Page 73 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

A dying man’s last request.

I follow her through the orchard, watch as she wades into the river to her waist. She lets the robe go, and the current takes it downstream, and I stop breathing for reasons that have nothing to do with poison.

Moonlight on wet skin. Her arms lifting, her palms cupping river water and pouring it over her shoulders, over and over, an anointing. Her lips still moving. Asking her goddess to break her own heart cleanly.

That’s when I hear it.

A footstep on silt. Deliberate. The kind of sound a man makes when he’s done being silent—when he’s been silent a long while and wants you to know it.

I don’t have to turn. I’ve spent a season learning the weight of those eyes—icy blue, ringed in gray, the coldestweather in the palace. I know better than most when the king is looking at me. We share a cursed bloodstream, he and I. We are, in the worst wedding ever executed, one flesh.

“You watch her like you’re looking through a keyhole,” Aldric says behind me, low and rough. He sighs. “I should know, because it’s how I watch her. How I’ve watched both of you.”

My heart stops, and I face him.

He’s alone. No guards, no torch, no crown. Just the king in a dark doublet with his collar open, and there’s something ruinously wrong with his face, because it doesn’t appear cast in that cruel way of his. It’s hungry, yes—Aldric Vaelstrom is never anything else—but underneath the hunger is a thing I’ve only ever seen on beggars.

Want. The kind that’s been starved.

“The library has a false wall,” he says. “Her garden room. The way she looks at you across my hall like you’re the last lit window in a dark realm.” He steps closer. My hand aches for a knife I didn’t bring, because he still has it. “I’ve known the entire time, fool. I’ve stood in the dark and watched my bride come alive under another man’s touch, and do you know what I felt?”

“Homicidal, I’d imagine,” I say, no fear left in my weary bones.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Murderously envious.” His eyes narrow on me through the dark. “She has never once looked at me and come alive. I didn’t think I evenwanted her to. I was tricked into a marriage, but then…” He trails, shrugs. “I saw her. I wanted her. From the very first moment, I was hers. But she gave herself to another—to a gods-damned fool.”

“You could’ve killed me.”

His chuckle is low, a mere scraped breath from his chest. “And lose her completely?” He tilts his head. “I too know what it feels like to accept scraps, jester. Willing to have the smallest piece. And I wouldn’t get the whole of her by doing away with you. That’s not how a king reigns over an entire kingdom.”

In the river, Sera has gone still. She’s seen us. She stands in the water with the moon on her shoulders and her chin lifted, and she doesn’t cover herself, doesn’t flee. She looks at her husband and her lover standing mere feet apart on the bank, and I think she makes some kind of decision.

I will wonder, for whatever's left of my life, what moved in her in that moment. Mercy, she'll call it later. One act of mercy for a dying man who doesn't know he's dying. But I saw her face, and mercy has never looked so much like hunger.

“Come into the water, Aldric,” she says.

And the king of Kravenholt—conqueror, tyrant, insatiable appetite—obeys his wife like the helpless wretch he’s just confessed to being.

He strips as he wades, and Sera receives him like the goddess she is. Without flinching, without loathing. And I stand rooted on the bank with my stuttering heart,watching her guide his hands, watching her grant what she’s never granted him—not on their wedding night, not in any bed in that stone palace. Given, this once, freely.

Then Aldric turns his head to find me through the night, his eyes as colorless as his hair beneath the silver moonlight. And for once, the cruelty there is heated by a different kind of threat.

“Come here, Renick.”

Not fool. Not jester. My name, in the king’s mouth—and it slays me more than any dagger he could’ve wielded. He knows…or perhaps he’s always known everything, and this is the strangest execution ever devised.

Fuck it.

I find I don’t care.

“Come touch our girl,” he says. “Feel how she craves our touch.”

Our.

Angels above, devils below—desire burns through my veins at that.

I go into the river.

The water’s cold enough to make my ruined heart lurch, and then her hand finds mine beneath the surface and nothing is cold anywhere. We fold around her, the king and the fool, her enemies, her lovers, her men—and what happens then isn’t sex or fucking. I’ve fucked plenty.