It’s a warning. I ignore it. I reach out with my free hand to take hers. She doesn’t pull away, but her hand stays limp in mine.
“But we could,” I say, desperation creeping in. “The Kaiser is a cruel man. You know this.”
“He is the Kaiser, he can be as cruel as he likes,” she replies. She glances around, as if there’s someone listening nearby. When her eyes find mine again, she looks at me like I’m a stranger, someone to be wary of. In all our years of friendship, she’s never looked at me that way.
I’m dimly aware of how tightly I’m clutching her hand, but she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t try to pull away. “If you could be Kaiserin. If…if you could marry S?ren. You could change things. The people would love you, they would rally to you over the Kaiser, you could take the country from him easily.”
“That’s treason,” she hisses. “Stop it, Thora.”
I open my mouth to argue, to tell her my name is not Thora, but before I can speak, something over Cress’s shoulder catches my gaze in one of the high windows that borders the garden to the west. I see a pale figure in a gray dress. I see yellow hair trailing behind her like the tail of a comet as she falls. I hear a scream that echoes in my bones and ends with a sickening thud on the other side of the garden, a hundred feet away.
Both of our mugs fall from our hands and break on the stones before Crescentia and I run toward it, but I know when we get there it will be too late. There is no surviving a fall like that.
The blood is the first thing I see. It pools out around her body—so much, so quickly. It’s the only color I can see against the gray of her dress, the gray of the stones, the colorless pallor of her skin. Her body is broken, limbs twisted at unnatural angles, like a marionette whose strings have been cut.
In my gut, I know who it is, but when her face comes into focus, shock still shakes me to my core. I’m so lost in it that I almost don’t hear Crescentia’s panicked cries next to me. I almost don’t feel her clutching my arm in shock and fear, our previous discussion forgotten, as if I can protect her from the Kaiserin’s corpse.
I untangle myself from Cress and inch closer to the body, stepping around the blood. I crouch down and press my hand to the Kaiserin’s cheek. Even in life her skin was cold, but it seems different now that she’s truly dead. Her eyes stare off at nothing and I close them, even though I’m sure they’ll follow me into my nightmares.
In the end, though, it’s her mouth that unravels me. Her dry lips are still caked in ash from when she kissed my forehead with something resembling love, and she’s smiling more broadly than I ever saw her when she was alive. She has the same smile as S?ren.
“Thora.” Crescentia shakes my shoulder. “Look up.”
In the window the Kaiserin fell from, a figure watches us. It’s too dark to make out his face, but his golden crown glints in the early-morning sunlight.
CRESCENTIA AND I DON’T SPEAK about what we saw in the week that follows the Kaiserin’s death. We also don’t talk about the conversation that preceded it, and I can’t help but wonder if it was all some kind of twisted nightmare. But that can’t be, because every morning I wake up and the Kaiserin is truly dead.
Only seconds after we found her, the guards came and questioned us, but we both knew better than to point fingers at the Kaiser.
We saw nothing, we told them, and they believed us without hesitation.
The court whispers that the Kaiserin finally succumbed to her madness and jumped, something most had been speculating about for years and a few had even been crass enough to place wagers on.
I heard that the Kaiser made the winning bet, but that’s only a rumor, albeit one that’s easy for me to believe.
The funeral was a quiet affair, one I wasn’t even invited to, though Cress was. She came to visit after and told me about how the Kaiserin’s body was displayed—clean, but just as broken as we’d found it. She told me that the Kaiser sat in the back of the chapel but left after only a few moments without giving the customary speech. Kalovaxian tradition says that those in mourning should shave their head, but he still wears his hair long, in the tradition of warriors, though it’s been decades since he was last in battle.
I try to hear any bitterness in Cress’s voice, any hint that the things we spoke of before have taken hold, but it’s as if she’s forgotten them completely. It may be a good thing. It may be that I was a fool to trust Cress, not because of who she is but because of how she was raised. This is the only world she knows, and though it’s a nightmare to me, it’s a world she is at home in. I suppose it’s easy to be at home in a world where you are on top. It’s easy not to notice those whose backs you stand on to stay there. One doesn’t even see them.
Blaise tries to ask me about what happened in the garden, but even though I can’t manage to be angry about our conversation at the maskentanz anymore, I’m not ready to talk to him again either. If I do, it will all come flooding out—the Kaiserin’s warning, the Kaiser’s leers, my feelings for S?ren, my almost-confession to Cress. It’s better if he doesn’t know any of those things. Blaise protects me in his way, and I protect him in mine.
There is no word from the Kaiser, though I expect something is coming, some new game that I will have to learn the rules to before he begins to cheat. If the Kaiserin was right about the Kaiser wanting to marry me to cement his hold over Astrea, I can only think the proposal will be coming soon. The idea creeps into my nightmares and many of my waking thoughts. No matter how many times I bathe, how hard I scrub my skin with sponges and oils, I can’t erase the feel of his hands on me. Sometimes just before I drift off to sleep, I’m suddenly jerked awake, certain that I smell his sour breath again.
One day, when I wake up, my fingers close around something hard and hot under my pillow. The bottle of Encatrio, I realize, pulling it out. I left it in its usual place in my mattress, but someone must have moved it to remind me—as if I could have forgotten. I feel my Shadows watching but no one says anything. No one is surprised it’s there.
I should say something, I know I should, but I can’t muster a defense again. I know as well as they must that I’m running out of excuses.
Instead, I get out of bed, Encatrio in hand, and kneel down to push it back into the hole in the mattress, not saying a word about it.
It would be imprudent to poison Cress and the Theyn too hastily, I tell myself, just as I’ve told my Shadows countless times. If we slip up, the Kaiser will blame me and I’ll likely lose my head before S?ren returns. Our plan will fall to pieces and it isn’t worth that. But I know that’s only a fraction of the truth. There is a much larger part of me that keeps playing my conversation with Cress in the garden over and over in my head, trying to imagine what might have happened if the Kaiserin hadn’t fallen at that moment, what Cress might have said.
I’m too afraid to bring it up again with her. I keep seeing the wary look on her face; I still hear her telling me that there is no changing the enslavement of the other Astreans. Still, there is a part of me that hasn’t yet given up hope that I’m wrong.
* * *
—
Every morning before Hoa comes in, I check the doorway for another note from S?ren, but there is never one to find. He was due back a couple of days ago now, and while I figure this must mean Vecturia is still fighting, I can’t help but worry that he might not come back at all.
And what will he come back to if he does? A world suddenly bereft of his mother, the only person in this palace he loved. He never even got to say goodbye to her. I understand that more than I care to, which is why I decide to write him another letter.
I don’t tell my Shadows what I’m doing when I sit down at my desk—I can’t stand to have Artemisia breathe down my neck again. Not this time, when there is no hidden strategy to my words, no deceptions or subterfuge, just honesty.