“But—” It would be an insult to dress up in finery now, while everyone else was dead. “It’s too soon.”
“It isn’t soon enough. You are vulnerable, Freya, as long as you are not the anointed queen. Once we have you crowned, in front of everybody, people will hesitate before they hurt you. Until then . . . we cannot risk it, Freya.”
I raked my hands through my tangled hair. “What happened last night? What—what did you see?”
“It was very sudden.” He looked away, eyes focused on the embroidery of my bed hangings, as though they might provide the answer. “After the last course of the feast. People—some people began to complain of stomach pains. Then—” He swallowed and dragged his gaze back to me. “I will spare you the details of what proceeded.”
“Don’t spare me the details. I want to know.” I needed to know, needed to understand. People were dead, and if I could understand that, if I could really know . . .
“You do not want to know. They will remain dead either way. You have one concern now, Freya. Be queen. You will have a whole council of people to investigate these murders. You need to focus on your own safety now.”
But a council of people weren’t me. Someone had killed many of the most influential and well-protected people in the kingdom. They’d succeeded, even though simply mentioning the idea would have led to their arrest. They were dangerous people, dangerous and clever. I needed to know who they were. I needed to know how they had done it, why they had done it. And I couldn’t trust anyone else to find out the truth on my behalf.
“What about Naomi’s brother?” I said. “Did you find him?”
He sighed. “I don’t know what happened to him. If he was at the banquet, then—it is unlikely he survived.”
“But it’s possible.”
“Yes, Freya, it is possible. For now, Naomi has been given accommodation in the Fort, and our protection, as well. But I have been working all day to take care of the details for you. Other people’s brothers . . . right now, they cannot be my concern.”
“But it’s my concern. Naomi is my best friend.”
“I know you want it to be,” he said sadly. “But you can only deal with so many things, Freya. You have to focus on staying alive and holding on to the throne. Her brother is either dead or alive. We can’t change that.” He shook his head, and then straightened, as though shedding his grief. “We need to get started. We’ll have to fit you for a coronation gown, and I will go over the protocol with you.”
The rest of the evening passed in a blur. My father returned with four seamstresses in tow. They carried Queen Martha’s coronation dress between them, but one glance told me that it would never, never fit.
It took longer to convince them. They squeezed me into it, urging me to breathe in more, as though that might make my shoulders less broad. When they’d finally forced the dress into place, unfastened but on, they fussed with the buttons and the hem, politely avoiding saying what was obvious to everyone. The dress was several inches too short. It strained around the waist and across the shoulders, while the chest gaped. Short of adding a patchwork of new cloth, even the Forgotten themselves wouldn’t be able to make it fit.
“The problem,” one of the seamstresses said, as she stepped back to survey the damage, “is that the dress is rather old-fashioned. It is twenty years old, after all, and it was never intended to crown a monarch. It might be best if we salvage from Queen Martha’s dresses and make something new for our new queen.”
My father frowned, but his impatience couldn’t change the fact that the dress wasn’t going to fit. “Could you have it complete by tomorrow?”
“We must, mustn’t we?” the seamstress said. “We will work through the night.”
“Then see it is done.”
They freed me from the dress, and then they measured me, talking a mile a minute as they went, about regal colors that would suit me, about how many jewels were suitable for such a somber yet important coronation. When their talked lulled, my father threw etiquette at me—as an unwelcome newcomer in court, he had made sure to learn every rule for every situation, and it was coming in handy now. I repeated the instructions in my head, but they jumbled together, nothing quite making sense.
Tomorrow, I would be on display for all the grieving kingdom to see.
The seamstresses left to begin their work, but my father remained, running over the coronation rules again and again, making me walk around the room with a regal air, correcting my posture, correcting my gaze, correcting everything about me.
Was he remembering, as I was, all the times I’d skipped my etiquette lessons, how I’d sulked and shouted and fought until he gave up on courtly elocution and dancing classes? Maybe if I’d gone to those lessons, actually tried, instead of assuming it was all useless to me, when I planned to go as far away from this court as I could . . . maybe then, this would have been different.
The seamstresses returned in the middle of the night for a fitting. The new dress didn’t exactly calm my nerves. Jewels weighed it down, although only half of them had been added, and the mass of them made it even harder to breathe.
By the time morning came, I was dizzy with tiredness and fear. But the preparations weren’t over. It took two hours for the four seamstresses to dress me, even helped by an apparent army of maids. They sewed me into the dress as they went. Jewels were stitched into the cloth, hung around my neck, studded on my shoes, and draped around my waist.
And still my father reminded me of all the things I must not do. The most important one, the one he repeated over and over, was that I must not speak. Not one single word, beyond the ritual itself.
I had to wonder: Was that tradition, or was that rule only for me?
The Minster reached taller than a castle, its bell tower hidden by the clouds. Every inch of its stone exterior was covered by intricate carvings and gargoyles, and when its bells rang, the sound echoed through the entire city like singing. It was a building crafted by the divine Forgotten, before they left this kingdom behind.
Rickben, the peacemaker. Elandra, the fierce. Garret, the trickster. Valanthe, the just. They had ruled Epria when it used to be better, but abandoned it in disgust at the kingdom’s growing corruption. Now only a few relics remained, miracles of architecture and engineering, a reminder of how great the kingdom had once been and could be again.