The funerals would take place at dawn. The funerals . . . I rolled onto my side. I’d only ever been to one funeral before, and it wasn’t one I wanted to remember.
I’d had to keep telling myself that my mother was dead, repeating it over and over, drilling the words into my head . . . I still hadn’t really believed them. Then the funeral came, and my final chance to say good-bye. The crowd had gathered around us, and I remember wondering what they were doing there, hating them for stealing this moment, as though any of them could possibly miss her as much as I would. And then it hit me, all at once, that my mother was gone, that she was never, never coming back. I didn’t remember much of what happened next, but people told me. I’d screamed, refused to let the priest near the body on the river, fighting and kicking and shrieking.
Tomorrow I’d be the one intruding on people’s grief, pretending it was my own. No one I loved was being remembered tomorrow. I hadn’t lost anything. And yet I was to stand in front of them all, as though my sadness mattered most.
I couldn’t bear it. I swung my legs out of bed and stood. I needed a distraction, something to do, and my laboratory waited downstairs. I would head down there, and work on my poison test. Make sure nothing like this ever happened again.
But when I reached the dungeons, the door to my laboratory was ajar. I pushed it slightly, letting it creak on its hinges.
Fitzroy sat inside, reading through my notes. His blond hair was rumpled, and his eyes bleary. He looked up when he heard the door, and nodded at me. Once again, the charismatic courtier I knew was gone, leaving a softer presence behind. I wanted to run up and snatch my notes from his hands, protect my thoughts from his judgment. I wanted to rest my hand on his arm, to soothe some of that rawness away.
“Fitzroy? What are you doing?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said.
“So you came here?” I shut the door. The thud echoed in the room, too loud.
“I don’t know. I mean, yes, obviously. I hoped you would be here.”
“Me?” I stepped closer, slowly. My heart pounded.
“I know you don’t like me,” he said. “But—maybe that’s what I need right now. I don’t know. We were honest with each other, last time. That was—I’m tired of being courteous. And I needed something to—I hoped maybe you were working. And that I could help.”
He looked so lost. William Fitzroy was in my laboratory, rambling to explain himself, and I should have been angry, I should have, but the feeling wouldn’t come. “All right,” I said. “You can help. Let me get some beakers.”
My next planned test was to try dissolving the arsenic in water. I had no hope it would help—if it had a detectable effect, it wouldn’t exactly be a useful poison—but I needed to explore every possibility, leave nothing to chance.
As I prepared two samples of water, Fitzroy continued to leaf through my notes. “These are very thorough.”
“Of course they are. Otherwise what’s the point?”
Fitzroy just nodded.
I carried the beakers back to the center table and set them down a few feet from Fitzroy. I didn’t let myself look at him. He was too distracting, the sheer presence of him, the way his feelings seemed to crackle in the air. I picked up a piece of pure arsenic with tongs and placed it in the water. Nothing happened. I poked it, as though that might encourage it, but it continued to sit, doing not much at all.
The powder was similarly useless. It dissolved in the water, as I expected it would, but nothing else happened to reveal its presence.
I scribbled down more notes as Fitzroy considered the liquid. I glanced at him, just once—twice. The lab felt too full with him here. Too full, and too quiet.
He thought I didn’t like him and I couldn’t leave that hanging, undisputed. I hadn’t liked him before, but I’d never spoken to him. And now . . . I didn’t know what I thought about him now. Nor did I understand this visceral something, a pull whenever he was near.
“I don’t dislike you.” I inspected the arsenic powder as I spoke, like I wasn’t even talking to him at all.
“What?” I could feel him staring at me. I didn’t look.
“Before. You said I don’t like you. But it’s not that. I just—” I didn’t know. I looked back at my notes, scrabbling for something to say. “We should test its acidity next. If you want to help—there’s paper, somewhere in one of those drawers. Pink-purple strips.”
I couldn’t see his reaction, but I heard his footsteps as he walked over to the drawers and began pulling them open, riffling through my supplies. I could probably have remembered where I’d stored them, if I focused hard enough, but I couldn’t think. I could barely make notes.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and I jumped. “You probably don’t believe me, but—I am sorry.”
He was determinedly staring into a drawer, still searching for the paper. I had no idea what he meant. “For what?” I asked.
“For that first night, at your coronation. When I said you didn’t belong here. I—I was upset, about my father, about all of this. And you were there, standing in his place, not fitting at all, and I just—I wanted to tear you out of there. I wanted to rip everything back to the way it was before. But it wasn’t your fault.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Fitzroy—”
“Everyone calls me that, you know.” He pulled open another drawer. “Fitzroy. King’s son. They invented the name just for me, to make sure everyone knew I was different. Do you even know what my actual name is?”
“William,” I said softly. “William Fitzroy.” I stared at my notes again. I hadn’t thought—“I can call you William if you like. I didn’t know—”
“No,” he said. “Don’t. Everyone calls me Fitzroy. I call myself Fitzroy. But—I don’t know. I’ve never had an identity outside my father. And I never really counted.”
“You counted.”
He made a soft sound of disbelief.
“You counted more than me.”
He didn’t reply.
Earlier that night . . . he had helped me, when that noble mocked me. Why would he have done that, made himself look the fool in order to save me? Because he had saved me, in his way. I had been too trapped in my panic to react to the challenge, and he had reset the moment, distracted everyone, made things easy again.
I walked to the row of jars against the far wall. There was nothing I needed there, but I had to do something, to move. I shifted the jars about, looking at the labels, not really reading them at all.
“Why did you help me? At the banquet?”
The silence was a physical presence. It loomed behind me, growing, growing, as Fitzroy did not reply.
“I knocked over some wine,” he said eventually. “I didn’t help you.”
“You made yourself into a joke, to stop them laughing at me. I didn’t know what to do, and you—” I pressed my lips together. “I appreciated it.” The words were heavier than they should have been, too full of meaning. But I did appreciate it, more than I could express. “Thank you.”