Page 4 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

Near midday, the palace appears on the horizon. Like a cloud of white stone and spires against the gray sky, it’s too beautiful, too pristine. An insult pressed into the landscape. Flags snap from the soaring towers. The road leads through iron gates that have been parted wide, expecting us, welcoming us.

Right into King Aldric’s domain.

I watch the performers in motley pour through those gates, thinking about sheep and slaughter, and how one only needs the right bait to set a trap.

I line up behind what appears to be a hundred other fools all waiting for their chance to stand before the king.

Ahead of me, the palace courtyard gleams with metal and marble. Servants in royal uniform move through the crowd, offering water and bread. Gods, it’s real bread, freshly baked. Warm and soft, and I barely inhale the scent of it before I’ve devoured a whole loaf.

Yet the moment my stomach is full, the aftertaste immediately turns to ash in my mouth. Fury lights up my sternum, my ego furious over accepting charityfrom the king.

The dagger sheathed in my boot feels heavy with my next step forward in the line. I might not be able to make his death painfully slow, the way he deserves to die. But I’m going to make gods-damn sure he sees my eyes when I sink the rusty blade into his heart.

And I can’t fail.

I’ve walked for two days with vengeance marching in my steps, and now that I’m here, so close, I almost laugh, realizing with a clarity that borders on madness that I never plan to leave that throne room.

I make some kind of peace with it. I won’t die in vain. For my sister, for all the others who’ve suffered due to his vile rule, I can’t let myself fail.

I have only this one chance.

I’m anxious to get inside that throne room. The longer the wait, the more my anger mounts, the more I shake with it. I blow out a breath.

The line moves slowly. Men enter the palace through the great doors and emerge minutes later. Some laughing, some cursing, most looking bewildered, as if they’d been weighed and measured, and found extremely lacking.

From my position, as I crane my head to see into the throne room, it doesn’t appear the princess laughs at the juggler who keeps seven balls aloft. She does not smile for the acrobat who flips across the marble floor. She doesn’t even shift in her seat for the wit who makes the entire court roar with laughter—even the king himself. She simply sits there, unmoved, her gaze somewhere far from this room.

“She’s a witch,” mutters the jester ahead of me. He’s a squat guy with a puppet on each hand. “Has to be. No woman lacks such emotion who isn’t dealing in evil things.”

I think about my sister’s face in her last days. The way the light bled from her eyes before her body surrendered it. Sadness doesn’t need witchery. Loss of hope only needs a cruel king to incite it.

As the sun travels the sky, the line shortens. My legs begin to ache, and my stomach is mourning the bread I ate too fast hours ago and the bells on my hat won’t stop their pathetic death rattle every time I breathe.

Nearly a hundred men have come and gone, and not one has made this melancholic girl smile. Seven hells, I’m not even a real jester, and my plan—if the incoherent mess in my head deserves such a word—has all the tactical precision of a drunkard swinging in the dark.

I glance back toward the high gates. The road out is right there. Two days of walking and I’d be back at my empty cottage, at the hawthorn tree—my sister’s grave.

My nothing of a life.

I face the throne room.

The puppet man is called forward. He disappears through the high doors. I hear muffled laughter from the court, then he reappears, deflated, defeated, his puppets limp on his hands as he sulks off.

“Next,” says the steward, and he’s looking directly at me.

My heart kicks against the cage of myribs. My mouth goes dry. The bells on my hat tinkle with my tremble as adrenaline surges.

Then I think about Kammy. I think about her hawthorn tree. I think about the seven days I watched her die while the king’s tax collectors rode past our village on horses worth more than our cottage.

And rage heats my veins.

Muscles corded with the fury of the seven hells, I walk through the doors.

“Wait—” The steward calls. Then suddenly, I’m being approached by guards, their meaty hands circling my arms. “Search him.”

Chapter 2

Renick