Page 65 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

Because I crave a cruel king’s touch as much as a fool’s gentle one.

And everywhere I turn, Ren is there to remind me.

He performs at the midday meal, capering in his motley, and not once does he look at me longer than a jester should look at his queen—but every glance that meets my eyes is a live coal.

Loaded. Charged. Dangerous.

I feel each one in the marrow of my bones, and I know he feels mine the same way, and the knowledge sits between us in that crowded hall like a blade balanced on its point.

We crossed a line last night that cannot be uncrossed.

He gave me a vow and I gave him my body, and somewhere in the wreckage of a wedding night we becamesomething that the whole weight of this kingdom would see us dead for.

Any small piece of you, he told me.However small. I’ll make it enough.And I believe him. I believe he would burn the world down to the foundations for the smallest scrap of me, and the terror of being loved like that—of loving back just as recklessly—is a poisonous thing growing thorns in my chest.

The stakes have changed. We are not a careful, doomed flirtation anymore. We are treason with a heartbeat.

And the cruel king himself is the puppet master pulling our strings.

There is only one way out of this before it goes horribly, terribly wrong. Only one way any of us will survive. Because I know, once Aldric has had his crude fill, and has tired of us, grown bored with this entertainment, he will have Ren at the gallows.

And me? What happens to queens who are guilty of adultery in Kravenholt? I shudder to find out just what Aldric has planned as my punishment when he grows disenchanted with his Threnmere girl.

So when the sun sets and night calls to the darkness within me, I go alone to my chambers.

I take down the small, locked box from the false bottom of my traveling trunk. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, is what my mother sent me here to use.

The preparation awaiting the combination of the wolfsbane from mygrowing garden.

This was always the true bargain. Not peace. Not an alliance. My father wept and signed his name and sold his daughter to a tyrant, yes—but my mother pressed her lips to my forehead in that courtyard and called me a blade.

And a blade is sent into a body for one purpose.

King Aldric Vaelstrom bought a bride, a toy trinket he wants to wind until it breaks—but he brought the very instrument of his own unmaking into his palace.

I measure the first dose by candlelight. A tincture, near-colorless, near-tasteless—designed to be taken slowly, over weeks, building in the blood the way my own tolerance was built. Except where mine made me strong, this will make him weak. A failing here, a tremor there. A heart that begins, by slow degrees, to lose its rhythm.

By the time anyone thinks to call it poison, it will look like nothing but a young king’s mysterious wasting, some humour of the blood, not a curse.

This is what I came here to do. This is what Ren came here to do—to end the king’s cruel reign.

We are the same in this, he and I. Two blades sent into the same dark for the same throat. We have to do this. It’s the only road that ends with us free, with Ren alive, with this kingdom unshackled from a man who bleeds his people to gild his halls.

So why does the guilt settle in my chest like a stone as I stopper the vial?

I press my palm flat against my sternum, as if I can push the feeling out. It isn’t mercy for Aldric—I have none. It’ssomething else, something I can’t name, a wrongness that has nothing to do with whether he deserves it and everything to do with the cold certainty that I’m about to start something I can’t stop.

But that’s a horror for another night.

Tonight, I use a blade to slice my palm. Let the drop of my poisoned blood drip into the brewing, as I chant my will.

My mother’s timeline might be patient, but mine can no longer afford to be. If I wait, there may be nothing left of my divided heart. I feel it opening, day by day, toward a man I loathe.

And I refuse—because my heart can only belong to one.

So I prepare the working, casting the curse.

Chapter 20