Long May She Reign(89)

“Freya. If you think he’s responsible—”

“Think is not good enough. Not for this. Not even with Sten bearing down on us. We have to know.”

“You won’t be able to keep this a secret,” Norling said. “People will gossip.”

“Then they’ll gossip. If we say nothing, they won’t know anything for sure.”

“And they’ll imagine all sorts of things in place of the truth.”

“Then they’ll imagine.” I stood, scraping the hair away from my eyes. I felt like I hadn’t slept properly in days, the tiredness weighing down my limbs. “I need to gather more evidence. I have to know.”

“Your Majesty,” Holt said. “Sten is three days away from the capital at most. We must work on our defensive strategy. We will man the walls the best we can, but we still lack any forces to meet him in the field. We must prepare—”

“We are preparing. We have been preparing. But this is important, too.” More important, almost. I couldn’t imagine how I might defeat Sten, what I could possibly do to stop him, if he would not surrender. But I could get to the bottom of this murder. I could solve this, achieve something, before Sten arrived to destroy it all.

I wasn’t going to be sad, I decided, as I searched through the papers again that afternoon, thinking and thinking about what evidence I might have missed. The facts were the facts, and there was no point crying over them, not when Fitzroy had probably been lying to me all along. I couldn’t—I wasn’t going to get distracted. Not when there were far more important things going on. But I couldn’t ignore the issue, not when he now seemed the most likely culprit. I had to find more evidence, one way or the other, and that meant thinking about it reasonably, with detachment.

I wasn’t proving very good at it. No matter how often I insisted that I had cried myself out with Madeleine and Naomi last night, I kept remembering his expression when I confronted him, the drop in my stomach when I first read the notes, knowing, knowing, that he’d lied to me, he’d hidden things from me, that even if he was innocent, he hadn’t respected me.

There wasn’t enough evidence here. I could have his rooms searched, but he would have destroyed anything truly condemning. There’d be nothing in the Fort that could help.

I’d have to go back to the palace again. If I could get into the king’s offices myself, if Fitzroy had missed something . . . I bit my lip. That was what I would have to do.

“Your Majesty?” One of the guards peered through the door. “A woman has come to speak with you. From the city.”

“From the city?” I had thought that nothing had come of my visit to the Gustavites. I certainly didn’t expect anyone to take up my offer of visiting the Fort. But if this woman was one of them . . .

The woman waited for me in a guards’ room near the Fort’s front gate. Four guards watched her, with another outside the door. At least someone had found her a chair. She stood shakily as I entered, and I realized she was the elderly woman from the meeting, the one whose arm I had touched. She bowed slightly now.

“Your Majesty,” she said. “You—you said we could come and speak with you.”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “I wasn’t sure if anyone would.”

“You made the effort to visit us. I thought perhaps you might wish to hear the reaction there. Some people would be furious if they knew I’d come, of course, but these young things can be foolish sometimes. They want things to change, and if you agree, then that can only be a good thing, I say.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“Bakewell, Your Majesty. Mary Bakewell. I wanted to tell you . . . some people believe you, Your Majesty. In the group. They want to listen to you, and they want to believe that—well, that the Forgotten support you, Your Majesty. But some . . . they want to believe, too, but they want more proof.”

More proof? “I don’t think it’s possible to prove something like that.”

“I don’t, either, Your Majesty, but there we are. That’s how they feel. And then there are the extreme ones, of course, the ones who aren’t happy if they aren’t shouting. I can promise, none of us were involved in what happened to the court. We’ve never been like that. A couple of them now, they think violence is the right path, they tried to attack you, once . . . but most of them just want change. They just need a little encouragement to believe.”

“Encouragement,” I said. Short of getting the Forgotten themselves to descend from the sky and give me their endorsement, I couldn’t think what more encouragement I could give. But it was something. They weren’t all against me. They wanted to believe. If only I could convince them.

This time, I went to the palace alone. It was dangerous—no guards, no friends, no one to protect me beyond my own wits—but I couldn’t trust anyone now. I had to see the evidence without giving anyone the chance to interfere.

Nobody tried to stop me. The guards at the Fort’s entrance looked uncomfortable with my orders, but they opened the gates anyway. What else could they do, when the queen told them she needed to go into the city?

The halls of the palace were silent this time. Occasionally I heard the rustling of rats, settling into the unoccupied space, but no human footsteps, no other signs of life. The figures in the portraits stared at me, and every step sounded too loud on the marble floor. A large painting of Fitzroy’s father watched me as I climbed the stairs, one hand on his hip, the other brandishing a sword he had never used in his lifetime.