Long May She Reign(27)

“You think someone else is attacking you?”

“I don’t know.” How many people could want me dead? How many reasons could there be? “It makes sense.”

“But why?” Naomi said. “Why would they want to kill you? Because they want the crown for themselves?”

“Perhaps.” But then I shook my head. “That servant—if she was involved, why would she sacrifice herself like that to put some other noble on the throne? Unless she’s innocent, she had to have known she’d get caught. She had to have known. Why would any servant do that to have one person on the throne instead of another?”

“Blackmail, maybe,” Naomi said. “Money. You know how court works.”

But the pieces didn’t fit. It had to be something more, something that carried more weight than gold and threats. The servant had to believe I needed to die, believe so deeply that she was willing to die herself to ensure that it happened. Which suggested the Gustavites, as Thorn had said.

And yet the attacks were so different . . . how could they be from the same group, with the same motivation?

I had to learn more. I had to know what they believed, what they wanted, what motivated them. I had to understand them, if I had any hope of surviving.

I raked my fingers through my hair again, and turned back to Naomi. “But I don’t know how court works,” I said softly. “That’s the problem.”





NINE


“HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE KNOWN ABOUT THE POISON attempt last night? You should have eyes everywhere.” My father banged his fist against the council table, making it shake. I flinched, but Thorn, master of intelligence, stared him down.

“We do have eyes everywhere,” she said. “But mistakes were made.”

“Mistakes where the queen is almost killed.”

“Yes,” Thorn said. “I can only apologize for that, and apologies mean little. But the taster is alive, and no one else was harmed.”

“That is not an excuse. Your queen could have died.”

“Perhaps you should not be serving on this council, Sofia,” Norling said, “if you cannot perform your job correctly.”

“I am doing my job,” Thorn snapped. “And now we have more evidence to work with. The servant last night had connections with the Gustavites. She told us so.”

I leaned forward. “What do you mean, connections?”

“Your Majesty?”

“Is she one of the leaders? A new recruit? What did she say?” The need to understand burned inside me. I had to know why. But Thorn only shook her head.

“She was not specific, Your Majesty.”

“But she told you she had connections with the Gustavites?”

“Not in so many words. She was raving. In between her pointless protestations of innocence, she talked about the corruption of the court. She said it needed to be purged. To me, that suggests a strong connection with Gustavites. They were responsible for the attack at the banquet.”

“It doesn’t prove it, though,” I said. “It doesn’t even prove she’s one of them.”

“The most obvious answer is usually the right one.”

“But do you have evidence?”

“The information suggests—”

“But that information failed to notice someone was going to try and poison the court, twice. We don’t need rumors. We need proof. I’m just saying we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. It isn’t safe. The first poisoner used arsenic, didn’t they? But this one used cyanide. Why would they change that, when cyanide is so much easier to detect?”

“We will not jump to any conclusions, Your Majesty,” Holt said. “But it is possible they were attempting to obscure the connection, or they felt a more direct approach was necessary. Either way, we must prevent this from happening again.”

He began to lay out additional security measures, and everyone around the table nodded, and agreed, and planned. Mostly this seemed to involve extra security at the Fort’s entrance, a thorough check of all current staff, and the use of additional tasters, from the raw ingredients to the moment before I took a bite.

They didn’t spare a word for why a group might want to poison us all. And the why was everything, wasn’t it? No matter how many checks we had, someone could always figure out how to slip through. We needed to understand them.

“Do we have a copy of their book?” I said, in a pause in the discussion.

Holt frowned at me. “Which book, Your Majesty?”

“Their book. Gustav’s book. It would be useful to study it, to understand them better.”

“Freya,” my father said sharply. “You cannot be seen with that book. And what would it tell you, that you don’t already know? They want to kill you.”

“But why? If we can figure out why they hate us so much—”

“They hate us, Your Majesty, because we have more than they do,” Thorn said. “Nothing more or less than that. The court has money, and it has power, and they want that for themselves. Jealousy can be a powerful motivator.”

If they hated how extravagant and wasteful the court was, I could sympathize.

“Your sensitivity does you credit, Your Majesty,” Holt said. “But we cannot take a soft approach, not with all that has happened now.”