinking of as kidnappers all this time, would have brought had they succeeded in their plan.

She had thought them suspicious from the beginning because she had seen these so-called kidnappers moving with a stealth and agility far too refined for an elf kidnappers, yet she had been unable to think it through properly given how rapidly everything had unfolded. How they had attacked simultaneously, how they had left her guards broken and scattered, how they had swiftly seized both her and her dear brother.

And only after waking from unconsciousness, for however long she had been under, with nothing in her mind but the singular drive to escape, they had managed to do exactly that. What she was struggling to reconcile now was the fact that their escape had been the assassins' plan all along. They had let her and her brother go intentionally. The ones she had believed she killed, the ones that had caught up to them during the chase, had all been illusions and decoys conjured through some artefacts and tools. She and Joseph had been following their script perfectly from the very beginning.

From being taken captive, to being permitted to escape, to being given the false satisfaction of believing they had killed some of their pursuers. It had all been meticulously planned. The more she heard, the more she struggled to accept it.

All her life she had prided herself on being able to see through things, though Joseph would never agree to that, but she had always been reasonably sharp and perceptive. To have missed all of this, to have mistaken trained assassins for mere kidnappers, felt unforgivably naive of her.

She had noticed how suspicious they were, how they had covered themselves entirely in black cloaks, yet she had reasoned herself into a comfortable explanation, telling herself that kidnappers simply wished to conceal their faces. Kidnapping elves, they would naturally hide their identities. So she had believed them to be nothing more than that. Trained, powerful kidnappers, certainly, but she should have questioned far sooner how men of that calibre had so thoroughly killed and injured the guards she had brought with her.

Though, she had to admit, the guards she had chosen to bring were not her finest. That had been entirely her own fault, born from her stubborn desire to hunt the beasts herself without being shadowed by those hulking, overbearing guards. She had not wanted to bring any guards at all, truth be told, but through persistent insistence from her parents she had relented and brought a small company, and they had failed completely in protecting her and her brother.

So she could not help but steal glances at Lucien, who had mercilessly slaughtered every last one of these assassins. How could a boy around her age be this powerful? While her own guards had crumbled entirely, he had cut them all down single-handedly with such ease that his black shirt bore not a single stain of blood, nor his fitted black trousers, nor any patch of his bare skin, nor a single strand of his dark hair.

How is this even possible? Is he really my age? Olivia screamed internally. She was on the verge of pulling her hair apart simply trying to piece everything together.

Her eyes drifted to her brother, who had been staring at the last struggling assassin. The man's arms had been broken and lay limply at his sides against the ground. Joseph stood with his arms crossed over his chest, wearing a grim, unreadable expression.

"I don't know more than this." The assassin rasped, his voice trembling, his eyes fixed on Lucien with undisguised terror. "All I know is that we were supposed to kill the girl and allow the boy to escape."

Olivia wanted to drive her fist straight into the bastard's face but held herself back. She could not help clenching her teeth as she imagined what would have become of her had they not stumbled upon Lucien. The worst of it was that Lucien could have simply vanished and left them to their fate, because she had witnessed firsthand the speed with which he moved. It was a speed she had only ever seen in a very small handful of people, and the thing that would not stop gnawing at her mind was that he was so infuriatingly, impossibly fucking handsome and far too powerful for someone his age. Every rumour she had dismissed as exaggeration had turned out to be fucking true.

Holy fucking shit was all she had been thinking since the moment it all became clear.

"Who ordered you to do it?" Joseph pressed.

The assassin drew a slow breath, his voice growing weaker with each word. "I don't know. Only the boss would know." He swallowed with visible effort. "All I know is that we were supposed to let you escape and chase you to the ends of the empire, lay the blame on the Eldoryn Empire, and stage the deaths of some of us so that the Prince could escape barely alive."

The assassin's answers had grown repetitive. He had said the same things multiple times now, circling back to the same admissions that he did not know the full picture, that her brother had been meant to survive, that killing her was the true objective. They had been tasked with making the whole affair look convincing enough for her and Joseph to believe they had overcome their pursuers and fought their way free, constructing a situation where she would ultimately be killed while Joseph escaped in a broken, half-dead state.

"You wanted our kingdom to attack the empire." Joseph murmured thoughtfully, pressing a hand to his chin. "You would have had me return home and tell everyone that the empire had sent assassins to kill us, that I had barely escaped with my life, and in seeking vengeance our kingdom would have thrown away the peace treaty entirely."

What took you so long? She knew she was the sharper one between the two of them even if he would never admit it. She would have voiced that thought had the situation been anything less than grim and had they not been standing in the midst of this hellish miasma forest of notorious beasts.

"Lord, pl..please let me go." The assassin pleaded, his gaze lifting desperately toward Lucien. "I have told you everything." His voice shook as he met Lucien's eyes.

Lucien did not answer. In the span of a blink, perhaps even faster than that, he drove his sword through the chest of the now prone man and withdrew it in a single clean motion, blood welling up and spilling freely as the assassin went still, eyes frozen open with shock fixed on Lucien's face.

"Why?" Joseph cried out. "We could have interrogated him further or used him to find the people behind all of this."

Lucien turned to Joseph with the same impassive expression Olivia had begun to grow accustomed to. "You don't seem to understand the full picture." His voice was ice cold. "They were sent by the five kingdoms."

Olivia drew in a long, slow breath. Joseph, for his part, lifted his index finger and pointed it directly at Lucien, his hand visibly trembling. "But wh..why?" he managed.

Olivia moved quickly and pushed her brother's hand down, lowering the pointing finger, because she had felt the tension radiating off the northern blade and feared that gesture alone might snap something in him. She exhaled in quiet relief when Lucien's expression did not shift. Perhaps she had imagined the danger. Perhaps not. But she had felt, with bone-deep certainty, that Lucien had been a single breath away from breaking Joseph's pointed finger.

"Because they want the empire occupied," Olivia answered, letting her voice carry the weight of the conclusion she had already reached. "They want the empire's forces redirected away from the front lines currently stationed against the five kingdoms, and they want the peace treaty between our kingdom and the empire shattered. To accomplish that, one of us had to die. Since our parents are more devoted to me and since I am the greater threat to them, they chose me as the one to kill." She allowed the words to settle before adding, without softening the blow for her brother's sake, "Killing me would wound our parents in a way that would make them blind with rage and point that rage squarely at the empire, and it would also mean our kingdom losing its most likely future queen."

Joseph made a visible effort to conceal the embarrassment and hurt crossing his face, and eventually gave a stiff nod. He would recover from it. She knew that well enough.

Olivia noticed Lucien incline his head in quiet confirmation. "Though they were mistaken in thinking that killing a princess would be enough to trigger an immediate war." He seemed to know something neither she nor her brother was privy to, and Joseph caught it as well, taking a step toward Lucien before Olivia placed a firm hand on his arm to stop him from doing anything reckless.

"I won't dismiss your words," Olivia said carefully, stepping in before her brother could say something that might make the situation worse. She had seen more than enough of what Lucien was capable of. "But my parents would likely have waged an immediate war regardless."

"I doubt that." Lucien replied, and offered no further explanation.

Olivia wanted to press him on it, but Lucien rose to his feet before she could find the words. With a single sharp motion he shook the blood from his sword, the crimson blood scattering cleanly from the blade, and then the sword simply disappeared. She had never seen a sword like it, so vicious in its design and so deeply black that it seemed to dissolve entirely into the surrounding darkness. The jutting thorns along its blade were unlike anything she had ever encountered on any other weapon.

"What kind of sword is that?" Joseph breathed, half dazed and half covetous in a way that was painfully obvious.

"Half-sentient." Lucien's words were as cold as ever. "It is my beloved sword. Darkness." Olivia had not expected him to answer at all.

"Just half-sentient?" Joseph muttered under his breath, the disappointment audible in his voice, and had already opened his mouth to continue when Olivia clapped her hand firmly over it. Did her brother not hear the word beloved come from Lucien's mouth? Did he not understand that it meant this was the man's most treasured weapon?

Joseph's voice came out in muffled, indignant sounds against her palm. Only after a few long seconds did she release him, fixing him with a long, pointed glare until he gave a small nod of understanding, acknowledging the gravity of his near mistake.

"Sorr-" Joseph began.

Before the word could leave his mouth fully, Lucien's sword materialised once again in his grip. In a movement faster than any he had made before, faster than anything Olivia had witnessed from him yet, the blade came to rest beside Joseph's neck with terrifying precision. This time, it drew a thin line of blood.

***

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