Page 16 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

I pour him a cup, setting it near mine on the table.

“A princess serving a jester,” he remarks, reaching for his cup.

“Nonsense,” I say, refreshing my own. “I like doing things myself, not always having someone loitering around.”

He takes a sip of tea before placing the cup on the table tray.

The space feels different with him here. In the great hall, there were explicit rules. The king’s presence, the court’s gaze, the invisible perimeter of propriety that kept us at arm’s length. Here, in this small, intimate room with the garden breathing through the open doors, the rules feel thinner. Permeable.

“Tell me something,” I say, crossing my legs.

“What most would you like to hear?”

“I don’t know. Something about this place, this kingdom. What it’s like outside these walls.”

He’s quiet for a moment, light and dark eyes studying me. Then he leans back against the wall, stretching his long legs out. His hat tips askew.

“What it’s like outside these walls,” he repeats, casting me a tentative glance. “All right, Your Highness. I can offer you that.”

Then he tells me about the village markets. The chaos of them, the shouting merchants, the way the fishmonger’swife sings to her eels as she guts them. He tells me about the orchards south of his village, how in autumn the air turns so sweet with rotting apples that you can taste it on your tongue. He tells me about Kammy—how she once spent an entire afternoon trying to teach a stray cat to sit, growing frustrated while the cat stared at her with total disdain, and how she finally gave it a name, and it never left their cottage grounds afterward.

I laugh. Properly. Not a surprised giggle but a real laugh, warm and full, rising from somewhere deep in my belly that I’d forgotten existed. It surprises me so completely that I press a hand to my mouth.

Ren is watching me with an expression I can’t quite name, something between surprise and captivation. He removes his hat and runs a hand through his dark, untidy hair. “I now see why one might be persuaded to take up the occupation of jester,” he says.

I feel some satisfaction in him admitting that he’s not one, that I knew this the moment I laid eyes on him. I lower my hand to my lap. “And why is that?”

“Wearing a ridiculous outfit and acting a fool is no bother,” he says, looking at me, “not when one gets to hear the sweetest laugh, Princess.”

I look away. Taking a measured breath, I compose myself. “Your sister, Kammy. She sounds wonderful,” I say quietly.

“She was,” he says, and I don’t miss the past tense, or how hisfeatures fall.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I offer, feeling at a loss as to how to ease his grief.

“She was the best person I knew.” His mouth tugs up slightly, but I can still register the raw anguish beneath.

The silence that follows doesn’t feel empty. It’s thick with a certain intimacy—two people who have experienced loss without needing to explain it.

It makes me want to be just as honest with him, to tell him about my mother, my home. About the courtyard, the girl I left behind, and how my father sold me off. Yet it doesn’t quite seem to compare to his loss.

Instead, I reach for my tea at the same time he reaches for his?—

And our hands collide.

The cup tips, spilling tea to the floor.

“Gods-dammit,” he mutters.

“It’s nothing,” I say, waving it off. But he’s already off the bench, crouched on the stone floor, searching for something to mop the spilled tea.

“Ren, please…”

At this, he looks up at me, his eyes so intense, so open—but it’s not until I feel the warmth of his skin on mine that I realize I’ve grabbed his hand. Ever so slightly, his hand turns, his fingers make contact with mine. They’re rough, calloused from a life of labor. And it makes me curious about what he did before he came here to be a jester.

The garden whispers through the open doors, warm andgreen and heavy with the scent of nightshade, and the room narrows to the point where our skin touches.

It’s just a touch, a graze, barely a breath of contact—but it quickens my pulse.