Long May She Reign(34)

“Will you go?”

She shook her head again. “I should. But—I don’t know. I want to stay here. I haven’t been back there in years. It’d be too strange now. And Jacob—you know he hated it there. He never got along with them. It’ll be so strange . . .” She sucked in a breath through her teeth. “And I want to remember him properly, as he was, not as he’ll be during—not as he is now.” She straightened the books with shaking hands. “I need to be here. So that’s what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll find something to include in the funerals for him. He would have liked that. More than—than going home.”

“He was lucky to have you, you know. As his sister.”

“I was lucky to have him.” She stroked Dagny, her hand running along her tail. “Will a lot of people be coming for the funerals?”

“Almost everyone, I think.” If I knew little about the members of the old court, I knew nothing about the nobles outside the city, the ones who survived by being hundreds of miles away. Some were older family members who preferred to let the younger generation charm the king, some had been disliked by the king, and some . . . some held the court in disdain, or lived far enough away that they ruled their land almost as kings of their own, as long as the real ruler did not think to check on them.

All but the most stubborn or unwell would be traveling to attend the old king’s funeral and see their new queen.

I shifted forward to consider the books. “How do you want to organize these? Alphabetically?”

“Let’s sort them by genre. Then size. Then—color, perhaps?”

I laughed. “That’s not very efficient.”

“But it’ll look good on the shelves.”

I wasn’t much help. To me, most of Naomi’s books were just novels. To her, they had mountains of nuance, and each tiny subcategory had its own space in her visualized shelving system. But it was fun to guess each book’s category as I passed them to her, getting more and more specific and ridiculous with every try.

It made Naomi smile, at least.

We were interrupted by a knock on the door. I opened it to see Reynold Milson holding a sealed envelope. “A message for you, Your Majesty. From Rasmus Holt.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course, Your Majesty.” He bowed, and I had to stop myself from curtsying back.

“What is it?” Naomi asked after the guard bowed again and strode back to his post.

I turned the envelope over. It was sealed with red wax and stamped with an eagle crossed with swords. I still didn’t have a seal of my own—something else my advisers were probably worrying about. My father had one, a bolt of cloth representing his old trade and the star of nobility, but it wouldn’t suit a queen. I needed to stand for something before I could have a seal of my own. I needed a message to send.

The paper inside was heavy and slightly stiff, and it was covered in writing. Name after name, well over five hundred of them. The list of guests at the banquet. Most had been crossed out. The rest were marked with stars or small Xs.

The king’s name was at the top, crossed out, and the queen, and his brother, and his brother’s son . . . all gone. My own name was far down the list, with a star beside it—the mark of a survivor, then—while Sofia Thorn’s name had an X.

Deaths, survivors, and absentees.

If this was the official guest list, it wouldn’t include anyone who showed up uninvited. I flicked to the back page, in case any names had been added and crossed out, but there were no other marks.

“Why has Holt sent that to you?”

“For my investigation,” I said. “My advisers think the Gustavites were responsible, but it doesn’t quite add up. I thought we could look through the list of guests at the banquet. Maybe there’s something suspicious there.”

“Makes sense,” Naomi said. “I’ll grab some paper.”

While she walked over to the desk, I scanned the list again. Nothing stood out. They were just names, after all. But we needed to investigate them, find out what they had done that night. Some must have survived because they were lucky, but some may have known what was happening, and some may have been spared for a reason.

I didn’t know much about most of the people listed here. But the same few names stood out. Torsten Wolff, the king’s best friend, and first in line of the survivors who had been at the ball. William Fitzroy, the king’s rejected son. Rasmus Holt, the new head adviser. The conspicuously absent Madeleine Wolff.

Naomi sat down on the floor beside me with a pile of paper and two pens. We split the pages between us, and wrote the name of a survivor at the top of each one. The list seemed much longer, when laid out across the floor. Twenty-four pages total.

Fitzroy had been the highest ranked to survive. Then me, then Sten, then Naomi. The rest were nobles much further down the line of succession, or not in line at all. My advisers, a few young courtiers even more insignificant than me, a great-aunt who always had a disapproving glare.

“Do you think they were definitely a guest? The murderer, I mean,” Naomi asked.

“I don’t know.” It would have given them an easy way into the event, and something of an alibi if they were caught sneaking around. But a servant was probably involved, too, to have access to the kitchens. That meant someone could have ordered the attack and still kept their distance.