He advanced with the knife, and she skated two steps back—knocking into her desk, the candles there wobbling in their glass cages. Still, her chin remained impossibly high, and Inés looked down her nose at him, though she stood a head shorter than her son.
“Taillefer, I don’t know what you think you’re getting at, but no matter the end game, you have no claim to Pyrenee—not upon my death, not upon your blood, not upon anything.” She leaned on the edge of the desk now, as if she’d meant to bump it. “You are no longer an heir. No longer a prince. No longer anyone of consequence. Simply put, my boy, you, like the Sand and Sky, are mine.”
His favorite sly grin slipped across his face. “You have named me disowned, but the only way that works for treason is with a trial. Believe me, I read up on the laws before I fled the Bellringe.”
“Anything can happen with the right people in the room.” Inés tossed her arms about, showing off the space. “It happened right here, you know. The councilors and I, the paperwork, the proof—technically it was simply the contract we pulled from the captured pirate, rotting away in our dungeons. But I knew when none of the rest of them did that we were actually surrounded by hundreds more pieces of evidence.” She did not need to nod or wave or gesture in any way to the vials. “Did you think I would be so stupid or so blind by ambition that I wouldn’t questionwhyDomingu requested the contents of your workshop as dowry?”
Taillefer smiled. Held off the cough rising in his blood-addled lung. “Mother, of course I knew you would question it. I just did not knowhow you would use that information. I am often called clever, butyou, letting Domingu’s own plan play out and twisting it your way? That was a stroke of genius.”
She held up parchment pieces from her desk. None of it signed, the top note was the last one.
The tiger has fled, the mountain lion is dead, the wolf has found his head.
“I’ll admit I did not expect compliments on the murder of youradvisor.” Inés waved it in front of him. “I’m willing to bet you sent this to the Warlord, too. Playing all sides. No matter how much you admired Domingu, you knew he was using you to get what he wanted. Poison in his hands. Poison in Sendoa’s drink. Poison in mine. Poison, poison, poison, from a boy who was more than pleased to do anything the old king said.” She lifted a brow. “Though I’m assuming having Amarande kill Renard was your idea, not his—more creative and painful. That is your hallmark, is it not?”
Taillefer didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
Inés dropped the paper along with the rest in a cascade of proof of his relationship with Domingu, dating to his father’s funeral. When one ambitious younger brother took aside a devastated child and told him about all the things a younger brother could be. What he could do.
Far from his thoughts, Inés laughed. “Did you think I would not recognize the penmanship I’d paid for with that trollop of a governess?”
“Do not speak ill of Alisea; she did more to raise me than you ever did.”
“She raised something, all right. I believe it is my right as a scorned wife to use that term when discussing the woman who slept with my husband,” Inés answered as if Taillefer did not wield a knife.
“That was no reason to kill him.”
His mother smiled tightly. Changed the subject. “Nevertheless, compliments will not make an ally of me this late in the game.” She arched a brow. “Did it work on Amarande? That’s where you were, wasn’t it? When Nikola found you? Trying to pull off the marriage your brother could not and steal the throne from under my nose.”
“The throne youstolefrom Father,” Taillefer spit. “You poisoned him daily.”
“You have no proof.”
“Ah, but I do have an encyclopedic knowledge of what every plant and potion on this damn continent will do to a body. Sanded brimstone in tea, was it? Daily for two years? That would do it.”
Her smile widened. “You’re very lucky I waited so long to murder him. You wouldn’t be here if I’d followedyour mentor’splan.” She let that hang, relishing the flicker of surprise across his face. “But keep at it, boy. Though, just like everything else here, you won’t win.”
Taillefer lunged at her then, dagger charging for any piece of exposed skin.
But that cough he’d suppressed could no longer wait. His blade bobbled, and his step faltered, his entire body shuddering uncontrollably. She spun out of his trajectory, and Taillefer and his dagger caromed into the desk. The blade skittered away, onto the floor, bouncing off built-in bookshelves and angling toward the queen.
Taillefer gripped the desk, blood dribbling heavily down his chin, clotting on the papers, and drew a deep, wheezing breath. And when he saw his mother again, she held aloft the dagger.
His eyes followed as Inés and the weapon crossed to the crates of vials, which were neatly stacked and so high they brushed the bodice of her dress. Domingu didn’t need much to poison the wine at the wedding—three vials at most. More than a hundred sat there calmly, his fire swamp and concentration of hemlock both. There was enough there to kill every last soul on this continent with the right mechanism. A good amount in a popular water source. Wine casks. Sagardoa. Any number of sauces popular throughout the region. The vehicles were as endless as they were unobtrusive.
“There are only two ways this ends for you, my traitorous, treasonous, disowned-but-clever scion. You die, or you wish you were dead.”
Taillefer swallowed and righted himself. There was no letter opener on the desk. No seal stamp or anything else heavy he could use against that dagger.
“If you survive me now, if you survive whatever internal damage you’ve clearly acquired, I will lock you away in one of my castles—honestly, whichever I have to visit the least, because I’m sure your suffering will be quite distracting—and you will make more of this. You make the antidotes, too,” she announced. “You will churn out vials until you keel over or ingest one of your concoctions yourself simply because you want out.”
Taillefer wheezed.
Satisfaction sparked in his mother’s eyes. “I do see myself in you. And for that, I cannot let you succeed. You are less experienced, yes, but still very, very dangerous.”
A grin slipped across her face, and for once Taillefer saw himself staring back—fox-like, ambitious, unforgiving. Standing in front of his hard work, toiled upon in the shadow of his grief for his father.
Knuckles blanching, Taillefer gripped the sturdy scrolls and swoops of the solid wooden desk and pulled himself to standing, careful to avoid elbowing her candles off the top. He brushed the blood from his mouth but only served to smear it.
