“I’ll judge you for it,” Briony says.
Fly shrugs, and we walk the final stretch of the garden back toward the palace. The sun is sinking rapidly toward the horizon, the warm air cooling and the evening insects chirping among the flowers.
Back in the apartment, I take her to one side.
“You’re angry at me for this?” I say, trying to hide the outrage I feel. I didn’t design this world, this realm, or this Quarter, yet so often Briony seems to hold me personally responsible for all of it.
“No,” she says. “No, I don’t blame you for it, Beaufort. I just don’t like it.”
I nod. “I feel the same way.”
I wonder if I always have – that I tried to convince myself I liked this place because it was the only thing I knew as home,but that I always had this lingering sensation under my skin, an itchiness I could never sate.
“I understand why you didn’t like it, Briony,” I say. “But Dray is right. The man chose to be there. He will be paid good money.”
“Did he really choose it? Or did he have no choice?” she asks.
I sink down onto the arm of a sofa and thread my fingers through hers, looking at our fingers twisted together for a moment before I venture a glance back up to her face. Her bottom lip trembles, and then she says in a quiet voice:
“I know what that’s like. To face someone immensely more powerful than you, and to have no way of defending yourself.”
“Stanley,” I growl.
She shakes her head. “No. The Madame. Henrietta. They both used their magic against me. You’ll never understand what that’s like, Beaufort. You were born this way, with power at your fingertips. You’ve never had to worry about being weaker.”
“Briony,” I say. “I wasn’t always this powerful.”
I drop my gaze back to our fingers, stroking my thumb along the length of hers, down the smooth surface of her nail.
“I know what it’s like too.”
“How?” she says, unable to believe it.
“At the school,” I say. “The one they sent me to. I was the youngest. There were older boys – more powerful than me then. I know what it’s like.”
“Beaufort,” she whispers. “Did they hurt you?”
I can’t help but peer up at her face, and this time it must be me with the incredulous expression. Everything she’s been through, everything she’s suffered, and she’s concerned about me, about the few times I took a beating as a kid.
“It was nothing, Briony,” I say. “But I do understand.”
She steps forward, leans her arms on my shoulders, and presses her lips to the crown of my head.
I was always told that it was natural for the powerful to prey on the weak. For the powerful to take what their power had entitled them to take. For the weak to serve those who were stronger.
But this woman has me rethinking everything I’ve ever believed. And even if she wasn’t as powerful as she is now, even if she were simply an ordinary girl from Slate with no magic in her veins at all, I’m beginning to understand that it is my duty to protect her, to serve her, to cherish her completely.
As Dray orders a feast for dinner, I slip out of the apartment and knock on the neighboring door.
Nurse Marion answers, still dressed in her stiff white uniform.
“She’s about to go to sleep, Beaufort,” she says.
This woman raised me for the majority of my early years, and yet at times I find it hard to believe. She treats me like a stranger, like we barely know each other. Maybe because she’s raised so many royal children and I am simply one of many.
“I promised her I’d read her a bedtime story,” I say, pushing past the elderly woman before she can throw me out like she did Dray.
I stride through the apartment and into my sister’s room. She’s already tucked up in the wide bed, her old teddy bear peering out from under the covers beside her.
