Page 71 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

Ren lifts our joined hands and presses his mouth to myknuckles, and his lips are cool, too cool. “You can’t stop, Sera. It’s your only chance to be free. Even if it’s only a chance.”

His light and dark eyes hold mine, and there’s no fear in them, none at all, only that terrible tenderness that has undone me since the first day. “Let the poison finish him,” he continues. “Let it run its course. Let it take him, and me with him, and walk out of this palace. Go home to Threnmere.”

A broken sound claws up my throat. “No,” I say, adamant. “You know I can’t do such a thing.”

He touches my chin. “You were sent here to kill a cruel king.” His thumb strokes my cheek. “You were sent across the realm to do this, and it’s almost done. Don’t throw your purpose, or your life, away for a fool in bells. I was already a dead man when I met you. I made my peace with that long before, Sera.”

The words tear out of me, fierce and shaking. “Youarea fool if you think I’ll buy my freedom with your life, Renick Ashbourne.”

He looks at me with such sad, gentle love that it nearly breaks me. “There’s no other way, Princess.”

Stubborn determination rears inside me. “Then I’ll make one.”

I take his face in both my hands, this beautiful fool who pulled me back from the brink. “I dealt this magick, I bound this curse, and a blade that made a wound can find a way to close it. I swear it on Morrishan.I swear it on Nythera. I swear it on every goddess of my blood and every drop of poison in my veins—I am not going to let you die.”

And I mean it with everything I am.

Even as, somewhere beneath us, a king sleeps his cruel sleep with my hatred in his blood.

Even as, in my own divided heart, the terrible truth beats on: that to save the fool I love, I must somehow spare that king, and defy my task, my vow—my mother.

I leave Ren before the sun sets. Once alone in my chambers, I take down my mother’s books. And I begin—by candlelight, on my knees, praying to a goddess—to look for a way to unmake the ruin I’ve made.

Hours later, Isolde finds me on the floor of my bedchamber, my back against the wardrobe with its tally marks, my knees drawn up, my gaze lost.

She takes one look at my face and she crosses the room, sinking down beside me on the cold stone, her soft eyes pleading. So I tell her what I’ve done.

For a long moment she says nothing. Her hand clasps mine and holds it, her thumb moving over my knuckles the way it did when I was a child waking from nightmares in a keep of black stone.

“You know what your mother would say,” she murmurs at last.

“That magicks always have a price,” I say, the words tasting of ash.

“There’s no working, no brewing, no calling on thegoddess that doesn’t ask something back. A give and a take. A sacrifice for anything you dare to ask of Morrishan.”

I laugh, and it’s an awful, broken sound. “It’s an awful exchange.” I turn my face to the stone. “The price is him. Otherwise, I will be banished from my home.”

My mission was clear. The debt Threnmere owed his crown was not paid in full by a bride. My father will never allow me to claim Threnmere as home again, and my mother will have to abide it.

I shake my head. “The curse may backfire anyway,” I tell her. “It may not even take the king, and I will have lost him, will have sacrificed his life, for nothing. How have I made such a terrible mess.”

Isolde is quiet. Then, carefully, in the voice she uses only when she’s about to tell me a truth I don’t want to hear, she says, “Magick is a fickle thing,” she says, “because the heart is fickle. I think you’ll find, in the end, that this was never the true desire of yours, Sera.”

I go still as her dark eyes hold mine, steady and sorrowful. And there it is. The whole shape of the trap, laid bare.

To keep the man I love, I have to keep the man I loathe. To spare Ren, I not only have to spare Aldric—I have to make a sacrifice.

The blade my mother forged, sent from our dark dominion, into a tyrant’s house for one single purpose, mustsheathe itself.

I should feel grief at that. Rage. The bitterness of my task failed. My home lost.

Instead, goddess forgive me, what floods through me first is something worse.

Relief.

Because some traitor-deep part of me does not want to let the king die.

I loathe Aldric Vaelstrom. I do. I have counted the days of his cruelty. I have felt his teeth in my skin and his hands bruising my wrists. Every reason I have to hate him is real, and carved deep.