Long May She Reign(36)

“I suppose they must.” I’d been an idiot to hope he’d be anything other than mocking and rude, considering what I knew of him. His friends always loved to make people like me feel small.

“I’m studying them.”

“To see if they’re poisonous? Because I’m pretty certain they are.”

And this was the problem with William Fitzroy. Or one of them, at least. I was supposed to be interrogating him, yet somehow here he was, guiding the conversation, putting me on the defensive. I wouldn’t let him do it this time.

“I’m trying to find a way to test for the presence of arsenic, as a way to replace tasters.”

He paused. Whatever he had been expecting, it hadn’t been that. “Do you think you can do it?”

I didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

He clearly hadn’t been expecting that, either. He watched me for a long moment, and I felt a rush of victory. He must have known he’d lost that round, because he shifted his weight, and shifted the conversation. “So, Your Majesty. Why have you summoned me to your torture chamber laboratory? I assume it wasn’t for my winning conversation.”

“Obviously.” He grinned, and I let out a breath. “I just—wanted to talk to you.” I ran my hands along the side of the table, letting the movement distract me. “We haven’t spoken yet, not since—”

“Not since I shouted at you in the corridor?” He ran his fingers through his hair, rumpling the curls. “That was rude of me.”

I stared at him. Had he just admitted to a fault? And a social fault, at that. It had to be some sort of trick, to throw me off balance again. “That wasn’t an apology.”

“Oh,” he said. “Let me try again.” He knelt before me, his head bowed, and I scurried backward a step. “Your Majesty, I am grievously sorry for the insult I have caused you. I throw myself upon your mercy.”

He was awful. I shouldn’t have expected anything else. My fingertips tingled, the first hints of panic, but I clenched my fists. I wouldn’t let that control me today. “Don’t make fun of me.”

He looked up, lips parted slightly. “I was joking.”

“You weren’t joking.” I turned away, counting the length of my breaths. Three beats in. Four beats out. Calm.

He stood again. “I was trying to joke. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You didn’t mean to upset me, but you meant to make fun of me.” Of course he couldn’t respect me. Anyone loved by the old court was bound to be cruel to someone like me. But he had been a courtier, and that usually meant he’d at least be slightly subtle in his mockery. Apparently, I wasn’t even worth that.

But the quicker I asked him the necessary questions, the quicker he could leave. “I wanted to talk to you about the night of the murders. I want you to tell me everything you saw.”

“And why would you want to know that?”

He couldn’t be serious. “Because someone murdered everyone in the old court. I want to find out who.”

“And you think it might have been me.”

I spun to face him. He still stood casually, but his expression was a little more focused now, a little more intense. “I didn’t say that.”

“No, but you meant it. I grew up in court, Freya. I know how to read people, and you have the least subtlety of anyone I’ve ever met.”

“What happened to calling me ‘Your Majesty’?”

“I think we’re on a first-name basis once you start indirectly accusing me of murder.”

Something about his expression had changed. He looked less polished now, a rawness bursting through. I felt a stab of guilt. “I didn’t accuse you of murder. I just—I need to know what happened.”

He stepped closer. “You don’t know me, so I’ll say this clearly. Almost everyone I knew died at that banquet. My father, my friends. And you think there’s a chance that I killed them?”

“Anyone could have killed them. And the king was angry with you, at the banquet—”

“My father was angry with me at least half the time. He was angry I existed half the time. That doesn’t mean I killed him and everyone I knew.”

“I know.” And I remembered how he had looked the morning after the banquet, when I bumped into him on the stairs. He looked broken. But a person could still murder and feel bad about it, couldn’t they? If they thought it needed to be done? “Why was he angry with you?”

“I don’t know. My father was too important to actually tell you why he was angry. You were just supposed to figure it out. It was lucky that he changed his mind easily enough, too.”

I’d never really thought about it before. I knew the king had fallen out with Fitzroy on a near-weekly basis, but it had just been a fact of the court, nothing that actually affected people. It was strangely uncomfortable to look at Fitzroy now, to see him as a person, not a figure at court. “So what did you see, at the banquet?”

He sighed, then leaned against the countertop. The move seemed like the final drop of his courtly armor. When he spoke again, his voice was a little lower, a little rougher. “I was there, although I didn’t eat much. Whatever had upset my father, he wanted to make a point of it, because he wasn’t exactly sending the choicest foods to me.”