I rolled it into a scroll and tied it with a ribbon. Without access to my father’s study, I couldn’t seal it with the family crest. Butmaking sure no one else read it wasn’t my concern. I wanted everyone to read it—to know Vulgaris’s ambitions.
I blew out the candle in my bedchambers, with the scroll in the pocket of my coat. I checked the hallway before I crept through it. Vulgaris had kept his original chambers, and they were located upstairs on the opposite side of the castle. Unless he was watching my room, there was no chance I would cross his path.
I moved to the top of the staircase and looked down below. The guards were stationed in their usual positions. I could climb out the window, but I needed to be a floor lower in order to accomplish that without breaking my legs. It was at least fifty feet high, and with the snow everywhere, it was too easy to slip.
I grabbed a small sculpture on display on one of the bookcases then aimed it at the window clear across the room in the corner. I launched it and listened to the windowpane smash, and the colored glass sprinkled everywhere.
I stepped behind the enormous pillar next to the banister and listened to the guards come running up the stairs. There were two of them, moving up the steps quickly, despite the weight of the armor they wore.
“The window,” one said to the other.
“Was it the wind?” the other asked. “Or did someone throw a rock?”
I didn’t hear the rest of their discussion because I crept down the steps and slipped out the front door. It was dark except for the torches posted throughout the village below and the ones mounted outside the castle walls.
I took one of the torches and followed the dirt path through the dark gardens, heading to the aviary where we kept the birds that sent our missives to other kingdoms. There were no guards on post there, so I was able to walk inside without a fret. The birds squawked from their cages, disturbed from their slumber, except for the owl, who was wide awake.
The crow was one of the messengers that flew to Warthorn, so I took him out of his cage and attached the missive to his leg before I fed him a couple treats. “I need you to take this to Warthorn,” I whispered. “Can you do that for me?”
He cocked his head, blinked his dark eyes, and then cawed.
“Thank you.” I extended my arm, and he hopped on it like he understood perfectly. Then I opened the window and stuck out my arm. “Make haste.” I watched the starlight reflect off his shiny feathers for a second before he was gone.
I closed the window then left the aviary, picking up the torch that I had left in the dirt. The castle was a mountain that loomed above, once my home and now a prison of my suppression. I hurried back, taking the right path because I’d memorized those gardens from pacing them so many times, searching for a place to shed my grief and quickly realizing I could never release it, not when it followed me so closely, not when it pressed so hard against me it suffocated me.
I returned the torch to the wall before I stepped inside the castle.
“Queen Hanne, what are you doing?” One of the soldiers had returned to his station.
Alarm shot through me first, but then my wits kicked in. “I heard a window break. It woke me up from a dead sleep. I thinksomeone was aiming for my window, and I wanted to see who it was.”
He seemed to accept my explanation without suspicion because he said, “We checked the perimeter and beyond the wall, and no one was there. Couldn’t find the rock they used to break the window either.”
Because I’d thrown it outside—not inside. “Must have been a stupid prank.” I turned to the stairs. “I’m headed to bed. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Queen Hanne,” he said from behind me.
I returned to my bedchambers without another interference. When I was behind my bedroom door, I shed my coat, realizing I had sweat on my skin for the first time that winter. It wasn’t from the walk or the coat, just the crippling anxiety.
I sat at the edge of my bed and looked out the window, wondering if I’d made the right move…or selfishly put my own interests before my people’s. I was powerless to combat my own situation, but a mighty king fused with a dragon was not powerless at all.
Days passed, and I wondered if I’d gotten away with it.
Dragons didn’t appear in the sky. Our scouts didn’t report an army marching on our borders.
There was a chance the crow had never made it to its destination. And there was a chance that King Acana either didn’t believe my words or simply didn’t care. With his dragonsin his arsenal, King Acana might not see Vulgaris as a serious threat to him. I was constrained by the length of the scroll, so my message had to be brief. I couldn’t explain every detail, so perhaps my tale wasn’t believable.
I seemed to have gotten away with it, but I’d accomplished nothing.
My father would have been proud of me for trying, for doing more than sitting on my ass and not taking action. I would find another idea after I’d spent my time mourning my first one. I sat on my terrace, my breakfast only half eaten, and I bathed in the rivers of my self-pity.
Then a group of soldiers arrived—and my life changed forever.
There were twelve of them, in steel plates of armor, broadswords at their hips and across their backs, like they’d come to my chambers to fight a Mammoth rather than a woman who was only five feet tall. “Queen Hanne, by the hand of King Vulgaris, you’re under arrest for treason.”
With my wrists secured behind my back with rope, I was marched to the throne room, where the king and queen usually sat at the top of the dais to pass judgment on their enemies, to hand down verdicts on the disobedient, to hear the pleas of their citizens.
Vulgaris sat there, the chair that my mother must have sat in removed because he didn’t want me to sit beside him. It was the first time I’d seen him in the uniform of the king, which wasblack rather than blue, not stitched with the images of flowers, but with a blade across the chest, like he’d made his own crest.
