Ead went to the Queen of Inys. She moved the drape aside and sat on the edge of the bed. Sabran was half-sitting, huddled over her bruised abdomen.
“I was selfish. I wanted—” Sabran breathed out through her nose. “I asked Niclays Roos to make me an elixir, something that would preserve my youth, so I would never have to get with child. When he could not,” she whispered, “I banished him to the East.”
“Sabran—”
“I turned my back on the Knight of Generosity for all that he had given me. I resented having to give just once in return.”
“Stop this,” Ead said firmly. “You had a great burden to bear, and you bore it bravely.”
“It is a divine calling.” Her cheeks glinted. “Over a thousand years of the same rule. Thirty-six women of the House of Berethnet bore daughters in the name of Inys. Why could I not?” She pressed a hand to her belly. “Why did this have to happen?”
At this, Ead took her gently by the chin.
“It is not your fault,” she said. “Remember it, Sabran. None of this is on your head.”
Sabran shied from her touch. “The Virtues Council will try everything, but my people are not fools,” she said. “The truth will out. Virtudom will collapse without its foundation. Faith in the Saint will be destroyed. The sanctuaries will be empty.”
The prophecy had the ring of truth. Even Ead knew that the collapse of Virtudom would cause turmoil. It was part of why she had been sent here. To preserve order.
She had failed.
“I have no place in the heavenly court,” Sabran said. “When I lie rotting in the soil, the Dukes Spiritual, whose blood comes from the Holy Retinue, will each lay claim to my throne.” A breath of humorless laughter escaped her. “Perhaps they will not even wait for me to die before the infighting begins. They believed in my power to keep the Nameless One shackled, but that power will now end with my death.”
“Then surely it is in their interest to keep you safe.” Ead tried to sound reassuring. “To buy themselves time to prepare for his coming.”
“Safe, perhaps, but not enthroned. Some of them will be asking themselves, at this very moment, if they should act at once. To choose a new ruler before Fyredel returns to destroy us.” Sabran narrated this in hollow tones. “They will all be asking themselves if the story of my divinity was ever true. I have been asking myself the same question.” Her hand slid back to her belly. “I have shown that I am only flesh.”
Ead shook her head.
“They will press me to name one of them my successor. Even if I do, the others may challenge it,” Sabran said. “The nobles will each raise their banners for one of the claimants. Inys will divide. While it is weak, the Draconic Army will return. And Yscalin stands poised to aid it.” She closed her eyes. “I cannot see it, Ead. I cannot see this queendom fall.”
She must have feared this outcome from the beginning.
“She was so … delicate. Glorian,” Sabran rasped. “Like the tracery of a leaf. The frail after the green has left it.” She gazed into nothing. “They tried to hide her from me, but I saw.”
A different lady-in-waiting would have told her that her child was safe in the heavenly court. Roslain would have painted her a picture of a black-haired baby swaddled in the arms of Galian Berethnet, smiling forever in a castle in the sky.
Ead did not. Such an image would not comfort Sabran in her grief. Not yet.
She reached for one icy hand and warmed it between hers. Shivering in the vastness of the bed, Sabran seemed more of a lost child than a queen.
“Ead,” she said, “there is a pouch of gold in the coffer.” She nodded to the chest her jewels were stored in. “Go into the city. The shadow market. They sell a poison there called the dowager.”
The breath went out of Ead.
“Don’t be a fool,” she whispered.
“You dare call the last Berethnet a fool.”
“Of course, when you speak like one.”
“I ask you this,” Sabran said, “not as your queen, but as a penitent.” Her face was taut, and her jaw trembled. “I cannot live knowing my people are doomed to death by the Nameless One or civil war. I could never be at peace with myself.” She took back her hand. “I thought you would understand. I thought you would help me.”
“I understand more than you know.” Ead cupped her cheek. “You have tried to turn yourself to stone. Do not be afeared to find that you are not. Queen you may be, but you are flesh and blood.”
Sabran smiled in a way that broke her heart.
“That is what it is to be a queen, Ead,” she said. “Body and realm are one and the same.”
“Then you cannot kill the body for the realm.” Ead held her gaze. “So no, Sabran Berethnet. I will not bring you poison. Not now. Not ever.”
The words came from a place she had tried to lock. The place where a rose had grown.
Sabran looked at her with an expression Ead had never seen. All the melancholy faded, leaving her curious and intent. Ead could see every splinter of green in her eyes, every lash, the candles trapped inside her pupils. The firelight danced on her shoulder. As Ead chased it with her fingertips, Sabran leaned into her touch.
“Ead,” she said, “stay with me.”
Her voice was almost too soft to hear, but Ead felt each word in her very flesh. Their lips were close now, a breath apart. Ead dared not move for fear that she would shatter this moment. Her skin was tender, aching at the feel of Sabran pressed against her.
Sabran framed her face between her hands. In her gaze was both a question and her fear of the answer.
As black hair brushed her collarbone, Ead thought of the Prioress and the orange tree. She thought of what Chassar would say if he knew how her blood sang for the pretender, who prayed to the empty tomb of the Mother. Scion of Galian the Deceiver. Sabran drew her close, and Ead kissed the Queen of Inys as she would kiss a lover.
Her body was spun glass. A flower just opened to the world. When Sabran parted her lips with her own, Ead understood, with an intensity that wrenched the breath from her, that what she had wanted for months now was to hold her like this. When she had lain beside Sabran and listened to her secrets. When she had stowed the rose behind her pillow. It was a realization that pierced her to the core.
They were still. Their lips lingered, just touching.
Her heart was too fast, too full. At first, she dared not breathe—even the smallest movement could sunder them—but then Sabran embraced her, voice breaking on her name. Ead felt the flutter of a heart against her own. Soft and quick as a butterfly.
She was lost and found and wandering, all at once. At the cusp of dreaming, yet somehow never more awake. Her fingers mapped Sabran, drawn across her skin by instinct. They followed the scar up her thigh, coursed in her hair, traced beneath her swollen breasts.
Sabran drew back to look at her. Ead caught a glimpse of her face in the candlelight—brow smooth, eyes dark and resolute—before they came together again, and the kiss was hot and new and world-forming, the flare of starbirth on their lips. They were honeycombs of secret places, fragile and intricate. Ead shivered as the night welcomed her skin.
She felt the wash of gooseflesh on Sabran. The nightgown slipped from her shoulder, farther, until it came to rest around her hips, so Ead could trace the pathway of her spine and fold her hands at the arch in her back. She kissed her neck and the naked place behind her ear, and Sabran breathed her name, head tilting back to bare the hollow of her throat. Moonlight filled it up like milk.
The silence of the Great Bedchamber was vast. Vast as night and all its stars. Ead heard each rustle of silk, each brush of hand on skin on sheets. Their breaths were hushed, held in anticipation of a knock on the door, a key in the lock, and a torch to bare their union. It would light a flame of scandal, and the fire would rise until it scorched them both.
But Ead called fire her friend, and she would plunge into the furnace for Sabran Berethnet, for just one night with her. Let them come with their swords and their torches.
Let them come.
Later, they lay in the light of the blood moon. For the first time in many years, the Queen of Inys slept without a candle.
Ead gazed at the canopy. She knew one thing now, and it blotted all else out of her mind.
Whatever the Priory desired, she could not abandon Sabran.
As she stirred in the depths of sleep, Ead breathed in the scent of her. Creamgrail and lilacs, laced with the clove from her pomander. She imagined stealing her away to the Milk Lagoon, that fabled land, where her name would never find her.
It could never be.
Slant light glowed through the Great Bedchamber. Gradually, Ead became aware of herself, and of Sabran. Black hair draped across the pillow. Skin on skin on skin. The sunlight had not yet reached the bed, but she felt as warm as if it had.
She felt no regret. Confusion, yes, and birds in her belly, but no desire to turn back time.
A knock came then, and it was as if a cloud had passed over the sun.
“Your Majesty.”
Katryen.