“Everyone I spoke to thought the Gustavites were stupid, though,” Naomi said, curling her toes around the slats of her stool. “No one seemed to support them. But I suppose they wouldn’t want to give that away, would they?”
“I suppose not.” After my encounter with Fitzroy, I was wary of dealing with people again. They were too unpredictable. I longed for science—clear, indisputable, easy-to-understand science. “Let’s work on the poison test,” I said to Naomi, shuffling our piles of notes aside. Perhaps that would give me somewhere solid to stand.
I pulled on thick leather gloves and tied a cloth over my face before passing a second cloth to Naomi and reaching for the jars of arsenic left by the room’s original inhabitants. We had both the white powder form, perfect for poisoning enemies, and the pure metal, flaky and gray.
Step one, I decided, would be to burn it. Different metals produced different-color flames when thrown into a fire, and if the arsenic was distinctive enough, we could simply burn some of the food to detect it.
There was no chance that the solution would be that simple. But it was a good place to begin.
I lit a candle and broke off a piece of pure arsenic with my tongs. Naomi stepped back, her face covered too. I held my breath as I pushed the arsenic into the flame.
The fire turned blue, and a garlicky smell filled the room.
“You did it?” Naomi said, shifting closer. She sounded unsure.
“Not yet.” I placed the pure arsenic in a bowl and snuffed the flame. “It’s the powder that’s used to poison people. If that has the same reaction . . .”
It didn’t. I couldn’t hold the powder in my tongs, so I lit another candle and sprinkled it on top, letting it settle in the slight dip of melted wax. Nothing happened. At least, nothing I could identify. The smoke might have been a little thicker, perhaps, but the powder just sat there, completely uninterested in doing anything useful.
I took notes anyway, making sure I didn’t leave out a single detail. That garlic smell felt like the key here. If I could get the powder to release the same gas, then it would be easy to detect.
My pen was too loud as it scratched the paper. I could feel Naomi watching me.
“It’ll be all right, you know,” she said softly.
“I know. The answer’s here somewhere.”
“That’s not what I meant.” She touched my shoulder. “I meant—court. The funerals. All of it. I know you can do it.”
I chewed my lip. “I wasn’t made for this, Naomi. I was supposed to leave. I was supposed to be doing science, not—not worrying about court gossip and fashion and the right way to smile. I was supposed to escape all this. I don’t fit here.”
“Freya—”
“Do you think I’m selfish?”
Naomi stared at me. “Freya, no. Of course not. You—”
“I think I am.” I stared at the stains on the table. It seemed so important, suddenly, to say it out loud. Not to get Naomi’s reassurance that I was wrong—what would be the point?—but to let myself accept that I was right. I’d found a huge flaw deep within me, one I’d previously thought was a strength . . . what was I supposed to do with that? “Fitzroy—he’s not who I thought he would be. And Madeleine, when she bumped into me, she just wanted to talk about charity. About orphans. And I thought maybe she was just putting on an act, but . . . I think she really is like that. I think she really does care. And I always dismissed her, because she fit in, and I didn’t. How can I be the queen of these people, when I think like that? I wouldn’t even accept me.”
“Freya. Listen.” Naomi pulled her stool closer, so we were practically sitting on top of each other. She wrapped an arm around my shoulders, and I sank into the strange sideways hug. “I don’t think you’re selfish. Things were different before. You didn’t feel like you fit in here. Neither of us did. You wanted to leave. Of course you didn’t want to make friends, or think the people making you miserable were nice. But now things are different, now you’re a part of it . . . you’re seeing things differently, too. And that’s okay, isn’t it? It means you aren’t selfish. You’re thinking about them as people. That’s all right. That’s what you need to do.”
“I don’t know.” I closed my eyes, shifting closer. Her hair tickled my nose. “How am I ever going to understand them?”
“They’re just people, Freya. You’ll be all right.”
But even that thought was terrifying. People were complicated. I’d never be able to please them all.
More visitors poured through the Fort’s gates the following day. Since none of these nobles had been at the banquet that night, and many barely knew the victims, they didn’t talk in the same somber tones as most of the survivors—they greeted one another with enthusiasm, their voices swelling in speculation. When I passed them in the corridors, they would fall silent, bowing and curtsying, before resuming their gossip as soon as I was out of sight.
I tried to smile as my mother had, to walk as though the corridors belonged to me. I needed the visitors’ approval—as my father had told me, over and over again. They held far more power than any ruler would like to admit. They collected the taxes in their regions. They were the face of law and justice to whoever lived under their rule. Common people knew them, respected them, or feared them, as the case may be, and they had old families, old connections, knowledge of the land and resources that the crown never saw. I needed their support. How could someone declare themselves queen in one city, when all the land around disagreed?
I had no chance to go to my laboratory. Instead I practiced my speech with my father until I knew it so well that my ghost would probably recite it in these halls a thousand years from now. I answered Holt’s questions about cutlery and curtsies, and whenever I had a spare moment, I scribbled down ideas for conversations, phrases I could say, anything to make me feel more prepared.
Naomi helped me to dress in near silence, pinning my hair up so it looked like a spiraling black pastry balanced on my scalp. It looked ridiculous, I thought, as Naomi added another ten pins to ensure in stayed in place, but it was a familiar style. I just needed to be familiar. Naomi dusted silver over my eyelids, and tied me into another huge skirt, layered with cascading silk and studded with yet more jewels. It swamped me, making my face and hands look inhumanly small, and I scowled at my reflection, willing it to shift into proportion.
When my father came to collect me, he looked calm and confident, as he always did in court, but he worried the edge of his sleeve with his thumb as he nodded his approval. He was nervous.
We met Holt outside the throne room. He looked over my dress, my hair, my jewels, and he frowned. But he didn’t get a chance to speak before my father barreled ahead.
“Do you remember your speech?”
I nodded, feeling too sick to reply.