“Noooo.” She drew out the word, the vocal equivalent of an eye roll. “I’m just wondering why you never mentioned that before. Why you’re keeping secrets, hmm? Why you didn’t get any work done, maybe?”
“It’s nothing like that. It’s—new. We talked, like I said, about the murders, and . . .” How could I possibly describe it? “He wasn’t what I expected.”
“So you invited him back to your lab?” She still spoke in that teasing, singsong voice, elongating her words, eyes dancing.
“He was just there, when I went to work the night before the funerals. And then last night, too. I think he’s lonely.”
“Yes, that’s why he keeps coming to your lab. He’s lonely.” She leaned in closer. “I think he likes you.”
I could feel myself blushing, but it was ridiculous. Nonsense. “Naomi, you haven’t even seen him.”
“As though he could possibly resist.”
“He could easily resist.” But my stomach twisted as I said it. Fitzroy didn’t like me, not like that, it was completely nonsensical. We were working.
“Wait,” Naomi said. “You actually like him. I was just teasing, but you actually like him. I can tell by your face.”
“I can’t like him. I barely know him.”
“But you like him.” The grin melted off Naomi’s face, and she sat back on her stool. “Oh, Freya, be careful,” she said, in her normal, steady voice again. “He’s the old king’s son.”
“I know that.” I scraped my fingers through my hair. “He’s just—not who I thought he was.”
“Who did you think he was?”
“Just—nobody. An idiot. You saw how he acted in court.”
“And who is he?”
The answer was too big, too nebulous, to put into words. “Fitzroy,” I said. “Just—Fitzroy.”
“Freya—” Her voice rose in warning, but I shook my head.
“We should get back to work. We have a lot of research to do.”
“All right,” she said slowly. “But if you want to talk—”
“I know.” But not then. Her teasing had knocked something loose inside me, like the realization that your finger hurt after someone pointed out it was bleeding. The knowledge buzzed at the edge of my thoughts, but I didn’t have time to examine it now, not with so much else going on.
I barely knew Fitzroy. He was an interesting person. That was all.
I had far more important things to worry about than him.
SEVENTEEN
THE TRIALS STARTED EARLY THE FOLLOWING morning.
I’d expected more of a mix of people, from what Norling had said, but only courtiers waited in the throne room, sitting on wooden benches. An aisle passed between them, leading to the throne. My council sat behind a large table, facing the rest of the court, and guards lined the walls.
This time, at least, someone had taken my skirts into consideration. I still wore about ten layers of them, but the wires were missing, making me look like a confection, but a human-sized one, and one that fit in the throne.
Even then, it was lucky I was tall. My long legs only just reached the floor when I sat. I forced myself to sit straight. I couldn’t let the throne overwhelm me. I had to look like I was in control.
Once everyone was settled and Norling had talked through the formalities, the guards led the server of the poisoned tarts into the room. She was trembling. Her black hair had matted around her shoulders, and she looked at the ground as she walked, chains rattling between her wrists.
“Felicia Cornwell,” Norling said. “You have admitted to attempting to poison your queen. If you name your co-conspirators, Her Majesty may see to have mercy on you.”
The woman continued to tremble. “I didn’t work with anyone. I acted alone.”
“You worked alone?” Norling said. “You found the poison alone, prepared the food alone, broke into the castle alone, got into Her Majesty’s rooms alone. Is that what you are claiming?”
“I was already a servant at the palace,” she said. “But—yes. I worked alone.”
“Tell us who you worked with,” Norling said, “or I will be forced to punish you for treason.”
The woman stared at the floor, her face ghost white, but she did not flinch. “I worked alone.”
But Norling was asking the wrong question, I thought. We could find out who she worked with ourselves, with the right information. If we wanted to understand the attacks, she was the only one who could help us. I leaned forward, steeling myself to speak before the crowd. “Why did you attack me?”
Norling stared at me. “Your Majesty?”
I continued to address the woman. “You must have had a reason for trying to kill me. You knew you’d end up here, whether or not you succeeded. You must have had a reason.”
The girl remained silent. I stared at her, willing her to speak. If she would just tell us, if she would just explain . . .
“Mistress Cornwell,” Norling said. “Her Majesty asked you a question.”
“Because of this!” she burst out. “All of this! The court with all its gold, while people outside it starve. You spend more on sweets than most people have to live on their whole lives. The Forgotten want to return, the deaths were a sign of that, but until we burn out this corruption, they never will!”
“Do all the Gustavites believe that?”
The woman’s expression closed off again. She stared at me again, her face red.
“His book—it doesn’t mention murder,” I said, trying to keep my voice as friendly as possible. I couldn’t let it shake. “I read it, to try and understand what you were fighting for. But it was a pretty peaceful book. Do you really think he wants you to do this?”
“Your Majesty—” Norling said, in a warning voice, but the woman seemed angrier now.
“We must burn out this corruption,” she said, meeting my gaze. Words from the book. But incomplete ones.
“We must burn out this corruption in ourselves,” I corrected. “Change must come from within. He never thought the Forgotten wanted us to become murderers. Has your group read his book, or just heard about it?”
“Most of them are fools,” she snapped, so angry now she didn’t seem to notice her mistake. “They think we can do this peacefully, and they’re wrong. He didn’t know what we would be up against. But the rest of us—we know. And so if I’m going to die—” Her voice caught on the word. “If I’m going to die, I want to do it stopping all of you.”
“You’re not going to die. We don’t execute people in Epria.”
The silence that followed was too sharp, too loud. “Your Majesty,” Norling said, rather carefully. “Epria has not executed a criminal in many decades, it is true, but that does not mean we should not respond to treason. One attack against you would be enough for that. And this woman may have been involved in murdering your predecessor, in slaughtering this entire court.”
“I was not!” The woman’s whole body shook. “That wasn’t me!”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“It was an opportunity,” she said, “but I wasn’t involved in the murders. You must believe me!”
“I believe you,” I said. Her surprise and panic seemed clear enough. “And there is no execution in this kingdom.”
“Your Majesty,” Holt said. “Regardless of anything else, regardless of her beliefs, this woman attempted to kill you. If not for your quick thinking—your divinely bestowed suspicion—you and several others may have died. We cannot let this go unpunished.”
“It won’t go unpunished. Where do attempted murderers usually go? Is it Rickstone Castle?” An isolated stone fortress on the moors, a good hundred miles from the capital, and perhaps fifty from the nearest town. It had been built by a rather eccentric noble, desperate for quiet and increasingly convinced that someone might attack him to take that solitude away. He had no relatives, no friends, and so the crown had taken the castle when he died and turned it into a prison. It was, I’d heard, nicer than the dungeo
ns of the Fort. It had never been intended for such grim purposes. “Mistress Cornwell will be sent there, as she has confessed,” I said. “No one will be executed.”
“Your Majesty!” Norling said, as furious whispers whipped through the crowd. “I am your minister of justice, and it’s my responsibility—”
“And I’m queen,” I said. “We’re not executing anybody.”
“No executions?” Sten stood. It was the loudest I’d ever heard him speak. His eyes were black and hard, and all his usual steadiness was gone. Fury radiated from him, his hands clenched into fists. “This woman helped kill most of the court. She killed her king, and the queen, and hundreds of others. And you’re going to show her mercy?”
“She didn’t kill them!” I said. “She denied it, at least, and she happily admitted to attacking me. We can’t execute her for that.”
“Torsten,” Holt said, his voice soothing. “You are still grieving for your friends, as we all are. But Queen Freya has chosen mercy, until we have indisputable proof of guilt. It would not do for us to lash out in grief and destroy a hundred years of peace.”
“The peace was broken when filth like this attacked the king.” Sten’s fists twitched. He shoved his way to the aisle and strode out of the room. The crowd whispered in his wake.
My hands shook, but I would not move. “No executions.”
Holt nodded. “As you wish, Your Majesty.”
The accused was led from the room, and my advisers had a hurried conference before addressing the guards again. While they talked, a few other nobles followed Sten, whispering as they went.
Next the guards led a man into the room. He looked about my father’s age, with a patchy mustache and gray speckled in his hair.
“Henry Goodram,” Norling said, reading from a large sheet of paper before her. “Accused of forging diamonds, endangering the stability of the kingdom for his own personal gain, at a time when our kingdom needs its stability the most.”
“Begging your pardon,” the man said, “but I didn’t know what was going to happen at that ball when I did it.” A few nobles behind him leaned forward in interest, but some of the others stood up and started drifting out of the room. I guess they had anticipated more discussions of murder, not jewel forgery. “How could I have known? If I had, I wouldn’t have—”
“You expect us to believe that you didn’t intend to take advantage of the situation?” Norling said. “That you only had innocent intentions?”
“I didn’t know they weren’t real diamonds,” he said quickly, as though he hadn’t basically admitted his own guilt ten seconds before. “Someone sold ’em to me, the price was too good to be true, maybe, but I didn’t know they were fakes.”
“Were they convincing?” I asked. After all the fuss over the poverty of the kingdom and the need to drape ourselves in jewels, realistic fakes might be useful. They must have been good, if they posed such a risk to the economy. Or did they just pose a risk to the nobility’s pride?
“See them for yourself,” Norling said. She gestured at a man to her left, who walked forward and presented me with a tiny handful of jewels. I held one up to inspect it in the light. It gleamed a thousand colors, shifting as I moved. I wasn’t exactly an expert on diamonds, but it looked realistic to me. Someone like Madeleine Wolff would probably spot its inadequacies immediately, but I would never have noticed.
“I didn’t know!” the man said. “You must believe me, Your Majesty. I didn’t know they weren’t real.”
“But you did, sir,” I said. I shifted in my seat. His rambling desperation made my skin itch, horrified that I was the cause, but if he admitted to it himself, I couldn’t exactly let him go. “It was the first thing you said. You didn’t know what would happen at the ball when you did it.”
“I meant—I might have suspected they were fakes,” he said. “But I’m not an expert, so I went on what I’d been told. I wasn’t involved.”
I looked back at the diamonds. They sparkled in the light, revealing colors at their hearts. Just like real diamonds. “How were they made?” I asked slowly.
“From glass, Your Majesty,” Norling said. “With a lot of lead added to create that gleam. They make a paste, I believe. We’re not certain of the exact method.”
“They’re very convincing,” the accused man said quickly. “Anyone would believe they were real.”
“Do we have any more proof?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Norling picked up another sheet of paper and talked through the investigation, those who had spoken against Henry Goodram, how the trail for the source had turned cold with him. Add in his own slip-up here, and the truth seemed obvious.
“I will not go against my advisers’ recommendations,” I said carefully, hoping they were the right words. “But these are impressive fakes. Tell us how they’re made, exactly how, and we’ll consider that when we—with the punishment. We’ll take it into consideration.”
Someone in the crowd laughed. “Is Her Majesty planning to get into the fake diamond market herself?”
“If we can understand how fakes are made, perhaps we can use that knowledge. It could help us identify them. Or they could be useful in some other way.” Like maintaining the extravagant look of the court without it costing endless riches. “Knowledge is a good thing.”
“Including criminal knowledge, Your Majesty?” Norling asked.
“It shows intelligence. Ingenuity. We need those things.”
“But I didn’t make them, Your Majesty. I swear I didn’t.”
“That’s my offer,” I said, quieter than I would have liked. “Do with it what you will.”
The trials went on for hours. The nobles left the room in dribs and drabs until only a couple remained. Madeleine stayed through the entire thing, her hands settled carefully in her lap, and Fitzroy stayed, too. I tried not to look at him. My conversation with Naomi was still too fresh, and I felt a jolt of uncertainty every time he caught my eye. I had enough to think about, with the parade of cases presented to me.
Norling was the chief of justice, and she was the one responsible for making decisions, but the word of a queen could always overrule her, and I wanted to be certain that everything was fair. I had the power to dole out justice, or to destroy someone’s life, and I wanted to do the best that I could. I wanted to do better than my best.
But hours of speaking to people, of being watched and measured, left me feeling scraped raw inside, too tired to think. The moment the trials ended, I hurried away with my guards, avoiding Fitzroy’s gaze again.
I’d been fascinated by the fake diamonds, the way the light shifted and changed color inside them. I’d always heard that those colors were part of diamonds’ hearts, but if a mixture of glass and lead could have the same effect, perhaps there was more to it. I’d asked that they be sent to my laboratory, and they were waiting on the center table when I returned. I picked one up and watched the colors again. Was it something to do with the light?
I lit a candle and held the jewel up to the flame. Again, the colors shifted inside. I’d left a piece of paper on the table, and the colors danced there as well, forming a rainbow.
I looked across at my supplies on the other side of the room, and then stopped. Something was wrong. I’d organized my metals in order of reactivity, to make my experiments easier, with the uncertain and untested ones in alphabetical order at the end. Now they were out of place. Mostly the same, but a few jumbled or reversed.
Someone had been in here.
It could have been Fitzroy. Naomi knew to keep things organized in the lab, but Fitzroy might not have known the system. Yet the hairs on my arm stood on end. I knew, knew, something was wrong.
I hurried over and inspected the jars. Nothing was missing, as far as I could tell. But someone had been looking for something—
I seized the jar of arsenic. It looked the same, though. That was good. No one had taken any.
Why hadn’t I been locking the door? I’d trusted that no one
would really care to interrupt me here, but I should have realized the risk the moment Fitzroy first appeared. These chemicals should be locked away.
The door creaked. I spun around, but it was just Naomi, peering into the gloom.
“Freya? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Are you all right?”
She nodded. Then she glanced at the jars scattered across the countertop. “What are you doing? You’d glare at me if I made a mess like that.”
“So you haven’t been here today? Reorganizing these?”
“No. I wouldn’t touch them, you know that. Maybe Fitzroy was here?”
“Yes,” I said. “Maybe.” But I didn’t quite believe it.
Naomi sat on the stool and pulled my notes toward her. “I think we need to get started on talking to more people,” she said. “Now that the Gustavites and Fitzroy are off our list. Fitzroy is off our list, isn’t he?”
I nodded.
“Sten acted so strangely at the trials. I know he lost his friends, but—he’s acting oddly. One of us should really speak to him.”
“And you think he’ll tell me anything, after that?”
Naomi shrugged. “He might. If you’re direct with him. Or I could try and speak with him.”
“Somehow,” I said, “I doubt most people will be as willing to spill their secrets as Fitzroy was.”
“He spilled all his secrets, did he?” Naomi said, giving me a slight sideways grin.
“Shush, you.” I joined her by the notes. “I suppose you’re right, though. My advisers haven’t found any more evidence or linked it to anyone. It feels like it has to be someone here. Sten must have seen something.”
“Can we find out who ordered the cake?” Naomi asked. “I know sometimes people would pay for particular dishes. As a gift to the king. If we knew who it was—”
“It was my father.” We both jumped. Fitzroy stood in the doorway. “Your guards let me pass,” he said, in answer to my unspoken question. “Since they see me so often here, anyway.”
“So much for security.” I stared at him. He hadn’t heard what we’d said before, Naomi’s jokes, had he? “What was your father?”
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