Page 72 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

And yet.

And yet, somewhere in the long, strange weeks of this courtship—in this palace, in the sharp exchanges, in the terrible magnetism of a man who reads my body—something else has grown alongside that hate.

Maybe not love, not yet, but something with the same roots. Something that flares when he’s cruel and clever in the same breath, something that answered him in my bedchamber that first night he entered, when my body heated against my will, something that doesn’t want the world emptied of him even as it wants him punished for filling it so cruelly.

That is the truth I’ve been hiding from, deeper than the poison, deeper than the marks on Ren’s skin. That my heart holds them both in some twisted, tangled shade of the same devouring want.

The dark and the light of me.

The blade and the girl.

Aldric feeds the part of me my mother forged; Ren feeds the part of me that survived that forging.

I don’t just want them both—I need them.

Wholly. Equally.

The deadliest thing I carry has never been a blade, not even the poison living in my blood—but my own divided heart.

Chapter 22

Renick

Ishouldn’t have followed her.

That’s the truth I keep folding smaller and smaller in my chest as I stand in the black hedges of the night garden, watching my queen kneel in the wet grass with her face turned up to the full moon. But a dying man hoards what he loves. Every glimpse of her is a coin I’m stealing from a purse that’s nearly empty, and as a thief till my last breath, I’ve never been able to keep my hands off what isn’t mine.

She’s wearing almost nothing. Threnmere silk, that gauzy, smoke-gray weave her dominion spins from goddess-knows-what—and the moonlight goes through it the way water goes through cupped hands. She kneels among the wolfsbane with her dark hair unbound down her spine, and her lips are moving.

She’s breathtaking as she prays, looking like a goddess petitioning a goddess.

The wind shifts, and it carries her voice to me in pieces.

“—take the wanting out of me,” she’s whispering. “Cut it out. Burn it out. I don’t care what it costs?—”

My heart does its sick little stumble. The one it does now every hour or so, that catch-and-drag, the poison keeping time inside me.

“—make my heart stop wanting them both. And if a life is the price—” Her voice frays. “Then take mine. Not his. Mine for his, goddess. A queen for a fool. It’s a poor trade, but I’m told you like those.”

Even praying, she jokes. Even bargaining her life away on her knees in a cold garden, she has to make the dark laugh first.

Gods, I love her.

And that’s why I close my eyes and I do the only kind of praying a heathen thief knows how to do. No goddess ever answered me. No goddess ever came to Harrowglade when the fever did. But I send my will up into that silver moon anyway, and I pray against her.

Don’t take her trade.

Take mine.

Let her let me go. Unstitch me from her heart gently, so there’s little pain. Let her wake one morning and find the wanting gone, and blame it on time. She was forged for more than mourning a jester. Let mego, and I’ll die grateful. I’ll die laughing. Apparently, in my last days, it’s what I was meant for.

The moon says nothing back. Curse the gods, moons never do.

I watch Sera rise from the grass, the silk clinging to her. She walks down the sloping lawn toward the river like something the water dreamed and is calling home.

The full moon rite. Of course, that’s where she’s heading. The daughters of the Thorn Court bathe under the full moon, wash the month’s workings from their skin. I should turn back. This is hers, and I’ve already intruded once on her holy worship.

Fuck it.