Long May She Reign

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Long May She Reign Page 11

by Rhiannon Thomas


  “Let’s sort them by genre. Then size. Then—color, perhaps?”

  I laughed. “That’s not very efficient.”

  “But it’ll look good on the shelves.”

  I wasn’t much help. To me, most of Naomi’s books were just novels. To her, they had mountains of nuance, and each tiny subcategory had its own space in her visualized shelving system. But it was fun to guess each book’s category as I passed them to her, getting more and more specific and ridiculous with every try.

  It made Naomi smile, at least.

  We were interrupted by a knock on the door. I opened it to see Reynold Milson holding a sealed envelope. “A message for you, Your Majesty. From Rasmus Holt.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty.” He bowed, and I had to stop myself from curtsying back.

  “What is it?” Naomi asked after the guard bowed again and strode back to his post.

  I turned the envelope over. It was sealed with red wax and stamped with an eagle crossed with swords. I still didn’t have a seal of my own—something else my advisers were probably worrying about. My father had one, a bolt of cloth representing his old trade and the star of nobility, but it wouldn’t suit a queen. I needed to stand for something before I could have a seal of my own. I needed a message to send.

  The paper inside was heavy and slightly stiff, and it was covered in writing. Name after name, well over five hundred of them. The list of guests at the banquet. Most had been crossed out. The rest were marked with stars or small Xs.

  The king’s name was at the top, crossed out, and the queen, and his brother, and his brother’s son . . . all gone. My own name was far down the list, with a star beside it—the mark of a survivor, then—while Sofia Thorn’s name had an X.

  Deaths, survivors, and absentees.

  If this was the official guest list, it wouldn’t include anyone who showed up uninvited. I flicked to the back page, in case any names had been added and crossed out, but there were no other marks.

  “Why has Holt sent that to you?”

  “For my investigation,” I said. “My advisers think the Gustavites were responsible, but it doesn’t quite add up. I thought we could look through the list of guests at the banquet. Maybe there’s something suspicious there.”

  “Makes sense,” Naomi said. “I’ll grab some paper.”

  While she walked over to the desk, I scanned the list again. Nothing stood out. They were just names, after all. But we needed to investigate them, find out what they had done that night. Some must have survived because they were lucky, but some may have known what was happening, and some may have been spared for a reason.

  I didn’t know much about most of the people listed here. But the same few names stood out. Torsten Wolff, the king’s best friend, and first in line of the survivors who had been at the ball. William Fitzroy, the king’s rejected son. Rasmus Holt, the new head adviser. The conspicuously absent Madeleine Wolff.

  Naomi sat down on the floor beside me with a pile of paper and two pens. We split the pages between us, and wrote the name of a survivor at the top of each one. The list seemed much longer, when laid out across the floor. Twenty-four pages total.

  Fitzroy had been the highest ranked to survive. Then me, then Sten, then Naomi. The rest were nobles much further down the line of succession, or not in line at all. My advisers, a few young courtiers even more insignificant than me, a great-aunt who always had a disapproving glare.

  “Do you think they were definitely a guest? The murderer, I mean,” Naomi asked.

  “I don’t know.” It would have given them an easy way into the event, and something of an alibi if they were caught sneaking around. But a servant was probably involved, too, to have access to the kitchens. That meant someone could have ordered the attack and still kept their distance.

  I inserted pages for Madeleine, for the Gustavites, for the vague and nebulous “cook” and “kitchen staff” and “tasters,” before Naomi and I started to add to each page. Everything we knew about the person. The people close to them who had died. Their relationship with the court. Their behavior since the banquet.

  Naomi had a lot more to contribute than I did. She noticed the details—that her great-aunt Katrina doted on Elva’s twin children, and could never have wanted to kill them, that Carolina had looked rather green for most of the evening, that this person and that person had been caught up in a fight. My observations were mostly restricted to gossip I’d overheard—not exactly reliable—and what I’d seen since we’d moved to the Fort.

  Dagny kept batting the pens away every time we put them down, so Naomi started balling up spare pieces of paper and throwing them for her. So far, two crystal jars and one silk bed-hanging had been damaged by her frantic pursuit of these new makeshift toys, but at least it kept her from troubling us. And watching her tear around the room made Naomi smile.

  “We’re going to need to talk to everyone,” Naomi said quietly, as she watched Dagny chase the fifth paper ball under the wardrobe.

  It was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do. We’d not only need to speak to people. We’d need to charm them, challenge them, guide the truth out of them. Judge them on their stories and their excuses.

  But I could do this. I could speak to people. I’d spoken to Holt, and to Madeleine. I’d stayed calm, when the city was in chaos. I could cope with this. It was too important for me to shrink away, to hide behind Naomi and hope the answers would appear out of the air. It was just another problem, another question to unpick. I could do it.

  “Then where should we start?” I tapped my fingers on the pages. “My advisers blame the Gustavites, but we can’t exactly go out and interview them. If we had that book, or more of their propaganda . . . but my advisers are very determined for me not to see any of that.”

  “But they’re not determined to keep me away,” Naomi said. “So that’ll be my task tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You’re brilliant,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  She shrugged. “I guess it’s been said. Once or twice.”

  But that left me with interviewing duties. At least people couldn’t refuse to meet with me, like they might with Naomi. Even spending time with a suspect might make things clearer.

  Sten’s name seemed to glare at me from the page, challenging me to question him. But that conversation in the library had unsettled me. He seemed to suspect me, genuinely, truly. The murderer wouldn’t do that.

  I’d speak to someone else first. Ease myself into the investigation. I scanned across the row of names again, and my eyes settled on William Fitzroy. Not technically in the line of succession, but close to the king. He had always been in the center of court. Even if he was innocent, he must have something useful to tell. Some secret to uncover.

  “All right,” I said. “Tomorrow.” Tomorrow, we’d begin.

  TWELVE

  THE ODDS OF FINDING FITZROY ALONE SEEMED pretty slim, so I needed to exert some of that queenlike authority and summon him. I could hardly go into the makeshift throne room for this, so I strode down to my half-furnished laboratory. Perhaps a meeting in an ex–torture chamber would startle some honesty out of him.

  If my guards were surprised by my request, they didn’t show it. One of them disappeared to deliver the message, and I waited by the far cupboard, trying to figure out what I was going to say.

  Ten hand-shaking minutes later, my guard knocked on the door again. “William Fitzroy, Your Majesty.”

  I turned. Fitzroy stepped into the room. Gone was his rumpled, grief-racked look. His blond waves were swept back with casual confidence, and his blue eyes were alert again. Like nothing had changed. He looked princely, and for a moment, he stared me down, like he was challenging my place. I stared back at him, forcing myself to meet his gaze, my heart pounding. Then he offered me a shallow bow.

  “Your Majesty,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  William Fitzroy, courtier extraord
inaire. Why should I be afraid of him, when he’d never had a serious thought in his life?

  He was serious when you saw him in the corridor, a voice in me said. When he told you you didn’t belong.

  I stepped forward. My heels wobbled beneath me. “Fitzroy. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “I gathered that.” He moved farther into the room, letting the door swing closed behind him. “This is an unusual meeting place, Your Majesty. Unless you’re planning to torture me?”

  “No!” The word shot out of me, and I blushed. “This is my lab,” I said, forcing myself to sound confident, in control. “There’s not a lot of choice for space in the Fort.”

  “Ah, so you’re planning to experiment on me.” He strode past me, elbow brushing mine, to peer at the jars lined up on the cupboard tops. “Hemlock? Arsenic? What are you doing down here?”

  “Those were already here.” More words rushing out before I could stop them. Why was I letting him unsettle me? “From before.”

  “Strange, that the labels haven’t faded at all in a hundred years. And the bottles are so clean. They must have been blessed by the Forgotten, don’t you think?”

  “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.”

  “Your father made you come onto the dais, for the fire-eaters.”

  “He did. I survived, I sat back down, things went on. Until the end of the feast.”

  “With the cake?”

  “Yes. With the cake. Every part of it was gold, so obviously he wasn’t going to waste any on me. He wanted to make a point. So everyone around me got a piece, and I got plain sponge. Just plain. Everyone commented on it, so I made some stupid joke, acted like the plain sponge was the real prize, since no one else had it.”

  “Were you upset?” There was something about this rawer, quieter Fitzroy that made me shift closer. He was compelling, almost magnetizing—all the things his usual persona tried so hard to be. Succeeded in being, for everyone but me.

  “Was I upset? A bit, I guess. But I’m used to it. That’s just my life, isn’t it? Or it was. And it turned out I was lucky. Gerald was next to me, acting completely normal, and then he started coughing. Acting like he couldn’t breathe. I asked him if he was all right, and he turned away and threw up. And before I could even react to that, everyone else around me started reacting, too.”

  “All at once?”

  “No,” he said, a little quieter. “Not all at once. That was the most frightening thing. A lot of people fell ill at the same time, but people kept getting ill. Everyone was terrified, pushing and shoving to get out of the hall, as though the outside would save them.”

  I closed my eyes, heart pounding. I could picture every breath of it. I didn’t want to, tried to shove the images away, but they burst to life before my eyes, all the faces I’d seen for years, the golden plates clattering on the floor, the te
rror of it. “I’m sorry.”

  Fitzroy swallowed. “People didn’t know. They felt dizzy, or felt sick, and they thought it was poison, so they panicked . . . but it could have been panic making some of them unwell. We didn’t know.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “I was watching everyone I knew suffer and die. How do you think I felt?”

  I flinched. “I just—I’m trying to understand.”

  “So am I,” Fitzroy said. “I didn’t know what to do. You think, if something terrible happened, you’d do the right thing. Maybe not be the hero, but do something. I just stood there. Gaping. Then the guards grabbed me and hauled me out of the palace.”

  “Why?”

  “Why was I such an idiot, or why did the guards grab me?”

  “You aren’t an idiot.” I’d called him that in my head a hundred times, but one brief conversation with him was enough to prove that wasn’t true. It had never been true. He was . . . I wasn’t sure what he was. But he wasn’t an idiot. “I mean, why did the guards—”

  “I guess they thought I might be king, with my father dead.”

  So there had been at least some movement toward crowning Fitzroy that night. Some assumptions. “Did you want to be king?”

  “What, then?” He laughed. It was a painful sound. “It was pretty much the last thing on my mind.”

  I couldn’t bear to look at him. I fixed my eyes on the floor, breathing in and out. “I’m sorry,” I said. “About your father.”

  Silence. Then: “At least I survived. That’s more than most people can say from that night.”

  “Yes. I suppose it is.” My hands shook and I felt an unexpected urge to comfort Fitzroy. Instead I said, “You’re being very honest with me.”

  “Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Yes. But—” I didn’t know how to explain it. “I didn’t really expect you to be. I thought you’d laugh at me.”

  “You are the queen.”

  “That didn’t stop you from mocking me earlier.”

  “I didn’t mean—” He ran his hand through his hair again. The gesture made him look vulnerable—far softer than the laughing, boisterous Fitzroy I was used to seeing at court. “I was just being ridiculous, Freya. I make jokes. It’s how I survive.”

 

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