“Is it?” Pepin asks quietly. “Have you not noticed how easily they replace them?”
Memories flicker to life in my mind, tales of strange illnesses befalling the Queens, women quickly replaced when one had served her purpose.
“My mother believed she had failed him,” Pepin says. “Not as a wife. As an offering.”
The word settles heavily between us.
“He married again,” Pepin continues. “And again. Each timehoping. Each time disappointed. They do not seek love,” he says. “They seek permanence. Legacy. Victory over whatever they fear is coming for them.”
I grip the cool stone at my side.
“You will end as she did,” he adds, not cruelly, but without softness. “Ill. Forgotten. Set aside when you are deemed insufficient.”
Each breath I draw feels heavy, panic tightening around my rib cage.
“No,” I say instinctively. I have seen cruelty, I have felt it on my own skin, bones breaking. And yet I refuse to believe I am simply a pawn in an age-old game.
He looks at me with something akin to pity.
“It will not matter how intelligent you are. Or how beautiful. Or how careful. The pact predates you. It does not bend for preference.”
My thoughts race—to the ring, to Charles’s growing intensity, to the way he looks at me lately as though searching for something beyond my face.
“If this is true,” I say slowly, “why tell me?”
“Because you deserve to understand the game you are in,” Pepin replies. “Even if you cannot win it.”
He steps away, leaving me at the wall with the city stretching beneath me, unchanged and indifferent.
For a long time, I stand there, trying to decide whether I believe him.
A pact for a queen’s soul.
An inheritance of obsession.
If he is lying, it is an elaborate cruelty.
If he is telling the truth—
Then Charles’s love isnot merely twisted by magic.
It may be driven by a force far older.
* * *
There is only one person I can ask about the deal with the devil, and I find him deep in prayer inside the chapel. The bishop is on his knees, his eyes closed, hands folded so tightly that his knuckles have gone pale.
If what Pepin told me is madness, I need someone who understands madness dressed up as faith. And if it is the truth he speaks of, then I need someone who has spent his life studying the language of bargains and damnation.
The air inside the chapel is cool and faintly scented with wax and stone. Candles burn low along the walls.
I sit in one of the back pews and wait.
His voice is low, almost exhausted. When he finally rises, he turns slowly—and freezes when he sees me.
His eyes are as unsettingly blue as ever.
“Your Majesty,” he says, bushy brows lifting. “I was not aware you were here.”
