Chapter 13 The Enemy Within

The fight was brutal and desperate. Corbin was a skilled swordsman, his blade an extension of his will, his movements precise and lethal. But Edward fought with something Corbin could not understand—the fury of a man who had spent his entire life being told he was nothing, who had been denied his heritage, his family, his right to exist. He fought with the anger of twenty-three years of shame and humiliation, and that anger gave him strength that Corbin could not match. They clashed steel against steel, the sound ringing through the cavern like a bell. Corbin pressed the attack, his blade a blur of silver and death, but Edward parried and countered, his movements growing more confident with each passing moment. He was not the most skilled fighter in the cavern, but he was the most determined, and determination was a weapon that skill could not match. You are good, Corbin admitted, a grudging respect in his voice. But good is not enough. He feinted left, then struck right, and Edward barely managed to block the blow. The impact traveled up his arm, numbing his fingers, but he held on, refused to let the sword fall. Give up, Corbin said. You cannot win. Your father died trying. His father died trying. The crown has chosen you, but that does not mean you can use it. Power is not inherited, Edward. It is taken. Then I will take it, Edward said. He charged, abandoning defense for offense, throwing himself at Corbin with the desperation of a man who had nothing left to lose. Corbin staggered back, surprised by the ferocity of the attack, and for a moment Edward had the opening he needed. He struck. The blade cut deep, and Corbin fell, his sword clattering to the stone floor, his face a mask of shock and pain. Edward stood over him, breathing hard, his own body aching from the fight. Die, Corbin whispered. Die, bastard. Edward looked down at him, his heart hammering, his mind full of conflicting emotions. He could kill Corbin. He should kill Corbin. It was self-defense, justice, revenge. But something stopped him, something deeper than rage, something that connected him to his father, to his grandfather, to the line of kings that had ruled the western islands before Aldric's betrayal. He sheathed his knife and turned away. Live with what you have done. He walked to the pedestal and picked up the crown. It was warm in his hands, alive with a power that hummed beneath his skin, and as he lifted it above his head, the cavern erupted with light. The crown spoke, its voice echoing through the stone, through the water, through the island itself. By blood and by right, by truth and by justice, I proclaim Edward of Northgate, son of Gareth and Isabella, heir of Edmund the Third, the true King of the Western Isles. The light faded, and Edward stood alone in the cavern, the crown in his hands, the weight of a kingdom resting on his shoulders. He had done it. He had claimed his birthright. But the work was not done. Aldric still sat on the throne, and the people still lived in fear. And Edward knew that the crown was only the beginning. The tunnel was narrow and dark, the walls slick with moisture, the floor uneven with stone and debris. Edward led the way, his hand on his knife, his senses alert for any sign of danger. Behind him, Torren and the other loyalists followed in single file, their footsteps muffled by the soft earth that covered the floor. The tunnel sloped downward, descending into the heart of the island, and Edward could feel the weight of the stone above him, the centuries of accumulated earth and rock pressing down like the hand of history. He thought of his father, who had sought this same crown, who had died trying to find it, and he felt a surge of determination that tightened his chest. After what felt like an eternity, the tunnel opened into a vast cavern, and Edward stopped breathing. The cavern was enormous, a natural cathedral carved from the living rock, its ceiling lost in darkness, its walls adorned with crystalline formations that caught the light of their lamps and scattered it into rainbow patterns. And in the center of the cavern, on a pedestal of white marble, sat the Crown of Saint Edmund. The echo of the proclamation died slowly, going from voice to murmur to a silence so complete that Edward could hear water dripping somewhere far below the floor. He turned the crown over in his hands and saw, engraved inside the band where no crowd would ever look, four words worn shallow by age: FOR ISABELLA, UNAFRAID. His mother's name, cut into gold by hands that had loved her, hidden all these years under a thief's treasury of dust. He pressed his thumb against the letters until they hurt his skin. A scrape of leather on stone made him turn. Corbin was gone—not dead, then—and a thread of dark blood led away between two crystal pillars toward a fissure that breathed cold salt air. The sea lay down there somewhere, eating its way through the island's roots. Edward weighed pursuit against the open tunnel behind him and chose the tunnel; a wounded man running toward Aldric would bring word faster than any letter, but by then Edward meant to be beyond reach. At the tunnel mouth Torren stood with the lamp raised, two fingers pinched around his own knife hilt, watching the dark behind them both. You live, the old smuggler said, as if confirming cargo against a manifest. And more than that, Edward answered, holding up the crown so its light caught. Now we carry proof, and every mile between here and Blackstone has to be bought with our feet. Torren grunted, shouldered his pack, and took the front of the line without another word. They counted paces as they went, the way smugglers do, and Torren marked every third hundred on the wall with chalk he kept for exactly this purpose. The air changed twice—once where a fault let in the smell of pine roots, once where water ran somewhere out of sight—and each time the loyalists tightened their single file and passed the whisper forward like ammunition. Edward walked last, so that no man behind him would see the crown's light through his coat, and he thought about how strange it was that the hardest part of carrying a kingdom was keeping it from glowing. The Enemy Within - Continued