“Would it be better, if I had something more dramatic to offer? Some personal grievance, some cry for revenge? Ambition for myself, perhaps? Surely it would be worse, to hurt people for such selfish reasons. I wanted to help. I wanted to create a better kingdom. And I believe I have.”
“Don’t pretend you intended me to be queen. That you didn’t think it would be you.”
“I never intended that. I assumed he would hoard it for himself, poison himself slowly, until he told me he was getting more for the banquet. And even then—so many people could have survived before me. It was never about becoming queen.”
“But you didn’t stop him. You knew hundreds of people could die, and you didn’t stop him.”
“It had to happen. Epria needed it.” She looked away, eyes settling on a half-finished canvas on the other side of the room. “It is medicine, you know. That’s what the merchant told me, when I bought a tiny pot of my own. It cost a fortune, but I’d never seen a color like it, and I needed it for my collection. He leered at me and told me it was a cure for the pox—and for sweating sickness, too, for many things. Of course, I just wanted the color.” She glanced back at me, smiling softly. “And then I fell ill. I saw the lines on my fingernails and I knew it must contain arsenic—I don’t paint with it normally because it ruins your hands, and this yellow was the only new color I had, so it had to be the source.”
“So you sent some to the king?”
“I sent all I had left, along with the painting I had just completed. And I told him the truth. It was a color, but also a rare and miraculous medicine that people in Rejka thought brought good health and good fortune. I wished for him to have it, as a gold color fit for a king.”
“And he put it in his wine.”
“I assume so. It gave him stomach pains, of course, as it poisoned him slowly. But he didn’t connect those with the dye. Why would he? He thought he was ill, and no one thought to investigate something that the king himself added to his food.”
“You said he had been sick for months and months. Long before you last left the castle.”
“I lied,” she said, and for the first time, I heard a slight hint of remorse. “I am sorry. You were so intent on solving the murder. I couldn’t let you find out he had only been sick since I left the capital. I wanted you to think someone had been poisoning him for months, before and after I left.”
And that was the detail she seemed to regret. Not all the deaths, but a couple of small lies, to interfere with my investigation.
I’d trusted her too much. I hadn’t checked her story. Fitzroy had agreed that his father was hiding an illness, and I’d just assumed that all the details she’d added were true, too.
“Of course,” she continued, “his arrogance wouldn’t stop there. He needed more and more. I didn’t have any more to give him, so he sent men to hunt some down. He named it after himself, even though it already had a name, and he wanted to own all of it. I was concerned that someone would warn his advisers that it contained arsenic, but either no one knew, or no one cared. They just knew it was a dye that cured certain illnesses, as long as people did not take too much. And of course, his extravagance meant he could not keep it to himself. He needed to make a big show, to bestow that good health and good fortune on everyone he favored. He had to throw that rare dye away at a banquet, just to show how rich and kingly he was. But I knew he would only give it to people he liked, which meant that those he didn’t like, those less extravagant than himself . . . they would survive. It would be far more effective at creating a new court than I had ever imagined. I would not stop that.”
“Even if your own cousin might die, too?”
“I trusted in him. I knew he wouldn’t eat it. The king was angry with him, and Sten was angry with the king, with his wastefulness . . . he wouldn’t eat the gold cake, out of principle. And he didn’t.”
“But everyone else—you just left them to die?”
“Not everyone. I thought perhaps Fitzroy might rule. I wanted to make sure he survived, so I told his father that a rumor had reached me, that Fitzroy was bragging that he’d be king. I didn’t say it quite like that, of course . . . I congratulated the king on his decision, said I’d heard it from Fitzroy himself. I knew it would enrage him, just in time for the banquet, and he’d deny him any golden cake, to put him in his place. He’d be safe.”
“So you’re the reason Fitzroy was going to be exiled?”
Madeleine shook her head. “I didn’t know about that. But you must understand, the king was always changing his opinion about Fitzroy. Even if he wished to make him his heir on the day he received my letter, he would have been furious to think that Fitzroy was assuming it would happen. And even if he was furious with Fitzroy because of my letter, he would have forgiven him, soon enough. If he had not poisoned them all. That was how the king behaved.”
“And the king just happened to have made a more permanent decision, this time?”
“I do not know. He might have been posturing, ready to change his mind again. But his sickness had made him reflective. And considering what we know about Holt’s beliefs . . . he may have been influenced to finally dismiss his son for good.”
“And everyone else . . . you killed them. All your friends.”
“The king’s greed killed them. Not mine.”
Her expression wasn’t guilty. It didn’t show any remorse. It was . . . honest. She met the truth with the same poise with which she met everything else.
“If I arrest you,” I said, “people will think it’s because of your cousin. They won’t believe you were responsible. And when Sten arrives, I’m sure he’ll be happy to free you.” He’d never believe me if I said Madeleine was responsible. He wouldn’t stop the attack now.
“Oh, no,” Madeleine said. “Not at all. If he finds out I was responsible, he’ll punish me for it, like he wants to punish you. But he will fight his way into the city before he believes you. I do not believe it will help your cause.”
Because Madeleine was so beautiful, so loved, so good. She was everything I wasn’t, or so I’d believed. How could she have killed them?
“You were supposed to be my friend.”
“I am your friend,” Madeleine said. “Whatever else I have done, I am your friend. I did this from kindness, Freya. I did this because it needed to happen, for everybody’s sakes. I am not proud of it. I take no joy in it. I’ve cried over those deaths, and every tear was real. But it needed to be done.”
And that was where we could not agree. No matter the flaws of the previous king, no matter who had ordered the poison, no matter how much she had mourned the deaths, Madeleine had plotted to kill, and kill she had. She had killed Naomi’s brother. She had killed everyone.
“Did you intend to kill me?” I said.
“I did not think of you. I did not know you.”
“And did you try to kill me after? After the poison failed?”
“No! No, of course I didn’t. This was never about me taking the crown. I meant every word I ever said to you, Freya. I think you are a good queen. The sort of queen we need.”
“Then it is lucky Naomi and I left the banquet.”
“Yes. It is lucky you did.”
I continued to stare at her. I couldn’t understand the soft expression on her face, her calm. “You let me arrest Fitzroy. You would have let me kill him.”
“You would not have killed him. You would have found a reason to forgive him. You have a good heart, Freya. You would have known to trust him, in the end.”
“And what about you? What about my heart’s decision to trust you?”
“Perhaps your heart is wise in that, as well. I did what was best.”
I shook my head. I could almost see Madeleine’s perspective, how she had twisted things around, but so many people had died. Innocent people, trying to live in the world they’d been given. Madeleine had punished them all, indiscriminately, just to say she had not done so directly, to say the king’s extravagance
was the cause.
“Do you believe me?” Madeleine said softly. “Or should I prepare to go down to the dungeons?”
“No,” I said. “No, to both of those things. If you really are my friend, you’ll stay in your rooms, and you’ll help me to stop your cousin. Once we’ve survived that, then . . . then I’ll decide what to do.”
“I meant what I said before,” Madeleine said. “You will be a great queen. A better one than I had hoped for.”
“If I stop your cousin first.”
Madeleine stepped back. “You have to use your strengths against him. Unsettle him. I don’t know what he believes, but he is too superstitious to be entirely convinced he doesn’t believe. If you can somehow convince him the Forgotten are angry with him . . . that might be the only way.”
I nodded. It was good advice, no matter the source. “I’ll have someone guard the door.”
Madeleine sank into a curtsy, her skirts flowing around her, and I forced myself to turn away.
I wanted to run to Fitzroy’s rooms, but my legs wouldn’t listen. The shock of Madeleine’s betrayal had hollowed me out, and I could hardly feel my feet touching the floor. I floated like a ghost through the castle, barely disturbing the air with my presence.
Down the stairs, along the corridor, past the guards, to Fitzroy’s rooms. I hadn’t planned what I would say to him, had no time to sort through my feelings, so when the door swung open, I simply stumbled forward, my throat tight.
He sat in an armchair, writing. His shoulders were tense, but otherwise he looked fine, he looked like Fitzroy.
“Why did you lie to me?” I said. My voice cracked. “Why did you hide the letters from me, when you knew . . . ?”
He must have noticed the shift in tone, the way my question had moved from accusation to confusion, because he frowned, and when he replied, his voice was softer too. “I panicked,” he said. “I didn’t know my father planned that, not until I saw those letters, when I was reading in the lab by myself, waiting for you. I thought, if you read them, you’d suspect me. It did seem to suggest I might have done it. So I hid them. I didn’t want you to not trust me.”
“So you did something untrustworthy?”
“I knew they weren’t useful for the investigation. They were personal. So I hid them. But I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”
“I—I understand why you did it.” That didn’t mean I forgave him, but I could see his reasons. It didn’t make him a bad person, but—that didn’t mean I had to forgive him. “I found the murderer.” I had to force the words out. I’d wanted to be able to say them for weeks, but now they were just . . . hollow. All of it was hollow. “It was Madeleine.”
“Madeleine?”
“She told me.” And I explained all that had happened since his arrest. He began pacing as soon as I mentioned the painting, and did not stop even when the story was done.
“Madeleine,” he said. “That—how? How could it have been Madeleine?”
“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 i
nterpret them.”
I frowned, the beginnings of hope crackling inside me. “What do you mean?”
“You can’t fight Sten with force,” Naomi said. “So you have to make his supporters decide they’d rather support you, instead. As, say, the chosen of the Forgotten.”
“Make them see heresy,” Fitzroy said.
People wanted proof. That’s what the Gustavite woman had said. They wanted to believe, needed to believe, but they required that final push. They had to see it.
I looked around the laboratory again. The experiments, the explosions, the way I had manipulated light . . . science was my strength, in part because so few people understood it. Because no one expected me to be capable of it.
Play to their expectations. Use their assumptions against them.
I picked up one of the crystals, letting it fracture the lamplight. “I’ve got it,” I said. “I know what we have to do.”
Holt was unconvinced. “Your Majesty,” he said, a little tentative, considering our last interaction. “This is a dangerous plan. If it displeases the Forgotten—”
“You’ve told me before that you think they chose me. If that’s the case, surely they won’t mind me using that to keep my throne. They can’t disapprove of me using my brain to help, not when they chose me because of it.”
Even as I said it, I felt a slight shiver of fear. If the Forgotten existed, if they were displeased . . .
It still couldn’t be worse than what Sten had planned for me.
I turned to Norling. “Do you think we can get everything in place before Sten attacks?”
“Certainly,” she said. “But Your Majesty, many other things could go wrong. If they see through it—”
“If they see through it, I’ll be just as dead as I’ll be if we don’t try. If that happens, you can surrender to him. Say you were misguided. He’ll probably spare you. Short of that . . . it’s the best plan we have.”
“But Your Majesty.” Holt paused, choosing his next words carefully. “This plan is rather—theatrical. You will have to speak well. And you . . .”
“And I’ve never spoken well in my life?”
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