Long May She Reign(42)

I froze. The words sounded respectful, but something more sinister lurked underneath. A hint that I was not the rightful queen. The possibility that someone else might deserve the throne more.

I had to do something. Say something, act somehow, to put him in his place and take control of the situation. But my mind was blank. I couldn’t make a mistake now. But what could I possibly do? I couldn’t acknowledge the hint of a threat. I’d have to use pretty words and a prettier smile in response, and I didn’t have either of those.

Beside me, my father and Holt raised their goblets. I needed to raise mine, too. Or just nod. Something. But my heart thudded faster and faster, and my hands tingled, and I couldn’t move, could barely remember how to breathe.

Smash. I jumped. Everyone stared at Fitzroy, who smiled and shrugged at a shattered ewer by his feet. Red wine spread across the stone floor. “My apologies, Your Majesty,” he said, his tone not apologetic in the slightest. “My hand slipped. Seems I’ll be playing the fool tonight.”

I forced myself to nod. He was a different person from the boy I’d spoken to in the dungeons, back into his courtier’s skin once again. But my breath was returning now, the world becoming clear.

“Typical Fitzroy,” a man near him said, his voice booming across the hall. “Can’t bear for the attention to be off him for a moment.”

Everyone laughed, and with that, the conversation started again, more lively than before.

I tried to catch Fitzroy’s eye, but he did not look at me again.





FOURTEEN


I STARED AT MY BED’S CANOPY THAT NIGHT, DAGNY curled up beside me. My room was almost completely dark, but I imagined I could see the patterns above me, the embroidery of fire-red birds and stalking panthers and glittering stars.

The funerals would take place at dawn. The funerals . . . I rolled onto my side. I’d only ever been to one funeral before, and it wasn’t one I wanted to remember.

I’d had to keep telling myself that my mother was dead, repeating it over and over, drilling the words into my head . . . I still hadn’t really believed them. Then the funeral came, and my final chance to say good-bye. The crowd had gathered around us, and I remember wondering what they were doing there, hating them for stealing this moment, as though any of them could possibly miss her as much as I would. And then it hit me, all at once, that my mother was gone, that she was never, never coming back. I didn’t remember much of what happened next, but people told me. I’d screamed, refused to let the priest near the body on the river, fighting and kicking and shrieking.

Tomorrow I’d be the one intruding on people’s grief, pretending it was my own. No one I loved was being remembered tomorrow. I hadn’t lost anything. And yet I was to stand in front of them all, as though my sadness mattered most.

I couldn’t bear it. I swung my legs out of bed and stood. I needed a distraction, something to do, and my laboratory waited downstairs. I would head down there, and work on my poison test. Make sure nothing like this ever happened again.

But when I reached the dungeons, the door to my laboratory was ajar. I pushed it slightly, letting it creak on its hinges.

Fitzroy sat inside, reading through my notes. His blond hair was rumpled, and his eyes bleary. He looked up when he heard the door, and nodded at me. Once again, the charismatic courtier I knew was gone, leaving a softer presence behind. I wanted to run up and snatch my notes from his hands, protect my thoughts from his judgment. I wanted to rest my hand on his arm, to soothe some of that rawness away.

“Fitzroy? What are you doing?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said.

“So you came here?” I shut the door. The thud echoed in the room, too loud.

“I don’t know. I mean, yes, obviously. I hoped you would be here.”

“Me?” I stepped closer, slowly. My heart pounded.

“I know you don’t like me,” he said. “But—maybe that’s what I need right now. I don’t know. We were honest with each other, last time. That was—I’m tired of being courteous. And I needed something to—I hoped maybe you were working. And that I could help.”

He looked so lost. William Fitzroy was in my laboratory, rambling to explain himself, and I should have been angry, I should have, but the feeling wouldn’t come. “All right,” I said. “You can help. Let me get some beakers.”

My next planned test was to try dissolving the arsenic in water. I had no hope it would help—if it had a detectable effect, it wouldn’t exactly be a useful poison—but I needed to explore every possibility, leave nothing to chance.

As I prepared two samples of water, Fitzroy continued to leaf through my notes. “These are very thorough.”

“Of course they are. Otherwise what’s the point?”

Fitzroy just nodded.

I carried the beakers back to the center table and set them down a few feet from Fitzroy. I didn’t let myself look at him. He was too distracting, the sheer presence of him, the way his feelings seemed to crackle in the air. I picked up a piece of pure arsenic with tongs and placed it in the water. Nothing happened. I poked it, as though that might encourage it, but it continued to sit, doing not much at all.

The powder was similarly useless. It dissolved in the water, as I expected it would, but nothing else happened to reveal its presence.