A girl steps forward wearing a red-lined cloak.
“I remember you,” Arsinoe says. “From the arena. You were at the duel.” She looks over the rest of them, barely a dozen in total, who have laid waste to every guard on the main floor of the fortress. “What are you doing here?”
The girl regards her with respect and bows slightly.
“We are warriors from Bastian City,” she says, and nods toward Jules. “And we came for her.”
GREAVESDRAKE MANOR
Katharine wakes in the dark to Nicolas thrashing, jerking, caught in the net of some horrible dream. She reaches out and touches his shoulder, and he eases back to sleep.
The room is full of shadows. The candles and lamps have gone out or been put out; she cannot remember. What she does remember sends heat to her cheeks. Nicolas was so different from Pietyr. But he is no less passionate. Afterward, he held her tightly, pressed together skin to skin.
She rolls toward him and slips her hand beneath the blankets.
“Nicolas? Are you awake?”
He does not stir. Her king-consort is exhausted. She walks her fingers up his chest, playfully.
Her finger slides in warm liquid. At first she cringes, thinking it is drool. But then she recognizes the scent in the air. The smell of so much warm and sudden blood.
Katharine sits up. She leans across to her bedside table for the candle and long matches. Her hands tremble as she lights it, even though she knows what she will see.
Nicolas lies dead, covered in blood. It pools atop his chest and in the wrinkles of the fabric, staining the sheet bright red. It has run from his mouth and from his nose. Even from his eyes. His veins are a swollen, angry purple beneath his skin, nearly everywhere she touched him.
Katharine sits back on her knees and stares down at her new husband. Poor Nicolas. Poor mainland boy, with no gift to help him withstand the toxins. She looks down at her skin, at her hands, at her whole body where the poison resides. The poison inside her must be strong indeed if it can produce such an effect so quickly.
Poor Nicolas. He lay with a queen, and he died for it.
Hoofbeats ring across the stones of the drive. Katharine gets quickly out of bed and stuffs her arms into her dressing gown.
“Natalia. Natalia will help me.”
She smooths and folds the tangled, blood-soaked bedclothes, breathing hard, beginning to weep. She touches Nicolas’s cooling cheek, and then pulls the sheet over his face. Natalia cannot arrive and see him that way.
“I am sorry,” she whispers as footsteps sound in the hall.
“Kat?” Pietyr says, and knocks. “I saw your candle from outside. Are you awake?”
“Pietyr!” Katharine cries. She runs to him and crushes herself to his chest as he comes through the door.
“You are trembling. What is—?”
She closes her eyes. He has seen it. Seen what she has done. He draws away to look at her. In the faint, shadowed light, he can only barely make out the crown of ink across her forehead. He touches it with his thumb.
“So you have done it,” he says sadly. “Tell me what has happened.”
It falls out of her mouth in a torrent. The farce of a duel. The crowning. The assassination of Arsinoe. Her wedding night, and the dead king-consort in her bed. When she is finished, she waits, sure that he will shove her away.
“My sweet Katharine,” he says, and wipes the tears from her cheek.
“How can you say that?” Her fingers have left streaks of red on his shirt. She tears free and returns to her bedroom, where the shape of Nicolas lies, what is left of his blood pooling in his back and legs.
“I killed him. Just by touching him. There is something wrong with me!”
Pietyr steps around her. He takes up a lamp from the table and pulls back the sheet. Katharine turns away when she sees how gray Nicolas’s skin has turned and how sunken his eyes. Pietyr picks up an arm and inspects the fingers.
“So much poison,” he whispers.
She is practically made of it. She is like they said she was, the Undead Queen.
She claws at her own face, disgusted, rubbing the fresh scab of her crown until it smears across her forehead, bloody and black.
Pietyr sets down the lamp and comes to her. He pins her arms to her sides.
“Stop. You are a queen. You are crowned. And none of this was your fault.”
“You are not surprised,” Katharine says. “Why?”
Pietyr looks deep into her eyes for a long time. Almost as if he expects to find someone else there.
“Because after you sent me away, I went to the Breccia Domain. I went down into it.”
His fingers dig into her skin, and she notices that they are cold.
“What do you really remember, Kat? From when you fell?”
“From when you pushed me,” Katharine says, and jerks loose. She lowers her eyes. “And I remember nothing.”
“Nothing,” Pietyr repeats. “Perhaps not. Or perhaps you are lying. What I saw there, or what I thought I saw there, made me scream like I have not screamed since I was a child.”
She looks up. He knows.
The dead queens had gnawed on the bones of their injustices for centuries before he had dropped Katharine right into their laps. That they were able to pour their wishes into her, filling her up with ambition and twisted strength, was his fault.
“At least I was not afraid for you anymore,” he says quietly. “The old sisters would never have let you be killed. Not when you were their way into the crown. Out of that hole.”
“But it was all for nothing.” She stares helplessly at Nicolas graying beneath the sheet. She has become poison. No mainland king may lie with her and survive. No mainland-fathered children could survive the long months in her belly.
“I cannot bear the triplets,” she whispers. “I cannot be the queen.”
She begins to weep, and Pietyr gathers her to him. “Natalia. How disappointed she will be. How disappointed you must be . . . how disgusted. . . .”
“Never.” Pietyr kisses her smeared crown. He kisses her cheeks and kisses away the tears that slip down them.
“Pietyr, I am poison.”
“And I am a poisoner. And you have never been more precious to me than you are right now.” He raises his head at the sound of an approaching carriage and wraps his arms around her tighter.
“I failed you once. I betrayed you once. But I will not again. From now on, I will protect you, Kat, whatever happens.”
INDRID DOWN
The warriors in the red-lined cloaks are led by a girl named Emilia Vatros and her father. She has the quick, dispassionate eyes of a hunting bird, and Jules likes her immediately.
“Why are you really helping us?” Jules asks.
“It is like I said,” Emilia replies, and Madrigal seconds her.
“It wasn’t hard to get them to come. You were the whole reason they were in the capital.”
“She should have been sent to us anyway,” says Emilia’s father, eyeing Madrigal. “You should have let her choose, to be yours or to be ours.”
“She was mine,” Madrigal says. “She was born to me.”