“I believe you,” I said. Her surprise and panic seemed clear enough. “And there is no execution in this kingdom.”
“Your Majesty,” Holt said. “Regardless of anything else, regardless of her beliefs, this woman attempted to kill you. If not for your quick thinking—your divinely bestowed suspicion—you and several others may have died. We cannot let this go unpunished.”
“It won’t go unpunished. Where do attempted murderers usually go? Is it Rickstone Castle?” An isolated stone fortress on the moors, a good hundred miles from the capital, and perhaps fifty from the nearest town. It had been built by a rather eccentric noble, desperate for quiet and increasingly convinced that someone might attack him to take that solitude away. He had no relatives, no friends, and so the crown had taken the castle when he died and turned it into a prison. It was, I’d heard, nicer than the dungeons of the Fort. It had never been intended for such grim purposes. “Mistress Cornwell will be sent there, as she has confessed,” I said. “No one will be executed.”
“Your Majesty!” Norling said, as furious whispers whipped through the crowd. “I am your minister of justice, and it’s my responsibility—”
“And I’m queen,” I said. “We’re not executing anybody.”
“No executions?” Sten stood. It was the loudest I’d ever heard him speak. His eyes were black and hard, and all his usual steadiness was gone. Fury radiated from him, his hands clenched into fists. “This woman helped kill most of the court. She killed her king, and the queen, and hundreds of others. And you’re going to show her mercy?”
“She didn’t kill them!” I said. “She denied it, at least, and she happily admitted to attacking me. We can’t execute her for that.”
“Torsten,” Holt said, his voice soothing. “You are still grieving for your friends, as we all are. But Queen Freya has chosen mercy, until we have indisputable proof of guilt. It would not do for us to lash out in grief and destroy a hundred years of peace.”
“The peace was broken when filth like this attacked the king.” Sten’s fists twitched. He shoved his way to the aisle and strode out of the room. The crowd whispered in his wake.
My hands shook, but I would not move. “No executions.”
Holt nodded. “As you wish, Your Majesty.”
The accused was led from the room, and my advisers had a hurried conference before addressing the guards again. While they talked, a few other nobles followed Sten, whispering as they went.
Next the guards led a man into the room. He looked about my father’s age, with a patchy mustache and gray speckled in his hair.
“Henry Goodram,” Norling said, reading from a large sheet of paper before her. “Accused of forging diamonds, endangering the stability of the kingdom for his own personal gain, at a time when our kingdom needs its stability the most.”
“Begging your pardon,” the man said, “but I didn’t know what was going to happen at that ball when I did it.” A few nobles behind him leaned forward in interest, but some of the others stood up and started drifting out of the room. I guess they had anticipated more discussions of murder, not jewel forgery. “How could I have known? If I had, I wouldn’t have—”
“You expect us to believe that you didn’t intend to take advantage of the situation?” Norling said. “That you only had innocent intentions?”
“I didn’t know they weren’t real diamonds,” he said quickly, as though he hadn’t basically admitted his own guilt ten seconds before. “Someone sold ’em to me, the price was too good to be true, maybe, but I didn’t know they were fakes.”
“Were they convincing?” I asked. After all the fuss over the poverty of the kingdom and the need to drape ourselves in jewels, realistic fakes might be useful. They must have been good, if they posed such a risk to the economy. Or did they just pose a risk to the nobility’s pride?
“See them for yourself,” Norling said. She gestured at a man to her left, who walked forward and presented me with a tiny handful of jewels. I held one up to inspect it in the light. It gleamed a thousand colors, shifting as I moved. I wasn’t exactly an expert on diamonds, but it looked realistic to me. Someone like Madeleine Wolff would probably spot its inadequacies immediately, but I would never have noticed.
“I didn’t know!” the man said. “You must believe me, Your Majesty. I didn’t know they weren’t real.”
“But you did, sir,” I said. I shifted in my seat. His rambling desperation made my skin itch, horrified that I was the cause, but if he admitted to it himself, I couldn’t exactly let him go. “It was the first thing you said. You didn’t know what would happen at the ball when you did it.”
“I meant—I might have suspected they were fakes,” he said. “But I’m not an expert, so I went on what I’d been told. I wasn’t involved.”
I looked back at the diamonds. They sparkled in the light, revealing colors at their hearts. Just like real diamonds. “How were they made?” I asked slowly.
“From glass, Your Majesty,” Norling said. “With a lot of lead added to create that gleam. They make a paste, I believe. We’re not certain of the exact method.”
“They’re very convincing,” the accused man said quickly. “Anyone would believe they were real.”
“Do we have any more proof?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Norling picked up another sheet of paper and talked through the investigation, those who had spoken against Henry Goodram, how the trail for the source had turned cold with him. Add in his own slip-up here, and the truth seemed obvious.
“I will not go against my advisers’ recommendations,” I said carefully, hoping they were the right words. “But these are impressive fakes. Tell us how they’re made, exactly how, and we’ll consider that when we—with the punishment. We’ll take it into consideration.”
Someone in the crowd laughed. “Is Her Majesty planning to get into the fake diamond market herself?”
“If we can understand how fakes are made, perhaps we can use that knowledge. It could help us identify them. Or they could be useful in some other way.” Like maintaining the extravagant look of the court without it costing endless riches. “Knowledge is a good thing.”
“Including criminal knowledge, Your Majesty?” Norling asked.
“It shows intelligence. Ingenuity. We need those things.”
“But I didn’t make them, Your Majesty. I swear I didn’t.”
“That’s my offer,” I said, quieter than I would have liked. “Do with it what you will.”