I didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
He clearly hadn’t been expecting that, either. He watched me for a long moment, and I felt a rush of victory. He must have known he’d lost that round, because he shifted his weight, and shifted the conversation. “So, Your Majesty. Why have you summoned me to your torture chamber laboratory? I assume it wasn’t for my winning conversation.”
“Obviously.” He grinned, and I let out a breath. “I just—wanted to talk to you.” I ran my hands along the side of the table, letting the movement distract me. “We haven’t spoken yet, not since—”
“Not since I shouted at you in the corridor?” He ran his fingers through his hair, rumpling the curls. “That was rude of me.”
I stared at him. Had he just admitted to a fault? And a social fault, at that. It had to be some sort of trick, to throw me off balance again. “That wasn’t an apology.”
“Oh,” he said. “Let me try again.” He knelt before me, his head bowed, and I scurried backward a step. “Your Majesty, I am grievously sorry for the insult I have caused you. I throw myself upon your mercy.”
He was awful. I shouldn’t have expected anything else. My fingertips tingled, the first hints of panic, but I clenched my fists. I wouldn’t let that control me today. “Don’t make fun of me.”
He looked up, lips parted slightly. “I was joking.”
“You weren’t joking.” I turned away, counting the length of my breaths. Three beats in. Four beats out. Calm.
He stood again. “I was trying to joke. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t mean to upset me, but you meant to make fun of me.” Of course he couldn’t respect me. Anyone loved by the old court was bound to be cruel to someone like me. But he had been a courtier, and that usually meant he’d at least be slightly subtle in his mockery. Apparently, I wasn’t even worth that.
But the quicker I asked him the necessary questions, the quicker he could leave. “I wanted to talk to you about the night of the murders. I want you to tell me everything you saw.”
“And why would you want to know that?”
He couldn’t be serious. “Because someone murdered everyone in the old court. I want to find out who.”
“And you think it might have been me.”
I spun to face him. He still stood casually, but his expression was a little more focused now, a little more intense. “I didn’t say that.”
“No, but you meant it. I grew up in court, Freya. I know how to read people, and you have the least subtlety of anyone I’ve ever met.”
“What happened to calling me ‘Your Majesty’?”
“I think we’re on a first-name basis once you start indirectly accusing me of murder.”
Something about his expression had changed. He looked less polished now, a rawness bursting through. I felt a stab of guilt. “I didn’t accuse you of murder. I just—I need to know what happened.”
He stepped closer. “You don’t know me, so I’ll say this clearly. Almost everyone I knew died at that banquet. My father, my friends. And you think there’s a chance that I killed them?”
“Anyone could have killed them. And the king was angry with you, at the banquet—”
“My father was angry with me at least half the time. He was angry I existed half the time. That doesn’t mean I killed him and everyone I knew.”
“I know.” And I remembered how he had looked the morning after the banquet, when I bumped into him on the stairs. He looked broken. But a person could still murder and feel bad about it, couldn’t they? If they thought it needed to be done? “Why was he angry with you?”
“I don’t know. My father was too important to actually tell you why he was angry. You were just supposed to figure it out. It was lucky that he changed his mind easily enough, too.”
I’d never really thought about it before. I knew the king had fallen out with Fitzroy on a near-weekly basis, but it had just been a fact of the court, nothing that actually affected people. It was strangely uncomfortable to look at Fitzroy now, to see him as a person, not a figure at court. “So what did you see, at the banquet?”
He sighed, then leaned against the countertop. The move seemed like the final drop of his courtly armor. When he spoke again, his voice was a little lower, a little rougher. “I was there, although I didn’t eat much. Whatever had upset my father, he wanted to make a point of it, because he wasn’t exactly sending the choicest foods to me.”
“Your father made you come onto the dais, for the fire-eaters.”
“He did. I survived, I sat back down, things went on. Until the end of the feast.”
“With the cake?”
“Yes. With the cake. Every part of it was gold, so obviously he wasn’t going to waste any on me. He wanted to make a point. So everyone around me got a piece, and I got plain sponge. Just plain. Everyone commented on it, so I made some stupid joke, acted like the plain sponge was the real prize, since no one else had it.”
“Were you upset?” There was something about this rawer, quieter Fitzroy that made me shift closer. He was compelling, almost magnetizing—all the things his usual persona tried so hard to be. Succeeded in being, for everyone but me.
“Was I upset? A bit, I guess. But I’m used to it. That’s just my life, isn’t it? Or it was. And it turned out I was lucky. Gerald was next to me, acting completely normal, and then he started coughing. Acting like he couldn’t breathe. I asked him if he was all right, and he turned away and threw up. And before I could even react to that, everyone else around me started reacting, too.”
“All at once?”
“No,” he said, a little quieter. “Not all at once. That was the most frightening thing. A lot of people fell ill at the same time, but people kept getting ill. Everyone was terrified, pushing and shoving to get out of the hall, as though the outside would save them.”
I closed my eyes, heart pounding. I could picture every breath of it. I didn’t want to, tried to shove the images away, but they burst to life before my eyes, all the faces I’d seen for years, the golden plates clattering on the floor, the terror of it. “I’m sorry.”
Fitzroy swallowed. “People didn’t know. They felt dizzy, or felt sick, and they thought it was poison, so they panicked . . . but it could have been panic making some of them unwell. We didn’t know.”
“How did you feel?”
“I was watching everyone I knew suffer and die. How do you think I felt?”
I flinched. “I just—I’m trying to understand.”
“So am I,” Fitzroy said. “I didn’t know what to do. You think, if something terrible happened, you’d do the right thing. Maybe not be the hero, but do something. I just stood there. Gaping. Then the guards grabbed me and hauled me out of the palace.”
“Why?”