NOVEL WEB Chapter 247: Silence In Her Wake
Turning her back on the dying man, Xinying moved through the service corridor toward the heart of the palace.
Between the second and third gates, a guard stepped into her path. He was young; the green sash of his armor was tied a little too tight. His hand jerked toward his sword, but he failed to pull it out. The iron would not answer him now.
He blinked at his hand as he continued to tug the handle of the sword, confused, and looked up, ready to shout.
A hairpin that was no longer a hairpin sped from her sleeve with a thought and settled in the hollow of his throat. He dropped like a stalk of millet, not knowing that he had died until long after she had passed.
By the fourth gate, the musicians were playing again. Xinying shook her head as a slow smile appeared on her face. They weren't playing because the fear had passed, but because the master of ceremonies had snapped his fan and hissed that nothing was wrong.
Wasn't that a normal human reaction? Finding explanations for thing that were inexplicable? The doors always stuck in the cold… the hinges were old and someone had already been tasked with repairing them…that the royal family of Baiguang needed music, and they better preform if they value their life.
Someone laughed too loudly in agreement, but their voice sounded more like the sharp sound of breaking ice.
The ancestral hall was bright as the middle of the day, its lacquered pillars painted with coiling dragons, its columns wrapped in bands of hammered bronze, its rafters hung with jade tassels and silk banners the color of dark leaves.
The green of Baiguang was everywhere—on the banners, on the embroidered hems of the court robes, on the lacquered tray handles. A long table cut the room in two. At its head, set on a raised dais, the King of Baiguang sat in a throne of carved camphor. His wife, the Queen sat to his right, three of the multiple princes below the two of them, and a score of blood-kin beyond.
Ministers knelt in ordered rows. A priest poured wine into a bronze libation bowl as an ancestor tablet watched with painted eyes that had seen a hundred winters.
Someone had just said a prayer.
Someone else was lifting a cup.
They all turned their heads at once when the fifth gate swung inward of its own accord. Their actions coming to a complete stop.
With the smile still planted firmly on her face, Xinying stepped over the threshold and into the hall.
It was fourteen paces from were the gates hung to the high table. She took them all step by step, letting her feet echo in the silence around her.
No one spoke, not even the loud ones—not when her mist moved in ahead of her like a herald, sliding over the polished wood, dipping under sleeves and into lungs with the thick-sweet scent of baked apple and cinnamon. The first cough sounded like polite embarrassment. The second came sharp from a prince on the left. The Queen put a hand to her chest and blinked in confusion.
"Guards!" a minister rasped.
The guards in the corners tried. They really did. But their spears wouldn't lift, and the buckles of their breastplates had cinched shut like clenched fists, and the rivets in the doors had sunk deeper into the wood. One staggered forward anyway, brave in the way young men were when they believed the world was still the size of their breath. He drew the knife from his boot—bronze, not iron—and lunged.
Too bad for him that bronze was still a metal.
She caught his wrist, the blade never touching her. She twisted until the bones in his forearm rolled under his skin like pebbles, then let him drop. His knife stayed in her hand.
She did not want it. She did not need it. So instead of taking it back home with her, she left it in the throat of the next man who lunged at her.
And all because he had looked at her and smiled.
"Who are you?" the Queen whispered, turning pale as she watched the guards dropping one after another. Her voice shook in a way that said she hadn't been afraid of anything in a very long time.
Xinying didn't bother to answer. Instead, she let the air speak for her.
It turned thick. It turned sweet. Then, it turned black.
The King tried to stand, but his throne refused to let him go. Iron spikes hidden deep in the legs of the chair pushed outward at her bidding and split with a crack that silenced both the king and the queen at once. The King sprawled backward, his robes tangling as his crown slid off his head, his mouth opening and closing around a command he did not own anymore.
"Witch—" someone said, a half-hiss from the second row.
She walked past the priest's bowl and the ancestor tablets and put her hand on the green banner that had hung above Baiguang's kings since before anyone living could remember. The silk was heavy. It seemed like it was trying to fight her.
But nothing could ever stand in Xinying's way when she wanted something.
And in this case, it was the complete downfall of the Baiguang kingdom.
She let the banner fall across the high table where the wine was starting to pool and the cups lay on their sides. The green of the banner started to turn a muddled color, but at this point in time, the color didn't matter anymore.
"Daiyu—" a minister gasped.
She turned her head slightly, just enough for him to see her eyes. Blue. Cold. Certain.
"Does not wait," she announced. "And neither do I."
The words were not for the living in the room.
They weren't for the corridors, or for the kitchens. They weren't for the guards who would crawl to the threshold and die after taking a single look. And they weren't for the women who would wail and tear their hair and remember the sound of her voice long after her steps had faded.
The words of the Witch weren't even for the children who would try to say her name before their organs turned to rot and disintegrated into their body.
The last time she had sent out the mist, sent out her warnings, those who survived hadn't listened. This time, there was no reason to let anyone carry her warnings.
Now her warnings would be nothing but silence in her wake.