Page 66 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

Renick

The king is dying.

It begins small. A pallor that the powders can’t quite hide. A tremor in his hand when he lifts his goblet, there and gone. He no longer wears his rings, so the gold doesn’t clank against the cups. While His Majesty halted his rides to the frontlines of the revolt for the wedding, he hasn’t returned, and new rumors are slithering through the great hall like a draft.

At first he’s simply too enamored with his new wife. Then he’s indisposed. Then fatigued by the revolt. Then, in the lowered voices of the bolder courtiers when they think no fool is listening, fearful of Lord Bramwich’s uprising.

I watch it happen and I feel nothing I expected to feel.

I thought, when this moment came—when I finally saw the cruelty drain out of that handsome face, when I watched the man who taxed my sister into a hawthorn gravebegin to wither—I thought I’d feel triumph. Vindication. The clean, cold satisfaction of a debt being paid.

I came to this palace with murder in my teeth and a dead sister’s name in my chest, and here is murder, slow and certain, unspooling exactly as I once craved it.

Instead I feel like a man watching a storm roll in from far away, knowing it will reach him eventually, unable to say what it will take when it does.

Because it isn’t my hand doing it.

It’s hers.

Sera tends Aldric with perfect devotion.

That’s the part that undoes the court entirely, that silences the whispers before they can sharpen into suspicion. The sad bride who would not smile for her king has become his most attentive nurturer.

She holds the cup to his lips with her own hands. She sends away the healers’ foul-smelling draughts and insists on brewing his restoratives herself, her face a portrait of devoted worry, and the court murmurs about how the marriage softened her, how love bloomed where no one thought it could, how touching it is to see the queen so faithful to her burdened lord.

Heavy is the crown…

The one she now shares with him, helping him bear its weight.

And yet, I know that every cup she lifts to his mouth is another measure of his death. That the restoratives she brews with her own hands in her garden room,surrounded by her poisonous blooms, are sending him into the grave. I know that the wolfsbane she’s tended by moonlight since the night I found her crouched in the dark is finding its way, drop by drop, into Aldric’s blood.

She is killing him in plain sight, and not one soul in this gilded court suspects that the cure is the poison.

Gods, she’s magnificent.

And gods help me, that I should be terrified of this beautiful creature of the Thorn Court.

We meet in the afternoon, by the flickering light of candles of the library in our dead queen’s wing, the dusty quiet that has become our escape, our stolen world.

Sera comes to me there when she can, slipping through the tapestry and up the hidden stair, and the moment the door closes behind her she’s in my arms and nothing else exists.

Today, as the king is tending to revolt affairs, she asks, “How does it make you feel when he touches me?” Her cheek rests against my chest, my arms wrapped around her like I could hold the whole world out.

I pause stroking her hair. We don’t speak of it often—this strange, errant thing we’ve become—but it sits between us in every silence.

“Does it bother you?” Her voice goes quiet with the honest question.

I release a long breath. “It should,” I confess as her fingers curl into my open tunic. “That it doesn’t is what bothers me most.”

She’s silent for a beat, then she pushes up onto her arm to find my eyes. “Where I’m from, it’s not looked at the way it is here in Kravenholt,” she says. “Maybe you’re secretly of the Thorn Court, Renick Ashbourne.”

A small smile twitches at the corner of her soft mouth, and that, right there, is all I truly care about—that my queen, my love, is happy.

I place a gentle kiss to her lips. “I only ever love to watch your face slacken with pleasure,” I whisper over her mouth, coaxing her into a kiss, while leaving the rest unsaid. Which has become a dark secret I carry in my chest, that whether her pleasure comes by my hand or his, I’m only bothered if I’m not there to help bring her to completion of that pleasure.

“Touch me now,” she whispers, and I, of course, cannot deny her command.

She’s poisoning a king slowly to death, and maybe we’re both bothered that we’re not feeling enough guilt at that. Like a missing tooth, probing the empty socket, disturbed more by the absence of it.