Page 77 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

“And I’ll come to you in the night,” he says.

The dark hours. Where appetite and hunger yearn. Where poisonous blooms reach toward the moon. A marriage the realm can believe in, made true at last from the inside. He gives me the night, because it’s all he’s ever ruled honestly.

Day and night. The fool and the king. Two great desires of my soul and of my body, no more divided. Fed and sated.

My mother sent a blade across the realms to end a cruel kingdom.

But blades only know one ending, and I’ve become something more, something she didn’t forge—a woman who couldn’t end this kingdom.

So I will do the more dangerous thing.

I will change it.

Not with wolfsbane. Not with craft or a knife under the pillow—with this, exactly this, the thing no one in Kravenholt’s long bloody history ever thought to try: hearts given freely, in the open hand, where the patient dark can see them. That’s how you break an ancient curse.

I suspect it’s how you break a cruel kingdom, too.

Epilogue

DOMINION OF THE HEART

Ayear ago, I fished a king’s decree out of the mud and decided to kill him.

I remember the weight of the soaked parchment, the royal seal bleeding wax down the post, some herald’s looping script gone soft at the edges.

Whosoever shall make the princess laugh…it read. And me on my knees outside a tavern with a split lip and broken heart, reading it by fading daylight like a glimmering beacon.

Tonight I’m the one nailing parchment to a post.

The nail goes in with two strikes. The seal catches the torchlight. And there it is, fixed to the great post in the outer courtyard where everyone will read it by morning:

By order of the Crown of Kravenholt: a house of healing shall be raised in every village of the realm, staffed and provisioned at the treasury’s cost, that no subject shallexpire for want of a healer’s hand. The first shall be raised at Harrowglade.

And beneath the royal seal, in the space where tradition puts a saint’s name or a dead king’s, one word in my own crooked but practiced hand.

Kammy.

I smile. Though I can’t take all the credit for the idea, as it was the Queen of Kravenholt who first suggested a house of healing. I simply gave it meaning.

The ink’s barely dry and the bells on my hat are ringing because my hands are shaking, and I stand in the cold courtyard and let them. Somewhere behind me, the great hall is filling with light and noise—the Feast of Misrule, the whole drunken glittering machine of it winding up again.

“You’d have loved this place as much as I hated it,” I tell the parchment. Tell her. “The palace, I mean. Too many stairs. Terrible people. The pastries are good, though.” My voice cracks a little at my joke.

There’s now a healer in Harrowglade. Some other fever, some other night—some other brother is going to knock on that door, and it’s going to open.

Maybe you fail to avenge the dead.

But as long as you live, you can help the living in their name.

I straighten my hat, shake my bells, and head inside to commit some misrule.

The hall is crimson and gold and roaring. A year ago tonight, Aldric hauled me up to his throneas a viscous cruelty. He set his own crown on my head like a blade laid across my shoulders—my breath held, waiting to see what a king does to a fool who dares to touch what’s proclaimed his.

Tonight, the king meets me halfway down the hall, carrying a tinsel crown.

“Lord of Misrule,” Aldric says, pitched for the whole hall, and the court howls its approval on cue. But his pale eyes do the thing only three people can read, that warm flicker underneath the ice. “Try not to humiliate me too hard.”

“No promises.” I bow with maximum insolence. “I’ve already committed the treasury to something scandalous. It’s nailed to your courtyard. Terrible precedent. Whole villages are going to survive the winter. The other kingdoms will say you’ve gone soft.”