Marchand appeared to realize the danger and made to run just as Jade reached Theo’s jacket and tugged. She threw him backward into her and in turn sent herself flying back as the chandelier crashed to the floor.
Glass shattered and metal scraped as the massive fixture smashed against the wooden floor, sending debris flying in a circle around it. Jade landed on her stomach and flung her arms over her head to protect herself from the onslaught of projectiles.
When things had stilled, Jade lifted her head, catching sight of the mayhem before her. Jade’s heart rammed against her ribcage to the beat of the stampede of footsteps as people rushed out of the ballroom. She caught sight of Matherson and Devereaux as they shielded Prince Reynauld, helping him out of the room. One of the troopers ran to the other, both alive but not unscathed.
The broken chandelier rocked back and forth on the floor, a heap of twisted metal and broken glass. Jade jumped to her feet, the gray of Theo’s uniform peeking out at the edge of the rubble. She rushed to him and crouched down, placing a gentle hand on his cheek, a long red cut beside his ear dripping with blood.
“Theo!”
He moved at her touch, and she helped get him out from under debris and sit on a clear part of the floor. She halfway held him up, her arm around his back as he leaned against a hand pressed into the floor. Theo’s eyes were locked onto the sight before him.
“Are you okay?”
He blinked several times, seeming to come back to himself, and he nodded before finally meeting Jade’s eyes. Fear and despair swirled in the blue depths of his own as he searched her face before dipping his head back in the direction of the chandelier. One word came from his lips.
“Marchand.”
Jade turned to look behind her and noticed what she had not seen before. A hand stretched out of the debris. Peering closer, Jade followed theblack sleeve past the hand to a coat, where Marchand lay crushed and mangled under the chandelier in a pool of his own blood.
Thirty-Eight
Jade heaved another heavy boxof haphazard papers onto the table in the open space of the archives room. It was the second day of her punishment from Matherson. She’d been in the archives from sunup to sundown with only meal breaks, sorting the most recent files, pieces of evidence, meeting notes, and the like into their respective crates for archival. While not backbreaking labor—though Jade’s stiff back had screamed in relief when she had stretched out in bed after a full day hunched over boxes—it was menial, tiresome, and beneath her rank. Matherson’s choice of punishment had been thoughtfully selected and personal, a task that might make Jade go insane.
Her work in the archives had given her an abundance of time for reflection, however. Jade lost herself in her thoughts as her hands moved automatically, sorting papers box by box.
No note had come from Nicolas, and quite honestly, Jade was surprised. She couldn’t fathom why he’d fallen completely silent after the last night they had spent together. Though he’d been quiet for this long before. He must have been busy, working on things within the conflict behind the scenes, but what was there to do after Marchand’s death? She couldn’t help but believe something with Nicolas was brewing and she would see him again soon. He always knew too much, more than he should have had access to. He’d never given her a clear answer as to how he gathered it all either. Cold trickled down Jade’s spine and made her shiver.
Eventually, she pushed thoughts of Nicolas aside and turned her mind to Lord Marchand’s last moments. She’d lost track of how many times she’d replayed the chandelier falling from the ballroom ceiling of Evenshold Palace and crushing Marchand. He’d been in their custody, accused of organizing the murders of so many, including the man in whose home they stood, and then he was gone.
Jade remembered how he’d argued against them, as any guilty party would to save their own skin.
I haven’t possessed them in years, and I don’t intend to cultivate them again.
But they would never know if he’d been lying, not truly. If Marchand hadn’t possessed either of the plants, how had they been present in his greenhouse?
The hair on the back of Jade’s neck prickled at the memory of finding first firra, then morsbane in the greenhouse. She’d only found one of each plant—which, arguably, was all it took to make the poison rienevoir—and they hadn’t been hidden well at all. In a time such as this, when people were being killed with a poison made from those two plants, Jade couldn’t fathom why Marchand wouldn’t have done a better job of hiding them in his greenhouse.
There was a possible explanation. Marchand had likely recently used them to create the poison that killed Grannam and had hastily returned them to random places on the shelves. That might also explain the fresh, loose soilin the pot with firra. But that still didn’t sit right with Jade. If Marchand was involved in such a plot, she imagined the man was smart enough to hide critical evidence better than that.
Jade returned the papers she had been sorting to the top of the box and left the table, an idea hatching. She’d come across a stack of order forms the military had obtained the day before for plants from Ferryman’s placed by Lord Marchand. All she’d done at the time was mindlessly file them away, the higher-ups in the military having confirmed the order forms provided no useful information before sending them to the archives for sorting. But now...Now she wanted to check something.
Jade wound through the shelves of the archives, the electric lights hanging overhead buzzing in the otherwise silent room, until she arrived at the crate she sought. She pulled it from its place and dropped it to the floor right there, quickly locating the file in question.
Holding the file open in one hand, Jade used the other to sift through the stack of order forms from Ferryman’s dating back years. Marchand had clearly developed a relationship with the plant nursery. Though he had purchased from other places as well in his time cultivating plants, the Ferryman’s stack was the thickest and went back the farthest.
Nowhere in the orders did Jade find the purchase of either morsbane or firra. She went back chronologically, having personally sorted the slips by date, reaching seven, eight, nine years prior. Still nothing.
She’d grown so used to seeing nothing of interest on the order forms that she nearly missed the plant names written on a yellowed piece of paper, flipping to the next slip before going back. Jade’s hand stilled on the purchase order, dated over eleven years ago. A single unit of morsbane and a single unit of firra were listed among other plants.
“So he was telling the truth—about that, at least,” she murmured under her breath. Marchand had last purchased the plants over a decade before, which corroborated his statement in the ballroom. “But why one of each, and never again?”
Jade made note of the date at the top.
Eleven years ago. . .
Something else struck her as having happened eleven years ago—the information Arabella had uncovered about something her father had done around the same time. The act that had turned her against him and motivated her to seek the throne ahead of her time. Something horrible enough to make her want to keep her father from power.
Jade’s mind whirred as her heartbeat slowly accelerated. The events had to be connected. There was no way they weren’t.
