He stepped forward, into the entry hall, streaming rivulets of water onto the floor. “You called me a beast. No man would name me so to my very face. But after you left… after you left, I thought: What self-respecting beast lets its lunch get away?” He was enjoying his own anger. “What kind tolerates disrespect without consequence?”
So he was here to eat me. Whatever that might mean. I came down off the steps, thinking to put myself between him and the rest of the house. I wondered if I might be able to placate him with deference.“Your Highness—you’re dripping wet. Allow me to remedy this, if it pleases you, and we’ll talk.”
But he had no interest in feigned civility. “Where are your daughters?” He pushed past me, with unwavering strength. I did not have the gumption to reach out and grab ahold of him, but I looked around, for a candelabra or anything else I might use if needed. He put a hand on the banister and turned back to me. “I am going to pluck their wings.”
“Your argument is with me.” I kept my voice calm, but a rapid pounding filled my chest.
“You’re the chess master,” he agreed. “But I am going to smash every piece on the board.” He continued up the stairs, feet leaving wet marks.
The prince intended harm, but I had no way of knowing how much, how badly. I wondered if his arrival had stirred the girls, the sleeping women. I desperately needed help, but I did not want anyone to appear and put themselves in his way. I would have to expel or contain him on my own. I tried to think of Sigrid. Of her love for him. Of her ability to see the best, to want someone to be more than they were. “Prince Simeon,” I called—hoping to placate, to stall. I did not know how to overpower him. “Think of your honor. Think of theirs!”
But he only laughed and kept going up the stairs.
I began to hurry up after him. “Your mother would not want this.”
The invocation made him pause. “It is the mark of a mother that you think that would bother me at all.” He turned toward the steps once more and kept going.
“How many people have you harmed?” I called.
He cocked his head. Tossed a glance over his shoulder. Curled his lips in something resembling a smile. “Stop trying to delay.”
I was just behind him now. He could have shoved me backward, sent me tumbling down the steps, with a light push.
“Please,” I begged. He turned—a blinding crack—and I received one of the backhanded slaps I’d seen him give Elin. A blue pain lit into the bone of my jaw. I gritted my teeth. Did not cry out.
“The harder you make it, the harder it is,” he said, taking on Elin’s affectations, as if spouting one of her maxims.
“Please—” I started to say again but thought better of it. I ducked my head. “I will show you the way.”
Keeping my head down, I stepped aside, up, and around him, so I was ahead on the stairs. We were soon at the top. But, instead of turning toward the girls’ bedchambers and the steps to Elin’s keep, I went the other direction, toward the west wing.
My designs would not protect anyone for long, but I did not know what else to do. Maybe the girls had heard and would have time to hide or escape. Maybe I would find a way to subdue him. Knowing what was ahead, what he was capable of, I could not live with myself if I led him to the beating heart of my home.
The hall was dark and I could hear him breathing behind me, the squelch of his shoes, as we made our way forward. I kept one hand along the wall, to steady myself. Reaching, with some silly hope that my fingers would land upon a weapon. A long-forgotten sword leaning behind a tapestry. A family battle-axe that I’d never noticed. But my fingers remained empty and we made it to the double doors without incident. I pushed them open ahead of me.
In the moment it took for our eyes to adjust, I had only my senses. The air was moist. The rain must have come through the hole in the roof. The temperature was much lower. The wing of the house was incredibly still, silent. And then the pile of rubble, wet with rain, appeared in the gloom before us.
Simeon turned to me, understanding at once that I had not led him to Rosamund, to Elin, to Mathilde. I had expected fury—malevolence—but on his face, instead, was a kind of delight. “Still playing chess.” He shook his head at me. “You’ve already lost.” He reached out, and in one swift motion, had me by the neck, against the wall. “I told you. The harder you make this, the—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. I had kneed him between the legs. He let go, groaning, and I ran. But he grabbed ahold of my skirts. I twistedaway, hoping they’d rip, but he had them by two hands now. I scrabbled forward. With a yanking motion, he leveled me to the ground. I fell, landing on my shoulder with a cry.
He stood over me as I tried to push backward with the heels of my hands. Then, with a decisive movement, he was on top of me, straddling my hips.
The moonlight streaming through the hole in the roof lit him in an eerie gray. He looked beautiful. I could see the stubble of his jaw, the hollows of his temple. Like a sculptor’s idea of a marble god. Like a sculpture, too, he had blank eyes—the emptiness had returned, and they had all the life of a pond of stagnant water.
He reached forward, placing both his hands on my neck. Squeezed. I could not breathe. I clawed at his fingers. Scratched my feet at the floor. Beat his back. But his grip remained firm. Viselike. Certain. No will or strength I could muster could undo that grip.
Beginning to feel faint, I wondered if this was how it would end. Something inside of me was starting to slow down. I tried to find leverage, to place one foot flat on the floor and thrust him off, but his weight was fully on top of me. A little bit of blackness at the edge of my vision.
I thought of Henry. Of gorse leaves. Of Lucy’s baby feathers. The taste of apple in another man’s mouth. A freckle on a calf. Twin braids. How do you make sense of your own life? What are the things that really matter, in the end? Did the girls know—know—how much I loved them? And would it be enough to sustain them once I was gone? A wish formed, in some emptying part of my mind: If only I had kept a list, a compendium, of all the things the girls should know. All that mattered. Instructions about how to live, how to survive. To share every part of myself, all the little pieces that made a person, to give them away, so that they might make use of them. My mistakes, my choices, my learnings could be the food of their lives.
My vision was going. Blackness, like a fog, creeping, fading. But I could still see Simeon, his face above mine. His unseeing eyes. What would he do when he was done with me? It was the thought ofthat—a continued prowl down the hall, the opening of the girls’ doors, the stagnant pond water—that cleared my sight for one last moment. I stopped scrabbling at his fingers around my neck and instead reached up and dragged my nails down his cheeks.
He screamed. I’d drawn blood. Bright stripes of it. He let go of my neck to touch his face. His weight was still firmly on top of me, but the release of my windpipe gave me the briefest moment to draw a much-needed breath.
It was my only idea. Not premeditated, just there—the grasping of a dying woman. I licked my lips. Tried to whistle. Tried again, and this time the shrill notes came out. Three in a row. Low-high-low. I did it twice.
Simeon was looking at his palms now, at the blood. The sky behind him black. The moonlight made the blood look black, too. It dripped to his jaw.
