“You need to leave immediately,” Kylar said loudly enough that all the nobles could hear him. “There’s at least two hundred more highlanders coming over West Kingsbridge. They’re probably the ones fighting in the courtyard right now. If you want to live, collect whatever weapons you can and free the soldiers who are trapped downstairs. Others are already heading there. With them, you can make it out of the castle. You can start a resistance. You’ve already lost the castle; you’ve lost the city. If you don’t move fast, you’ll lose your lives.”

The news hit the nobles crowding around Kylar like cold water. Some of them shrank even more, but a few of them seemed to find their backbones as he spoke.

“We’ll fight, sir,” Terah Graesin said. “But some of us have been poisoned—”

“I know those poisons. If you’ve lived this long, you’ve taken a small enough dose that you’ll recover within a half hour. Where’s Logan Gyre?”

“Excuse me, I’m Terah Graesin, now Queen Graesin. If you—”

Kylar’s eyes narrowed. “Where’s. Logan. Gyre?”

“Dead. He’s dead. The king’s dead. The queen’s dead. The princesses are dead, all of them.”

The world rocked. Kylar felt as if he’d been clubbed in the stomach. “Are you sure? Did you see it?”

“We were with the king in the Great Hall when he died, and I found the queen and her younger daughters in their chambers before I got caught. They were . . . it was awful.” She shook her head. “I didn’t see Logan and Jenine, but they must have been the first to die. After the king announced their marriage, they’d not left the Great Hall ten minutes before the coup started. The lord general took men to try to save them, but he was too late. These men were just bragging about how they slaughtered the royal guards.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, but it’s too—”

“Does anyone know where Logan went?” Kylar shouted.

He saw from the looks on their faces that some of them knew, but they weren’t going to tell him because they were afraid he would leave them. The cowards. He heard a moan further back in the garden and he pushed through the standing nobles to see a pasty pale man sweating on his back. His mouth was crusted with froth and there was a puddle of vomit near his head. He looked so bad that Kylar almost didn’t recognize him. It was Count Drake.

Kylar knelt by the count and grabbed leaves from his herb pouch and began stuffing them in the count’s mouth.

“You have an antidote?” one of the sick but standing nobles asked. “Give it to me.”

“Give it to me!” another demanded. They began pushing forward. Kylar whipped Retribution out and put the point on a noble’s throat.