Even writing the words, it still feels so unreal. King Evert Strinne is dead.
They announced it yesterday. He died in the early hours, just after dawn. The Queen says he was murdered, and everyone is in a panic.
This is the first moment I’ve had to sit and collect my thoughts about all of this, and I just have no idea what to think.
Murmurs around town are saying poison. Linus Berling told me his father had heard the King’s lips were stained black from it. They’d been slipping it in his drink for over a week, and it finally took hold.
That explains how out of sorts the King seemed at Kasper’s funeral. But that just leads to a much bigger, darker question—who exactly are “they”? The Queen says that we have a mole in our midst, but she’ll root them out.
“We must be on guard always.” That’s what she said when she announced his death, perched on the balcony of the clock tower in the town square. Speaking to us all between tears while we all stared up at her anxiously, wondering what the fate of our kingdom will be.
And how can we be on guard any more than we already are? The H?gdragen are everywhere, but they’re not making us feel any safer. In fact, with them always watching, I feel even more vulnerable.
What if I accidentally do something and they think I’m the mole now?
In training today, I heard a few rumblings of your name, that you might somehow be behind all of this. I was quick to tell them to shut the hell up. You weren’t even here. It’s not even possible. And I know you would never do anything like this anyway.
The whole town is running scared, though. We’re all eyeing up our neighbors. Are they the enemy? Do they know who poisoned the King?
Delilah came over last night. She didn’t even care if anyone saw her. She was scared, and she needed to feel safe. So she came to me.
I held her in my arms for a long time, telling her that it would all be okay, when I wasn’t so sure that it would be anymore. But she looks at me with those eyes of hers. (And those eyes, Bryn—they’re unlike anything I’ve ever seen, dark chocolate and so big, I could get lost in them for days, and I wish I could, I wish I could just hold her and look at her, but there isn’t time for that.) Everything is so royally fucked right now.
I’ve been thinking that you might be the lucky one because you’re not here. The town is on lockdown. No one can leave or come back. There’s a curfew. (But that worked to my advantage last night, because Delilah couldn’t go home or she’d risk getting brought in for questioning, so she spent the night with me.)
You would be going crazy if you were here. That’s something that you can take comfort in, at least. You’re avoiding all the madness.
Today, the Queen appointed a new Chancellor to take your father’s place. She said this isn’t the proper time for an election, but with everything that’s happening, they need someone doing the job.
There should’ve been an uproar. The Queen removed the people’s only voice in our political process by cutting out the election. But nobody made a peep. We’ve all just accepted our fate.
In slightly better news, your parents are fine—they’re making do with your father’s pension, which the kingdom is apparently still paying. For now. Tilda is holding up okay. Or as well as one would expect given the circumstances.
Oh! I do have good news for you!
Tilda and I were walking through the town square this morning to get breakfast. (I try to get her out of her apartment at least once a day.) I saw Ridley on the other side of the square, walking through a crowd.
He didn’t look well, I’ll be honest with you, but he was free. He was walking without guards. I called his name and waved to him, but he never looked my way. I wanted to run over to him, but Tilda stopped me.
“He heard you, Ember. I don’t think he wants to be noticed right now,” she said.
But she promised me that she would stop by his place tonight.
I just can’t wait for this all to be over.
The snow has been melting, and it’s been doing this weird cold drizzle thing all day. All the posters they’d had up were getting destroyed by the elements, so the H?gdragen were out replacing them. The good news is that they took down the WANTED posters of you.
The bad news is that they replaced them with a reward being offered for anyone who knows anything in connection to the King’s death. With the King being dead, he can’t always be watching us anymore, so they replaced those with black and white posters of Queen Mina, looking twice as severe as Evert ever did.
The only thing it says is I AM ALWAYS WATCHING YOU, but somehow I believe it more than I did the King.
Your friend (no matter what),
Ember
SIXTEEN
duplicity