I leaned closer. “Traditionally, he’d either wait for us to send our armies out to fight him, or put us in a siege.” Fitzroy gave me a questioning look, and I added, “That’s what I read, anyway.”
“If we had an army, yes,” he said. “But we don’t. We barely have any men. I’d be surprised if he even expected a fight.”
“What, he thinks I’ll just open the gates and let him kill me?”
“No,” Fitzroy said. “I assume he’ll stop outside the capital and demand we surrender. He’ll make a show of being willing to negotiate. And if we don’t step down, if we don’t meet all of his demands, he’ll storm the city the next day. He won’t expect much resistance, but he’s still a tactician.”
“That’s good,” Naomi said. “He doesn’t think you’ll be able to outsmart him. So he’ll sit outside the walls all night, expecting you to surrender. That gives us time. Maybe we can attack him there. Subtly.”
“But how?” I said. “I don’t want to kill him or his men. If we poisoned them . . .” I did not need to say what thoughts mass poison invoked, considering the events of the past few weeks. “Be smart,” I muttered. “Play to your strengths.” My strengths were science, experiments, puzzling out the truth. Not much use now. But they were all I had.
Play to your strengths, Freya. Think.
I looked around the room, at the different bottles and jars, the attempts at poison detection, the cut glass, the notebooks full of failures and successes.
“What am I supposed to do? Do scientific experiments at them until they think I’m worthy of being queen?”
Naomi stared at me. She began to smile. “It’s not the experiments that matter,” she said slowly. “It’s how people interpret them.”
I frowned, the beginnings of hope crackling inside me. “What do you mean?”
“You can’t fight Sten with force,” Naomi said. “So you have to make his supporters decide they’d rather support you, instead. As, say, the chosen of the Forgotten.”
“Make them see heresy,” Fitzroy said.
People wanted proof. That’s what the Gustavite woman had said. They wanted to believe, needed to believe, but they required that final push. They had to see it.
I looked around the laboratory again. The experiments, the explosions, the way I had manipulated light . . . science was my strength, in part because so few people understood it. Because no one expected me to be capable of it.
Play to their expectations. Use their assumptions against them.
I picked up one of the crystals, letting it fracture the lamplight. “I’ve got it,” I said. “I know what we have to do.”
Holt was unconvinced. “Your Majesty,” he said, a little tentative, considering our last interaction. “This is a dangerous plan. If it displeases the Forgotten—”
“You’ve told me before that you think they chose me. If that’s the case, surely they won’t mind me using that to keep my throne. They can’t disapprove of me using my brain to help, not when they chose me because of it.”
Even as I said it, I felt a slight shiver of fear. If the Forgotten existed, if they were displeased . . .
It still couldn’t be worse than what Sten had planned for me.
I turned to Norling. “Do you think we can get everything in place before Sten attacks?”
“Certainly,” she said. “But Your Majesty, many other things could go wrong. If they see through it—”
“If they see through it, I’ll be just as dead as I’ll be if we don’t try. If that happens, you can surrender to him. Say you were misguided. He’ll probably spare you. Short of that . . . it’s the best plan we have.”
“But Your Majesty.” Holt paused, choosing his next words carefully. “This plan is rather—theatrical. You will have to speak well. And you . . .”
“And I’ve never spoken well in my life?”
“You have improved, Your Majesty!” he said quickly. “Your passion is undeniable. But I do not know if it will be enough.”
It was true. Despite all the convoluted details of the plan, that was the part that made me the most nervous. But it was also key to the whole thing. I needed to play my part.
When I’d dealt with people before, honesty had made things click. This plan relied on reaching out to others, on making them believe. And I could do that just as easily with truth, with being myself. “I can do it,” I said. “I have to do it.”
My life depended on it.
Holt gave me a long look. Then he nodded. “I’ll make the preparations.”
Sten made camp within sight of the city walls, as Fitzroy had predicted, and sent envoys with his demands for my surrender. And so once it was dark, I set out with my guards around me. I was dressed simply, for a queen, in a pale-blue silk dress and no jewels, save for the tiara brushing my hair back from my face and that star around my neck. Simplicity—another thing I’d learned from Madeleine. I needed to look like my own kind of queen tonight.
“Who goes there?” one of Sten’s guards shouted, as we approached his camp. Mila stepped forward, holding her torch higher. “Representatives of Queen Freya. We wish to speak to Torsten Wolff.”
“He hoped you would be willing to see reason,” the guard said. “Drop any weapons here.”
My guards made a show of placing their swords in a pile, and a couple of Sten’s men stepped forward to check for any concealed blades. They paused when they saw me in the middle of the group, my hair flowing loose around my shoulders.
“Your Majesty,” the guard said. I waited for a mocking remark, something about being desperate enough to travel to speak on my own behalf, but it did not come. Good. They might not believe in me, but these people had some modicum of respect left for the crown. I dwelled on the thought, turning it into a whisper of a smile.
“Sir,” I said, with a respectful tilt of my head. Another of Madeleine’s tricks. “May we proceed? It is a chilly night.”
I was actually quite warm, blanketed by adrenaline, but delicacy was the best excuse. The guard bowed and led the way into the camp, without checking for the dagger I had tied to my calf. I didn’t expect Sten to attack me or my men during a parlay—they had more honor than that, at least—but I wouldn’t trust my life on it.