I snuggled back against her shoulder. “I don’t know what I’d do without you two.”
“You’d be fantastic,” Madeleine said. “Just maybe a bit less fabulous.”
I laughed.
TWENTY-NINE
“YOU ARRESTED FITZROY?”
Holt leaned forward over the table, his expression a mixture of satisfaction and disbelief.
“Yes,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady. “It needed to be done.”
“I am sorry it had to come to this,” Holt said. “But he was too much of a threat.”
“No,” I said. “This has nothing to do with what you said before. But I found evidence that—I know he’s been lying to me. And his father—he wanted to send him away. Fitzroy has the motive, he’s acted suspiciously. I had to.”
“A wise choice,” Holt said. “I had suspected him, as I tried to warn you—”
“Yes,” I snapped, all my exhaustion, the hours of crying, bursting out of me. He could act as wise and superior as he liked, but I still couldn’t be sure he wasn’t involved, somehow. He’d still been suspicious. How dare he act like his good judgment had predicted this? “I know what you suspected. You’ve been against Fitzroy from the beginning, for no reason. You were determined to think he was guilty, or to deal with him if he wasn’t. Why? Because his mother wasn’t the queen?”
“I only thought—Your Majesty, I wanted what was best for you. I only wished to protect you.”
“And did you find any evidence against him? Anything, beyond the fact that his father wanted to send him away?”
“Not as such, Your Majesty, but it was suspicious, and—”
“Suspicious? If we’re condemning people for acting suspiciously, why don’t you tell me why you were in the palace a few nights ago? What did you take from the chapel?”
Silence. Holt stared at me. “Your Majesty?”
“I saw you. I was there, investigating the murders, and I saw you carrying treasure away. Sneaking into the place where everyone died is suspicious, don’t you think? Do you think I should arrest and execute you for that, without any actual evidence?”
“Rasmus?” Norling said. “What is this?”
“I was in the palace, Your Majesty,” Holt said slowly. “But I was helping you. That shrine was an insult to the Forgotten, and we need gold if we’re to have even a chance of fighting Sten. They would want it to be used to support you.”
I could believe it. I wanted to hate him, wanted all the blame for the murders to fall on him, but that, at least, I believed to be true. “Perhaps,” I said. “I am simply saying—” I pressed my fingers into my eyes. The strain of the night was too much. I didn’t want to think that Holt had been right after all. He had still been prejudiced, misguided. He had. “We should not act too harshly before we know the whole truth. I appreciate that you want to protect me. Especially—considering the circumstances. But your job is to advise me. Whether I take your advice or not is up to me.” I sighed. “We’re not going to do anything, for now. We won’t tell anyone. Not until we have more evidence, one way or the other.”
“Freya. If you think he’s responsible—”
“Think is not good enough. Not for this. Not even with Sten bearing down on us. We have to know.”
“You won’t be able to keep this a secret,” Norling said. “People will gossip.”
“Then they’ll gossip. If we say nothing, they won’t know anything for sure.”
“And they’ll imagine all sorts of things in place of the truth.”
“Then they’ll imagine.” I stood, scraping the hair away from my eyes. I felt like I hadn’t slept properly in days, the tiredness weighing down my limbs. “I need to gather more evidence. I have to know.”
“Your Majesty,” Holt said. “Sten is three days away from the capital at most. We must work on our defensive strategy. We will man the walls the best we can, but we still lack any forces to meet him in the field. We must prepare—”
“We are preparing. We have been preparing. But this is important, too.” More important, almost. I couldn’t imagine how I might defeat Sten, what I could possibly do to stop him, if he would not surrender. But I could get to the bottom of this murder. I could solve this, achieve something, before Sten arrived to destroy it all.
I wasn’t going to be sad, I decided, as I searched through the papers again that afternoon, thinking and thinking about what evidence I might have missed. The facts were the facts, and there was no point crying over them, not when Fitzroy had probably been lying to me all along. I couldn’t—I wasn’t going to get distracted. Not when there were far more important things going on. But I couldn’t ignore the issue, not when he now seemed the most likely culprit. I had to find more evidence, one way or the other, and that meant thinking about it reasonably, with detachment.
I wasn’t proving very good at it. No matter how often I insisted that I had cried myself out with Madeleine and Naomi last night, I kept remembering his expression when I confronted him, the drop in my stomach when I first read the notes, knowing, knowing, that he’d lied to me, he’d hidden things from me, that even if he was innocent, he hadn’t respected me.
There wasn’t enough evidence here. I could have his rooms searched, but he would have destroyed anything truly condemning. There’d be nothing in the Fort that could help.
I’d have to go back to the palace again. If I could get into the king’s offices myself, if Fitzroy had missed something . . . I bit my lip. That was what I would have to do.
“Your Majesty?” One of the guards peered through the door. “A woman has come to speak with you. From the city.”
“From the city?” I had thought that nothing had come of my visit to the Gustavites. I certainly didn’t expect anyone to take up my offer of visiting the Fort. But if this woman was one of them . . .
The woman waited for me in a guards’ room near the Fort’s front gate. Four guards watched her, with another outside the door. At least someone had found her a chair. She stood shakily as I entered, and I realized she was the elderly woman from the meeting, the one whose arm I had touched. She bowed slightly now.
“Your Majesty,” she said. “You—you said we could come and speak with you.”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “I wasn’t sure if anyone would.”
“You made the effort to visit us. I thought perhaps you might wish to hear the reaction there. Some people would be furious if they knew I’d come, of course, but these young things can be foolish sometimes. They want things to change, and if you agree, then that can only be a good thing, I say.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”