Fear went through Royal and took everything else with it. He made himself go forward.
Daniel was lying at the end of the passage, and there was so much blood on him that for a moment Royal could not find where the man ended and the ruin began. He dropped to his knees beside him and called his name, and called it again.
Daniel coughed weakly. "You're late."
"I'm sorry." Royal's hands were shaking and he could not make them stop. "I'm sorry, I should have been faster, I should have — who did this? Tell me who did this."
"They're already dead," Daniel said. "All of them." He got the words out slowly, in pieces. "After I got out of the hall they chased me in here. A great many of them. I killed every single one."
He had. Royal could see the evidence of it back along the passage, and there had been far too many for one man.
"But one of them reached you," Royal said.
"One of them reached me."
"You couldn't leave me even one?" Royal's voice broke on it. "Not one, so that I could take revenge?"
Daniel smiled, faintly. "You know I hate leaving unfinished business behind."
Royal opened the man's coat and looked at the wound and understood, with a despair that arrived all at once, that it was far too deep. There was nothing here that could be saved.
"Royal," Daniel said. "Will you grant me one final wish?"
"Yes." He did not even wait to hear it. "Anything. What is it?"
"Protect my kingdom."
Royal stared at him. "You just told me you never leave unfinished business behind."
Daniel coughed, and there was blood in it, and he was still smiling. "This is different," he said. "You look exactly like me. You can take my place. You can rule it, and no one will ever know." He drew a breath that cost him. "And with this face, you were never going to be able to live an ordinary life anyway. Not in this world. So the best thing — the best thing left — is for you to protect it in my place."
Royal could not answer.
"And protect my brother," Daniel said. "Protect Laurian. He's innocent. He's naive, he's far too kind, he will not survive alone. Promise me."
"I promise," Royal said, weeping openly now. "I'll do exactly as you wish. All of it."
Daniel gave him one last smile, and died in his arms.
Royal shook him. He knew better and he shook him anyway, and told him to stop joking and wake up, and told him again, and no response ever came. Eventually he stopped shaking him and lowered his head onto the dead man's chest and let the truth into the room.
From this moment on, he thought, I will become Daniel.
And Royal will simply become a nameless corpse that the world forgets.
He found something strangely ironic in it, in the middle of everything else. When he first came to this world he had abandoned his original name completely — had handed it over without a fight, because it meant nothing here. Now the person who had given him a new one was gone forever, and somehow he had ended up carrying two names instead of none at all.
He could not hold it back any longer. He broke down and cried beside Daniel's body, and there was no one in the passage to see it.
After a time he made himself get up. He drew off his cloak and covered Daniel with it carefully, and understood, sickened, that he could not take the body out with him now. So he made a second promise on top of the first: that he would come back one day and give this man a proper funeral, in the ground, with his name on it.
"I'll fulfill your final wish," he said quietly. "I'll protect your kingdom properly. I swear it."
Before he left, he took Daniel's sword.
Laurian was probably still alive somewhere — he had only disappeared, and no one had produced a body or a proof. Royal turned that over as he moved and let it harden into something like a plan. He would find him.
When he came out of the hidden passage, there were men waiting outside it, a good many of them, and he knew every face. These were the people Daniel had personally trained and personally trusted over the years. If Daniel had trusted them, he could trust them too.
"Your Highness — are you all right?"
Royal straightened. His voice, when it came, was perfectly calm.
"Everyone is to leave the palace immediately."