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The others were shouting now, the guards having to hold them down. Keil’s body shuddered under what had to be a web of power.

Then the pin launched toward me again, so fiercely that I had to throw it aside with a tendril of my specter.

A tendril that splintered out the moment I released it.

I heard myself scream as sparks exploded behind my eyes. This was a greater pain than any I’d felt during Arun’s prior assault, his power now viciously thin.

I whimpered as my specter fought to coalesce, the sensation like the stitch-and-pull of raw flesh. And I realized that Arun had been trying to goad me into Wielding, just so he could add another layer of agony to this suffering.

“You can’t harm her this way!” Goren’s voice boomed out. “It’s against Ansoran law!”

“Actually,” Arun said, pacing the tiles, “the law states that I cannot try Lady Alissa as a criminal of Ansora, and I will not. But I can certainly return her to her own king in whatever state I see fit.” Raw terror climbed inside me as his voice deepened with resentment. “If only I had done so when she first arrived, imagine how many lives might have been spared. Instead, she has continued to reap the favor of an empire she has done nothing but harm. Lady Alissa is a harbinger of ruin—a thorn in every court she enters. I will not allow her to become a thorn in mine.”

I was still shaking from the pain, trying to peel myself off the floor, when Keil said calmly, “It’s not your court.”

And Arun froze.

“Rheya may be injured,” Keil continued, “but as long as she breathes, this remains her court. Her empire. Or did you forget, Your Excellency?”

I glanced up to see that the guards had allowed Keil to rise to his knees. They were mumbling to him, holding him back by the shoulders.

“Please, Your Highness,” one of them whispered. “Don’t make it worse.”

But Keil went on, unyielding. “You want to know why Rheya never initiated you into the Gallery? Because you have never been anything more than a blade in her hand. And a blade always has to be controlled.”

Silence stretched, cut through by the heavy breathing all around. Keil was trying to draw Arun’s wrath upon himself, but Arun knew it.

Because the minister’s granite-carved features broke into a chilling smile. “I agree. We can’t have our beasts running wild, can we?” He stopped before Goren, and I tensed at the glint in his eyes. “Tell me, what trick kept this one in check for all these years? It will save me the trouble of breaking him in. After all, why should he spend his sentence taking up space in our prisons when he could be put to use?”

My stomach tumbled as Goren’s nostrils flared, in wrath and realization.

Because Arun wanted to do to him what the Orrenish hadn’t been able to manage.

“Perhaps I’ll let you watch the demonstration, Miss Kimba,” he said coolly, meeting Osana’s glare. “It seems, after our time apart, you could use the reminder.” He turned to the guards. “Take the traitors to the prisons. Separate cells.”

Then his gaze locked on mine, and I knew he was thinking about what I’d said in the council chamber. How I—the girl who’d somehow gained the immunity he’d always craved—had humiliated him before the people whose favor he needed most.

“Take Lady Alissa straight to my workroom,” he said darkly. “I think we ought to spend some time together before her voyage back to Daradon.”

I was scrambling to think of a way out of this, my power still in tatters, when Osana spoke up.

“Lady Alissa possesses royal immunity and the protection of the Ansoran Gallery.” Her voice was low with new authority, but she wasn’t speaking to Arun. She was speaking to the guards. The people she had once worked beside, fought beside. “You know what that means,” she continued steadily. “You know he has no right to do this.”

As the guards stirred with discomfort, Osana’s gaze flicked to Keil in silent collusion, and I realized what they were doing. And realized, too, that Keil’s earlier words about Rheya hadn’t been for Arun after all.

They’d been for the only other people in this room who had the power to stop this.

“I told you,” Arun said, his voice like acid, “to take the lady away.”

A few guards shook themselves and strode toward me.

“Leave her,” Keil snapped. Unbelievably, the guards faltered.

Arun’s eye twitched, a thread of his composure coming loose. So loose that he clearly hadn’t noticed the stillness of Keil’s body, no longer shuddering beneath a spectral web.

The guards had released him.

Keil’s laughter rumbled, smooth and molten. “They’re not the fools you treat them as. They know what you really are. They know you don’t hurt people because you have to, but because you like to.” Arun’s expression darkened with each word, his fists clenching at his sides. “And the imperial guards of Ansora,” Keil continued, his head held high, “will never break their backs for a monster.”