“There is no justice in this place!” Angelonia wailed.
Huxley stood beside her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders, stepping on Magdala’s foot as he did. “And what of this woman?” he cried. “She has lost everything. How could you possibly deny her peace?”
But the judge had already removed his blindfold and slipped out the door behind the bench.
“Julian deserves justice!” someone shouted.
The room surged again as Lady Justice escorted the prince out the back door. Magdala pressed her back against the cold wooden bench as the royal guards screamed, swore, shook their fists at nothing, at no one. Huxley supported Angelonia and steered her from the courtroom, leaving Magdala to fight her way out of the chaos alone.
Chapter 9
My daughter, come home.
The thistle is in bloom, and the red amaryllis is climbing the trees. The baby hinds are in their spots, and the eagles are home from the mountains—I can hear them calling over the hills in the morning, while the sparking beavers snuffle in the back garden. It is not too hot, and the breeze blowing off the loch cools my face. Beloved, your father is a proud old boulder. Let him get his own house back, and come home.
“I wish you had come to the funeral.”
Startled by her father’s voice, Magdala dropped her mother’s letter onto the bed. “I thought it would be better to leave the family in peace,” she said, snatching the folded paper off the quilt and tucking it under her pillow.
“I am sorry for your loss.”
Magdala gazed at her father, perplexed.
“You’ve known Julian for years,” he added. “You must be devastated.”
Magdala bit her lip and glanced away, pulling at a loose thread on her sleeve. She’d already grieved over Julian,months ago, when she looked into his eyes and saw the fire her father lit in them. He’d died to her long before the ball.
Perhaps her father was to blame for his death as much as Prince Asherton was. He had radicalized him in this very cottage, turned him into a zealot for a lost cause.
“I have a meeting tonight,” her father said. “Would you mind offering refreshments?”
Magdala glared at him. “You should not have those meetings in the house. Huxley looks the other way because he needs me on the guard, but imagine if someone else found out?”
“No one will find out.”
Sighing, Magdala shuffled down to the kitchen and took a basket of vegetables from the windowsill. “I will make food because I am in the mood for cooking. Not to suit your madcap friends.”
“They’re not madcap,” he grumbled.
Magdala shot him a skeptical scowl as the first knock echoed through the cottage.
The door creaked and shut, creaked and shut, as her father’s radicals scuttled into the sitting room like roaches. Magdala dropped a tomato onto the wooden cutting board and set the knife against the flesh. She remembered the scratch of her blade on the prince’s neck. Her teeth on edge, she sliced into the tomato.
The sitting room full, bodies spilled into the kitchen, bumping her as she sliced tomato after tomato, her hands dripping red juice, her blistered fingers stinging. Shesnapped at the intruders, and they shied away like skittish mares.
Just when Magdala lifted the rolling pin, meaning to crack the skull of the next person to jostle her, a familiar voice carried over the crowd. Her stomach flipped when she saw Huxley wading toward her.
Magdala deduced from his black wool suit that he had come directly from Julian’s funeral. He shook hands with her father and then moved toward the cramped kitchen.
“What are you doing here?” Magdala asked suspiciously. “You’ve never been a royalist before. You don’t believe in curses.”
Huxley thrust his hands in his pockets and nodded. “Yes, yes, well, Julian’s passing and the prince’s acquittal have changed my mind.”
“What of your promotion?”
“Magdala.” Huxley leaned against the counter and fixed her with an aggrieved look. “Even I am not so mercenary as to care more about rising in my career than my brother’s murder. Lately”—he ran his thumb along a groove in the wood grain—“I haven’t been able to think about anything but Asherton Ageric and what he did to Julian.”
“And so you’ve come to jointhislot?” Magdala pointed the rolling pin at the press of bodies. She had thought Huxley was too clever for her father’s excitable friends.
