Alice's blade hung above Finn's throat and did not finish the last inch.
She was not looking at Finn anymore. She was not looking at James either, not at his face. Her eyes had gone past him, to the broken eclipse shaking behind his bowed head, leaking its thin silver-black light across the marble.
Her lips moved.
"Azrael…"
James opened his eyes.
The throne room arrived in him all at once, and it was too much.
He could hear Finn's heart. Beneath the smell of blood and burnt silk, under Marcus's ragged breathing, there it was, hammering fast and thin against Finn's ribs twenty feet away. He could hear Maeve's heart too, and Saoirse's, and the slower, wronger rhythm inside Alice that was not quite a heartbeat but wanted to be one.
