––––––––
“HOW DID YOU KNOW?”Tori moaned.
“You said it yourself,” I said. “She can’t be trusted.”
“I’ll have her head for a trophy!”
The symptoms of the laxative were rather explosive, to put it delicately. It was clear Narcissa had used a large quantity of fast-acting medicine, but Reselda had luckily given Tori something to combat it, along with several glasses of water. By the end of it, my friend was in a rotten, if not murderous, mood on the way back to the debutante shelter. The hunting party had returned with their game. Tori and I found a shaded spot away from the rabble of tittering debutantes and boasting young men.
“Careful,” I said.
Tori growled. “I’ll do whatever to get that b—”
She doubled over and clutched her stomach.
“What you need to do is sit down,” I said. “I’ll deal with Narcissa.”
Tori stared at me incredulously. “You?” she said, leaning against a tree. “How? Stay silent until she dies of boredom?”
“I’m perfectly capable of confrontation.”
Tori didn’t look convinced.
A strange sort of confidence had overtaken me in the past hour. As I sat in the medical tent, I let the colors bloom from the cluttered table of ointments and herbs, enraptured. Slowly but surely, I deciphered the words that came from them.Mend.Protect.Cleanse. Some words were vague and some specific, and when I tried to decipher the lemon-yellow oozing from the canvas ceiling, nothing came. Still, there was progress, some semblance of control—and excitement—that wasn’t there this morning.
I went back to the picnic to grab what was left of Narcissa’s punch. Prince Ash was a few feet away, cleaning his bow as Samantha chattered and hovered over him like a hummingbird. I skirted around the pair and found Narcissa, who was sitting on a blanket at the far corner of the shelter, tossing bits of bread to a group of squirrels. She was relatively isolated, which I was grateful for. I tapped her shoulder.
“Amarante. I see you decided—”
I thrust the glass toward her, hard enough to fling the remaining liquid over her dress. Narcissa screamed as the punch dripped down her bodice.
“A peace offering,” I said, twisting my lips into a smile.
Without waiting for a reply, I turned to the gaggle of shocked debutantes. My hands shook as I marched past them. There was power in confrontation, that I knew now. But where there was power, there was price. Narcissa ran to Duchess Wilhelmina, shrieking. For a second, the duchess’s eyes met mine.
I had made a dangerous enemy.
