Long May She Reign(94)

“I just told you—”

He laughed humorlessly. “It was a figure of speech, Freya. But—Madeleine killed them. Madeleine. I’ve known Madeleine for years. She’s—how could Madeleine have done it?”

“She thought she had good reasons.”

“I’m sure Sten thinks he has good reasons to kill you. I’m sure everyone thinks they’re doing the right thing. Doesn’t mean that they are.”

I felt that I should say more, apologize more, dig in more, but—I just couldn’t. Fitzroy’s betrayal was still raw, hidden underneath the devastation of Madeleine. I’d cried all night. I’d been so reluctant to trust him, and then I had, and even if his feelings were honest, he wasn’t. I couldn’t offer him anything more. I couldn’t possibly articulate any of what I felt.

I scraped the tangled black hair away from my face. Madeleine wouldn’t be able to style it for me now. “Sten’s two days away,” I said. “And I still don’t—please, come to my lab. I have to figure this out.”

He watched me for a long moment, and for once, I couldn’t read his expression. Then he nodded.

I still needed to fetch Naomi, to tell her everything that had happened. She hadn’t been as close to Madeleine as I had become, but she’d still be heartbroken. Madeleine had killed her brother.

We met her on the stairs to my quarters. She hurtled down them, her face had been drained by fear, and stopped short when she saw us.

“Freya!” she said. “I just woke up, and Madeleine’s under guard. No one would tell me what was happening. Has Holt arrested her? What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry, Naomi,” I said. The words felt too heavy to speak. “Madeleine confessed to me. She killed them.”

Naomi opened her mouth to argue, then stopped. She swayed on the spot, still poised to disagree, all the fight falling out of her. “She told you that?”

“She did. I’m sorry, Naomi.”

She glanced at Fitzroy then back at me. “How can you be certain?” she said. “How can you know? She could be lying, or she could be confused, covering for her cousin—”

“I know, Naomi. This time, I know.” And I told her what Madeleine had confessed.

“So Madeleine killed Jacob.”

I nodded, and she repeated the words louder. “She killed everyone, and then she joined us. Then she pretend to help us?” Furious tears burned in her eyes. She strode back up the stairs. I ran forward to grab her arm and hold her back.

“Naomi, don’t,” I said. “We can deal with her later, and we will, but we can’t right now.”

“Freya—”

“Please, Naomi. Punishing her won’t help anything yet. We have to deal with Sten first. We have to. And I need your help.”

“You don’t need my help.”

“Yes,” I said. “I do. Please. You’re my best friend. We’ll deal with Madeleine later. But first—we have to figure out how to stay alive. I need your help. Please.”

Naomi looked at me for a long moment, tears still blurring her eyes. “All right,” her tone resolved, fierce. “Let’s take down this bastard together.”





THIRTY-ONE


“STEN’S MEN ARE COMING FROM THE EAST,” FITZROY said. He had spread a large map across the lab’s central table, and he was negotiating it like a seasoned battle strategist.

I leaned closer. “Traditionally, he’d either wait for us to send our armies out to fight him, or put us in a siege.” Fitzroy gave me a questioning look, and I added, “That’s what I read, anyway.”

“If we had an army, yes,” he said. “But we don’t. We barely have any men. I’d be surprised if he even expected a fight.”

“What, he thinks I’ll just open the gates and let him kill me?”

“No,” Fitzroy said. “I assume he’ll stop outside the capital and demand we surrender. He’ll make a show of being willing to negotiate. And if we don’t step down, if we don’t meet all of his demands, he’ll storm the city the next day. He won’t expect much resistance, but he’s still a tactician.”

“That’s good,” Naomi said. “He doesn’t think you’ll be able to outsmart him. So he’ll sit outside the walls all night, expecting you to surrender. That gives us time. Maybe we can attack him there. Subtly.”

“But how?” I said. “I don’t want to kill him or his men. If we poisoned them . . .” I did not need to say what thoughts mass poison invoked, considering the events of the past few weeks. “Be smart,” I muttered. “Play to your strengths.” My strengths were science, experiments, puzzling out the truth. Not much use now. But they were all I had.

Play to your strengths, Freya. Think.

I looked around the room, at the different bottles and jars, the attempts at poison detection, the cut glass, the notebooks full of failures and successes.

“What am I supposed to do? Do scientific experiments at them until they think I’m worthy of being queen?”

Naomi stared at me. She began to smile. “It’s not the experiments that matter,” she said slowly. “It’s how people interpret them.”