The Executed Empress Proposed to His Scarred Brother novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: The Night Before
The case lay open on the table, and nobody had touched what was in it.
There was a black wool hood, and a long plain sword in a worn scabbard, and a folded paper under a lump of red wax.
The chamberlain had gone.
The drums at the north gate had fallen quiet at dusk, and the tower was silent.
Ilarion broke the seal and read the paper standing up.
He read it twice.
Then he held it out to her without a word.
It was in Caelum's hand, and it was short.
Iseult Valcour was charged with treason, for calling a foreign army to the capital.
The sentence belonged to a kinsman of the throne, as it always had.
The Grand Duke would carry it out himself, the morning after the vows.
That was his oath, sworn at twenty-one.
If he refused, the Dragon March was forfeit, and his three captains would hang at noon.
She read it to the end.
Her hands did not shake.
She had thought they would.
"The bride's peace ends at the vows," she said.
"Yes."
"He has it in writing now."
"Yes."
"Ilarion, sit down. There is something I have to say, and I have waited too long."
He sat on the edge of the bed, with his big hands hanging between his knees.
She stood in front of him with the paper still in her fingers.
She told him the way a clerk reads a list, because that was the only way she could get through it.
"The dream was not a dream," she said.
"I lived six years as the Empress, and the north starved under my seal."
"Then I was beheaded in the Courtyard of Bells."
He did not move.
"The man in the black hood was kind to me at the end."
She turned his right hand over in hers and laid her thumb along the long seam on his forearm.
"It was this hand. It was you."
The room was very quiet.
A log shifted in the grate.
Ilarion looked at his own forearm for a long time.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Executed Empress Proposed to His Scarred Brother are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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