Chapter 7: The Recording

Two hundred rifles were pointed at me, and I put my hand up slowly, palm out.

"Wait," I said. "Let me show you the whole thing."

"We've seen the whole thing," the River Alpha said.

"You've seen ten seconds missing from a broadcast. Dorian cut them. Watch what the king saw."

I raised the Seal.

The red stone was warm against my thumb.

The Keeper had told me one more thing at the Hollow, in the whisper of a woman who knows time is short.

The stone has a rim, and you can turn it, and it will play slower.

I turned it a quarter turn and pressed it flat to the screen at the end of the hall.

The broadcast flickered and went black.

Then the picture came back, from the height of a king's hip, low and shaky and true.

The hall gasped.

It showed Dorian walk up beside me with his hand on his holster.

It showed the gun come out.

It showed it level, steady, pointed at my chest.

"Father-in-law," Dorian's voice said sweetly, "it's time."

The sound was slow and deep, every word stretched out.

Then, under it, so soft that nobody in the Moonhall had caught it, another voice.

"Now," said Percival.

It carried across the whole River hall.

Every head turned toward my uncle.

He had gone the color of paper.

"That's nothing," he said. "That's a trick of the stone."

"It's your voice," a River wolf said from the wall.

"Anyone can make a voice."

"It's your voice, my lord," said a woman, clear and hard. "I've heard you at the council for twenty years."

The recording played on.

My father stepped in front of me, and the bullet hit him with a flat, ugly crack.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Survived My Father's Test and Took His Throne from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.