Chapter 20: What Cade Took

The knife had gone in, and it was not in me.

I lay on my back in the wet grass with a man's weight across my chest. His black hair was in my face.

"Ghost," Cade said, an inch from my ear. His voice was a thread. "Get your arm up, you idiot."

The hilt stood out of his back, just under the shoulder blade. Silver. Black lines were already spreading from it.

"Cade."

"Don't talk," I said.

Over his shoulder I saw the Rogue King.

He had stopped three feet away, with his empty hand still held out. He was staring at what he had done.

For the first time in his life, he had no smile.

Fifty rogues stood behind him. They had watched a king break the white law in front of two armies.

The silence was total.

"He yielded," Rowan said. His voice came flat and terrible out of the ring. "He bowed his head. And he drew on her back."

No one answered him.

A graying rogue in the front of the fifty, with a scar through his lip, let his spear fall in the grass.

It rang on the stones.

Another dropped his. Then ten more.

"My sons," the Rogue King said. "My sons, she turned her back on me, I only"

"You turned her back," said the scarred rogue. "We all saw."

He looked at the others and spat on the ground.

"Your own law," he said. "You swore it on the Goddess."

The Rogue King took a step back. Nobody went with him.

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