“I only thought—Your Majesty, I wanted what was best for you. I only wished to protect you.”
“And did you find any evidence against him? Anything, beyond the fact that his father wanted to send him away?”
“Not as such, Your Majesty, but it was suspicious, and—”
“Suspicious? If we’re condemning people for acting suspiciously, why don’t you tell me why you were in the palace a few nights ago? What did you take from the chapel?”
Silence. Holt stared at me. “Your Majesty?”
“I saw you. I was there, investigating the murders, and I saw you carrying treasure away. Sneaking into the place where everyone died is suspicious, don’t you think? Do you think I should arrest and execute you for that, without any actual evidence?”
“Rasmus?” Norling said. “What is this?”
“I was in the palace, Your Majesty,” Holt said slowly. “But I was helping you. That shrine was an insult to the Forgotten, and we need gold if we’re to have even a chance of fighting Sten. They would want it to be used to support you.”
I could believe it. I wanted to hate him, wanted all the blame for the murders to fall on him, but that, at least, I believed to be true. “Perhaps,” I said. “I am simply saying—” I pressed my fingers into my eyes. The strain of the night was too much. I didn’t want to think that Holt had been right after all. He had still been prejudiced, misguided. He had. “We should not act too harshly before we know the whole truth. I appreciate that you want to protect me. Especially—considering the circumstances. But your job is to advise me. Whether I take your advice or not is up to me.” I sighed. “We’re not going to do anything, for now. We won’t tell anyone. Not until we have more evidence, one way or the other.”
“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.
Fitzroy had cooperated enough to tell me where his father’s study was, at least, and it seemed he had told the truth. It was inside the king’s private quarters on the third floor of the palace, and he had left the door unlocked.
I paused on the threshold. I’d never been in the king’s quarters before, not even the semiprivate ones, and although he was dead, although I was now queen, it still felt dangerous, forbidden. I didn’t belong there.
But I couldn’t let that silliness stop me now. I forced myself to step into the corridor.
It wasn’t what I had expected. The king had been ostentatious, wasteful, but he hadn’t filled these rooms with the usual gold paneling and endless staring statues. A couple of paintings hung on the walls, but otherwise, the place was al
most plain.
The king’s study was also more sensible than I had expected. A huge oak desk filled most of the room, and several shelves leaned against the walls. No paintings here. I hurried around it, lighting the sconces on the walls until the room flickered with light.
It was mostly empty, thanks to Fitzroy. But he couldn’t carry an entire room’s worth of papers, even if he wanted to. There had to be something here.
And the king, it seemed, had been incredibly messy. Papers had been shoved on top of books on the bookshelf. They’d been piled on the windowsill behind the curtains. They teetered in the corner and under the desk. A quick glance through the stacks on the floor suggested they were almost a year old—probably not relevant, which would explain why Fitzroy hadn’t brought them. But I couldn’t leave anything to chance. Evidence could be hidden anywhere.
I sat in the king’s red-velvet chair, cushioned by its luxury. If only the king had cared as much for organization as he did for comfort and gold.
I looked at the chaos on the desk again. I had no time left, and this would take hours to sort through. But I needed to play to my strengths. I would work out a system, and I would get through everything, bit by bit, until I had the whole picture in mind.
The hours flew past, Sten’s army getting closer and closer to the capital, and I found nothing. Nothing about Fitzroy, nothing about the banquet, nothing hinting at the murders. A few letters from nobles, a few drafts of notes to send back to them, pleas from his advisers to consider this or that. A note from Holt, warning the king of the expense of his birthday celebrations, but no sign of how the king had responded.
One letter of note came from Rasmus Holt. In it, he begged the king to consider using some of the gold decorating the chapel to support victims of a flood in the west, but the king had merely scribbled Find other resources at the bottom. I ran my finger along Holt’s signature. Yesterday, I would have added this to the pile of reasons why Holt must have been involved, why he resented the king and tried to create a new regime. Now, I wasn’t sure. It explained his appearance in the palace, confirmed that he supported charity and religious simplicity. It wasn’t necessarily a motive for murder.
Once I’d worked through the piles under the desk, I crawled underneath, searching for any dropped pages. When that revealed nothing of worth, I emerged and pulled books out from the shelves and moved the curtains aside, checking for any hidden pages.
Behind one of the curtains was a wastepaper basket. It was full.
Most of the pages here were unfinished letters, full of crossed-out words and apparent frustration. I skimmed through them, but found nothing useful.
After several hours, the king’s desk was completely tidy, his notes sorted by topic and author, and I’d found nothing more than a few coins lost in the mess. I slumped back in the chair, tiredness weighing my eyelids down. If I found nothing . . . if there was nothing to find . . .
I couldn’t stay in this room any longer. I needed to stretch my legs, to see what else this part of the palace had to offer. There had to be secrets and intrigue behind some of the doors.
I stepped out of the office and stopped. A large landscape hung on the wall opposite the door. It had been obscured before, by the darkness, by my distraction, but it caught my attention now. Rolling hills, tinted orange and yellow by the setting sun. The sky was a rainbow of color, the sunset gliding across the clouds. Near the top, where red blended into blue, there was a streak of yellow that almost looked like gold.
The same yellow that had been used in the cake. The same yellow as the powdered dye when it colored my fingertips. I scrambled closer, until my nose was inches from the canvas. It was here. I searched the painting for a signature, for any sign of its origin, but there was nothing, so I wrenched it from the wall and pried it out of its swirling golden frame.
A note had been tucked inside. It said:
I see these hills from the window of our country manor, and the richness of the sunset makes me long for your company and your court. I hope I can return soon and find you as well as when I left.
It was signed by Madeleine Wolff.
THIRTY
I TURNED THE PAINTING OVER AND STARED AT THE sky. It was King’s Yellow, I was certain of it. The color Madeleine claimed she had never seen. The color so rare and expensive that the king had to send thousands of miles away to get it.
Someone had told him about the color. Someone had exposed him to the idea. And Madeleine was close to him, the only painter that I knew of. She’d used the color, and she’d lied about seeing it, and—
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. I had to think. I’d already accused someone I cared about. Was I now going to accuse another, over a painting? The evidence was scant, to say the least, and everyone had lied, with their lives potentially at risk. Lied about religion. Lied about what they had lost. Lied about a small dab of paint in a landscape.
I had to think. Think. Fitzroy had reason to silence his father, but to kill everybody, and not make a move for the throne himself? To help me in my investigations—and he had helped, he had brought me closer to the truth—and defend me against Sten? I’d seen him in the Fort, the morning after the banquet, and again after I was crowned. He’d been distraught. He had looked like he could not make sense of what was happening, like he didn’t quite believe the pain was real.
I wasn’t good at reading people, but Fitzroy . . . Fitzroy had been so raw. He was a good performer, when he wanted to be, but I’d seen him without that mask now, and I felt certain I’d seen his true feelings then. His face in that moment, the agony there . . .
Madeleine had been sad, too. Madeleine had grieved. But always in that sophisticated, wonderful Madeleine way, so perfect, with none of the messiness that Fitzroy and Naomi had displayed. And she had been out of the capital when the attack occurred, safe and free from suspicion. If I hadn’t left the palace, she would have inherited the throne. And when the poison was a food dye, intended to be in the meal, included on the king’s orders . . . who would ever suspect her of murder, even as a painter who had used the color before?
She’d said she was away from the capital because of an illness, one that seemed to have no clear cause. “Melancholy,” the doctor called it, but Madeleine said she’d never had such a stomachache from melancholy before. Stomachache, a sign of mild arsenic poisoning. Arsenic like in the paints she used.
And Madeleine licked her paintbrushes. I’d seen her do it, smoothing the bristles on my makeup brushes. If there had been traces of King’s Yellow there, it could have given her that stomachache, and if she’d realized the source . . .
Had that given her the idea?
I did not want to believe it. But it was possible. It was beyond possible.
When I got back to the Fort, I did not order guards. I did not make a scene. I walked into Madeleine’s rooms to find her sitting in an armchair, a book propped open on her lap. Our eyes met, and Madeleine’s lips parted, her face paling slightly. And I knew. There was such a resigned look on Madeleine’s face. She stood, her skirts flowing around her like water, never looking away.
“It was you.” I was surprised by how calm I felt, how clear. Now it was fact, now I knew, it didn’t seem worth screaming about. “You killed them.”
“I didn’t put the poison in the cake,” she said, in the same soft tone I’d heard from her before, whenever she discussed the deaths. “But I introduced him to that dye, yes.”
“Why?” There was so much I needed to say, but that question pushed away everything else. Why.
“It needed to be done.”
“You needed to kill all your friends?”
“I did not know he would do it,” Madeleine said. “I did not force him to act as he did. I knew he would like it, for the extravagance, but I did not know—I did not know he would fill a dish with it at the banquet.”
“Why? Why would you do this?”
Madeleine tilted her chin upward, meeting my gaze without flinchi
ng. “You know I loved the court, when I first came here. It was so lively. Every day had a new distraction. I felt like I belonged, like it made up for everything I’d lost. And then, a couple of years ago, I was sick for the first time. I spent several months back in the country, painting, walking, meeting new people and learning how to breathe. And when I returned . . . I saw it, Freya. I saw it for what it really was. The vanity of it, the waste. The day I returned, we had a huge party in the garden of the palace. The theme was gold. Gold flakes in the food, gold flakes in the water, gold on the dresses and in people’s hair. It was a celebration of the peace and goodness of the court, the peace we’d had for so long. And I stood in the middle of it, seeing how ugly it was. Seeing how no one had really cared for my absence. No one cared about me, no one cared about anyone. They just wanted to have fun, and to be more fantastic than anyone else. The next day, I went to the king. I’d seen people struggling, and I wanted to help. But when I asked him for money, he laughed at me. He said I was too much like my cousin, and the crown did not have the funds to waste. The countryside dealt with its own affairs. He had the money to let his whole court literally eat gold, but not to make sure others were fed. And from then on, I saw it, Freya. I saw what Gustav was talking about, as I know you have. We needed change. We needed it. And it wasn’t going to happen by itself.”
“Because the Forgotten must return?”
“The Forgotten aren’t real, Freya. We’re deluding ourselves to think they are. The people who lived here before were just people, with skill and knowledge we don’t have. And we’ll never have them, because we think we must wait for the Forgotten to give them to us. We use that myth as an excuse. Things were broken, Freya. And someone needed to fix them.”
I stared at her. “That was your reason?” There must have been more. That couldn’t be it.
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