Page 11 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

My own personal court jester.

Isolde studies me for a moment. Then she sets the last pin down on the vanity and rests her hands on my shoulders. Her grip is firm. Grounding.

“Just be careful, Sera,” she says. “That one has an anguish in him, scars that tell of it, and that makes men reckless.” A heavy pause. “And you, my girl, have your mother’s heart, which means you’ll try to save him. And that—” she squeezes once “—is not what you were sent here to do.”

She leaves without another word. The door clicks shut behind her.

I sit in the silence of my chambers, my dark hair loose around my shoulders, my hands still in my lap. Through the arched window, the last light of the day is bleeding out of the sky, turning the palace grounds the color of bruised flesh.

And I think about the fool. His one pale eye, his other full of depth. The grief I found there in them. The scar that speaks to pain, and violence. The raw scrape of his voice as he told his truth in a court full of lies.

I think about his hands, shaking when he bowed.

The way he looked at me like I was real.

I open the small drawer beside my vanity and retrieve the thin sliver of metal I use for my tally. I pressit into the wood of my wardrobe and scratch through the twenty-nine marks.

Twenty-nine days, undone by a fool in bells.

I hesitate just a moment before scratching a new line below.

Tomorrow, I will not break.

I will be as silent as the belladonna growing in my private garden.

A blade does not weep—and a princess does not smile for the cruel king she has vowed to kill.

Chapter 4

Renick

The room I’ve been given is larger than my cottage.

I stand in the doorway for a long time, just looking at it. A bed with an actual frame and feather mattress, not a pallet on the floor. Sheets that are made of the softest thread. A pillow—one whole pillow, stuffed with feathers, not straw. There’s a wardrobe, a washbasin, a window with glass in it. Kammy and I nailed oilcloth over one of ours when it broke, because we couldn’t afford a new pane.

And here I am, standing in a room that doesn’t have one oily smudge.

I close the door behind me. Lock it. Lean my back against the wood and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor, because the bed feels like a betrayal and the floor is closer to what I deserve.

The bells on my hat rattle dully as my head drops forward.

“You’d love this, Kam,” I murmur to no one. “A real bed. You’d have bounced on it the second you walked in, you little terror.”

The silence answers me, cavernous. Permanent.

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until stars burst behind my lids. I will not think about the healer who could’ve saved her with curative tinctures. I will not calculate how many tinctures the cost of that pillow could have purchased. It will just end with me wanting to tear something apart with my bare hands. Wrecking this room.

Instead, I peel off the motley. Leaving the faded purple and black puddle on the stone floor like a shed skin. I stand in my threadbare underclothes and stare at my reflection in the glass window.

Hollow, dark circles carve beneath my eyes like thumbprints in wet clay. When I look in the wardrobe, I’m met with a row of new jester costumes.

I bark a laugh at the ceiling. It echoes off the stone and comes back to me sounding unhinged.

A servant knocks an hour later with food. More food than I’ve seen in months. Roast pheasant, bread with actual butter, some kind of stew that smells like herbs. A carafe of wine. A dish of honeyed figs.

I eat all of it. Every last scrap, hunched over the tray like an animal, barely chewing, my body overriding everyprinciple I have. The king’s food. Paid for with the taxes that killed my sister, and I’m shoveling it into my mouth with both hands because I am a hypocrite and a coward and so gods-damned hungry I could weep.

When it’s gone, I sit on the edge of the bed—the too-soft bed of betrayal—and wait for the guilt to hit as I chug the last of the wine to drown my pitiful existence, hoping to black out.