Long May She Reign(38)

“And you think I should trust you?”

“You probably shouldn’t. I am the last king’s son, after all.” The words should have been another one of his jokes, but his tone didn’t change. “Not really one that counts, but I’m sure your advisers will be quick to tell you how much of a threat I am. Just try not to cut my head off, all right? I rather like it where it is.”

Still no change in tone. I shivered. “I’m not cutting off anyone’s head.”

“I’ll take that as a promise.” He turned away, stepping toward the middle of the room. The tension between us snapped, leaving the ground unsteady underneath me. “Here’s why you can trust me, Freya,” he said. “For all my father’s spontaneous sulks, he was in the middle of legitimizing me. He wanted to make me his heir. If he hadn’t died, I would have been the next king. Even if you think me ruthless enough to kill my father and everyone at court for the sake of my own ambition . . . even then, it couldn’t have been me. I would have been king. I would have been accepted here, surrounded by everyone I care about, and now I’m not. I’m not your murderer, Freya. And if you find them, let me know. I’d like to be there to skin them, myself.”

He gave me a little smile and a casual tilt of his head, as though that were a joke, too, nothing serious meant at all. But the strain in his shoulders ruined the illusion. He might not actually be willing to murder the person responsible, but he wasn’t entirely joking, either.

“I will,” I said. “Don’t—don’t worry about that.” I wanted to say something else, something more, but I didn’t know what. It felt like something significant should follow, but instead the silence hovered between us, waiting to be broken.

Part of me wanted to continue the conversation, to draw it out, to dwell in the rawness of it. But my hands were still shaking, and my heart was beating too fast. It felt dangerous, all of this. Far too open. “Thank you,” I said. “For coming here. For answering my questions.”

He nodded. “It was my pleasure. I mean, without the pleasure, but—still.” He stared at me for a long moment. “I hope your investigations come to something, Freya. Try and survive until then.”





THIRTEEN


I FELT ON EDGE FOR THE REST OF THE DAY. I WAS CONFIDENT I could cross Fitzroy off my list of suspects, after that conversation, but I was even more confused and uncertain than I had been before I’d summoned him. I tried to organize my possessions as they arrived in the lab, but it was almost as if his piercing blue eyes were still watching me from across the room. I could still feel his rawness filling the air.

Shame swirled in my stomach as I worked. I’d always thought Fitzroy was a fool, but I had never paused to think that it might all be an act, that there might be something more substantial underneath. I’d never even really thought of him as a person. First Madeleine Wolff, now William Fitzroy . . . was it the murders that had brought out these sides in people, or had they always been there, lurking underneath the court’s gold veneer all along? What did that say about my observation skills, if I’d never noticed?

What did it say about me as a person, if I’d never cared to try?

Naomi slipped into the lab in the afternoon, but she was no closer to getting her hands on a copy of the book. It would be too dangerous to let people know about her search, considering all that had happened, and although Naomi was brave, she wasn’t stupid. She’d spoken to as many people as she could without raising suspicion, turning the conversation to the Gustavites, using flattery to convince the older members of court to explain the problems to her, again and again, teasing out each person’s beliefs. The survivors of the banquet had been more reticent, she said, but many nobles had begun to arrive for the funerals, and to many of them, the situation was more a source of gossip than one of grief.

“Everyone I spoke to thought the Gustavites were stupid, though,” Naomi said, curling her toes around the slats of her stool. “No one seemed to support them. But I suppose they wouldn’t want to give that away, would they?”

“I suppose not.” After my encounter with Fitzroy, I was wary of dealing with people again. They were too unpredictable. I longed for science—clear, indisputable, easy-to-understand science. “Let’s work on the poison test,” I said to Naomi, shuffling our piles of notes aside. Perhaps that would give me somewhere solid to stand.

I pulled on thick leather gloves and tied a cloth over my face before passing a second cloth to Naomi and reaching for the jars of arsenic left by the room’s original inhabitants. We had both the white powder form, perfect for poisoning enemies, and the pure metal, flaky and gray.

Step one, I decided, would be to burn it. Different metals produced different-color flames when thrown into a fire, and if the arsenic was distinctive enough, we could simply burn some of the food to detect it.

There was no chance that the solution would be that simple. But it was a good place to begin.

I lit a candle and broke off a piece of pure arsenic with my tongs. Naomi stepped back, her face covered too. I held my breath as I pushed the arsenic into the flame.

The fire turned blue, and a garlicky smell filled the room.

“You did it?” Naomi said, shifting closer. She sounded unsure.

“Not yet.” I placed the pure arsenic in a bowl and snuffed the flame. “It’s the powder that’s used to poison people. If that has the same reaction . . .”