The dagger pressed against Benjamin's throat came from the left, from Rihan's hand, and it made contact with the precision of someone who had spent time learning exactly where to place a blade for effect without committing to a particular outcome.
"Rihan," Benjamin said, very quietly. "What are you doing."
The garden was suddenly a different kind of quiet. The maid had frozen mid-motion, tea service arrested, fan held at an angle that no longer made any breeze. The fountains continued.
Vincent stepped past the group and put his pistol level with King Nasubi's considerable forehead.
The king's guardian spirit beast had been watching all three of them since they crossed the garden threshold. It had spent that entire walk in a state of increasing cognitive dissonance, because what it was seeing with its eyes and what it was sensing through the specifically attuned awareness of a spirit beast built to protect did not match. The man pointing a gun at the king had no hostile intent that the beast could feel. No murderous edge, no fear-spike of someone committing to violent action. It was like watching a person mime drinking water and finding the cup was somehow full.
"His Highness the Fourth Prince extends his greetings," Rihan said, the blade steady.
Nasubi looked at the gun without adjusting his posture. He was a large man who had made peace with what he was, and his relationship with mortality appeared to be one of long acquaintance.
"Is that so," he said.
"The king will abdicate," Vincent said, pleasantly. "In favor of the Fourth Prince. Now, if you would."
"Outrageous," Benjamin said, through his teeth, the precise enunciation of a man who was furious in a formal way.
"Otherwise," Rihan said, with the tone of someone delivering a business proposal, "the First Prince will be harmed."
"Rihan, you ingrate!" Benjamin snarled at Rihan. "How long have you served under me! The Fourth Prince offers you— what? What could he possibly—"
"Nothing at all," Rihan said, and smiled. "But serving you for years was honestly not very enjoyable."
The maid's expression had migrated to a complicated place.
Nasubi set down his tea. "A prince who conspires to assassinate his king and his brother forfeits his claim under the succession statutes. You're aware of this."
"We're simply asking you to abdicate," Vincent said. "Voluntary. Clean."
"Wishful thinking," Nasubi said.
The three-beat pause that followed was the pause of someone running a specific calculation, and then Liam released Benjamin from the Star Mark.
The first prince, consciousness snapping back to full authority over his own body, had approximately half a second of assessment before he moved. His read of the room was rapid and expert: Rihan with the blade at his throat, Vincent with the weapon on his father, the king sitting still and watching. The math was immediate. He was already moving by the time the conscious decision formed.
He hit Rihan's forearm with his elbow, hard, not perfectly (his own neck was still in proximity to the blade), and the dagger opened a line on the side of his neck as he broke the contact. He ignored it. He crossed the distance to the king in two strides and put himself in front of Nasubi.
Vincent's gun butt came down on the back of his head.
It connected properly. Benjamin staggered, blood immediately running from the scalp wound, and caught himself against the king's rattan chair. His hands were on the chair arms, framing his father, holding himself upright. His eyes weren't focusing cleanly.
"Father," he managed, on the second attempt.
Nasubi looked at his eldest son: bleeding from the neck and the head, blood on the hands, body between the king and the threat. The king's expression was the expression of a man who had seen the inside of several succession crises and had opinions about what he was looking at.
His eyes moved to something just behind Benjamin's left shoulder.
A very small pentagram, rose-gold, recently settled.
The king's gaze returned to the level of a man receiving information and declining to react to it until he had processed it fully.
Vincent lined up the shot he'd been holding. The Star Mark on the back of Benjamin's neck was small and precise, and the round punched through it cleanly. Benjamin's body processed this as a sharp impact to the upper back and the specific unraveling sensation of Manipulation release, and his legs became uncertain about their purpose.
He went down holding onto the chair, taking a portion of the tea service with him.
The king watched his eldest son on the garden path, hands pressing uselessly at the neck wound, eyes blurring at the edges. He tried to speak. The neck injury made this an aspirational exercise rather than a functional one.
He knew. Liam had felt the knowledge arrive through the possession the moment the scenario resolved: Benjamin understood that he had been used as a staged victim by another prince. He was running through the candidates. Tserriednich was too arrogant to move before the formal start. The third prince was too invested in his wise-statesman reputation. The math kept returning to Camilla.
Whether or not the math was accurate was almost beside the point. What mattered was that the first prince was bleeding in a garden, and the king was Star Marked, and there was now a plausible narrative of Tserriednich acting against the royal family.
"Benjamin," the king said, the single word carrying several things simultaneously.
Two servants were already running.
In the operational room, Liam had settled "Ellie" into a posture that implied she had someone's head on her lap, which she did not, but the visual approximated the post-dramatic tension of a general who had just concluded a complicated operation and was taking a moment.
"You don't plan to keep him, do you," Camilla said.
"For now, I need him to issue some edicts," Liam said, with the comfortable tone of someone managing multiple ongoing projects. "Searching Tserriednich's properties. Whatever protocol covers that."
"Camilla wants the throne," Camilla said.
"We'll get there."
Kurapika, who had been following the summary of events with the focused expression of a person sorting priorities in real time, said: "The Scarlet Eyes. If a royal edict authorizes the search of Tserriednich's properties—"
"You'll have access to wherever he stores them," Liam said. "Yes. That's the point." He tilted his head. "The abdication part is optional. The search authorization is not."
"Poor acting," Camilla said, regarding the recap.
"The tears were very convincing," Liam said, not particularly bothered.
"You controlled his tear glands."
"I controlled the tear glands."
Kurapika said nothing. He had reached the part of the calculation where the method was not the issue and the outcome was.
Through the king's eyes, on the other side of the city, Liam was looking at the garden and the staff who had gathered around the first prince and the distant sound of the palace's internal alarm beginning, and the king's guardian spirit beast sitting approximately two feet away and examining him with the doubled attention of something that had decided to be thorough about this.
It couldn't feel any malice from the king.
It also couldn't feel anything particularly like Nasubi.
It was working this out in the patient, methodical way of an entity that had no mechanism for processing the conclusion it was arriving at, and Liam watched it arrive and felt some sympathy.
He looked at his borrowed double chin in a reflective surface nearby.
"Alright," the king of Kakin said to himself, in a voice that was mostly Nasubi's. "Where do we keep the royal seal."