Widow Morton lifted her chin, as if getting a better look at Aria from beneath her slanted veil. “Curiosity about magic, Highness? I would not have guessed. Perhaps you hope the answer will give you some insight to your curse.” When Aria didn’t respond, the woman said, “Very well. An answer for an answer. This Cast is made possible through combination with another Caster. Now, Highness, tell me howyoumanage to resist my curse.”
Resist. The woman had a sense of humor, it seemed. “I wouldn’t be awake right now if I had power to resist.”
“Correction, Highness. You would be comatose right now if you didnothave power to resist. How long do you expect a person to last with mere minutes of sleep each day? At the very least, your mind should have fractured beneath the stress, yet I find you here, pacing, scowling, asking reasonable questions.”
Aria blinked. She’d wondered why the curse had not grown worse over time but never thought to imagine the stability wasnot part of Widow Morton’s plan. “I thought your magic did that. Extending the ... torture.”
“To an extent. The curse has a timeline, after all, but it is a timeline involving the others of your blood. I did not expectyouto last this long.”
That should have terrified Aria; instead, it made her smile.
“Then I question your skill in Casting, because not only am I alive, but the rest of my family doesn’t suffer.”
In the first days of her curse, she’d dreaded watching the effect spread. After so many days suffering alone, she’d taken for granted, without even realizing, that Widow Morton’s most morbid prediction hadn’t come to pass. Eliza was safe.
“Bridle that smile, Highness. You have surprised me, but you have not escaped me.”
“Why did you give the soldiers that Artifact?”
Her father’s soldiers had been forced back from Northglen, but not before capturing the suspicious Artifact, which they’d claimed had been encased in glass and surrounded by painted symbols of “suspicious warlockry.”
“Perhaps I want to watch His Majesty dance.”
The woman’s image rippled against the wall, as if in silent laughter.
“Is all of this what your husband would have wanted?”
As Aria had hoped, the question caught the widow off guard.
“My husband,” Widow Morton said at last, “may have argued for your peace. But he was not a Caster, and he did not speak for me.”
“Why continue pretending this is about Caster rights? Your son was not killed for magic; he didn’t even possess any. He passed his test at twelve.”
A shadow flashed across the widow’s face, a moment of flared nostrils and hot anger. Though she returned quickly to her coldmask, Aria could not unsee it, and while her mind churned slowly over the meaning, she heard a noise behind her.
Turning, she saw a shadowed figure slowly dragging open the throne room door. Her breathing quickened, imagining another intruder breaking into the castle, but the figure who stepped into the lamplight was a familiar one.
“Aria?” Eliza squinted, glancing around. “I thought I heard you.”
As Aria gaped, her heart plummeting right off the dais, Widow Morton said her final word.
“You should not have questioned my skill. Thirty days left, Highness.”
The woman vanished, and a curtain of water fell to splash across the stone.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Eliza said, looking around as if dazed, as if she hadn’t heard the widow. “Reallycouldn’tsleep, and I kept feeling more restless the more I tried. So I went to your room, but you weren’t there. What is this?”
Aria stared at the puddle of water seeping into cracks in the floor.
Finally, she rasped, “It’s Widow Morton’s ... gift.”
At first, Eliza didn’t believe it. She rushed into the hallways, ignoring Aria’s calls behind her and growing more frantic with each guard she found asleep at his post. She fled to their mother’s room and shook her shoulder, shouting for her to wake. But the queen did not rouse.
“It will be all right,” Aria assured her.
It was a lie, and Eliza was too upset to hear it anyway. In the end, Aria gave her space. They would have plenty of time to talk. Thirty days of it. Unless one of them fell comatose or into a fractured state of mind first.
She returned to her room and stood beside her fireplace, kindling the logs and wishing the crackling little flames couldsink warmth deeper than her skin. At her core, there was a chill that never left. A chill she’d gained in Northglen.
