CHAPTER TWO: THE FAREWELL BANQUET (3)

“Kneel,” he murmured, low, only for me, and the word was velvet.

I knelt. My knee hit the black glass. I knelt in my borrowed finery in the belly of the monster’s palace, and I smiled up at him like it didn’t break something in me, and I thought, This is the play. He wants everyone to see the princess grovel. Fine. I can grovel. I’ve been groveling to the Light Court for six years.

He set the empty goblet down. His thumb brushed the inside of my wrist — once, light, almost gentle — and then he let go, and the gesture read, to every watching noble, as a predator dismissing its prey.

I did not know — could not have known — that he’d drained a cup his own poison-sense had flagged as lethal ten seconds before it touched my lips. I did not know he’d drunk it to keep it off me, because the bond had screamed at him that the girl on her knees was about to be the one who died.

I read his mercy as a spectacle.

It was, I would later think, the single most expensive misread of my entire life.

KAELEN

I did not drink poison for show.

That was the part Ian would never understand, the part I would never say out loud. I’d tasted the wine the moment my fingers touched the goblet — the old shadow-sense, the thing that had kept me alive three hundred years, reaching up through my tongue like a warning bell. Nightshade. Light Court nightshade. Prepared by a hand that knew exactly what it was doing.

And prepared, I realized, a heartbeat later, for her.

The cup in her hand had not been the cup she’d meant for me. The swap had already happened. Someone had gotten to my wine steward, or to her sleeve, or to both, and the wine that had traveled from her fingertips to mine was wine that would have put a princess in a black-glass coffin before the fourth course.

So I’d drunk it.

Because I could. Shadowkin royal blood turned Light poisons to water in my veins. Because the alternative — letting her drink from a cup someone had rigged to kill her in front of my whole court — was not, apparently, a thing I was capable of watching.

I told myself it was strategy. A live, useful princess was worth more than a dead one. I told myself it was pride. I told myself a great many things, standing there while she knelt and glared up at me like I’d personally stolen her puppy, and none of them were true.

“Your Majesty,” Ian hissed, appearing at my elbow the moment the hall’s attention wandered, “she just— you drank— allow me. One stroke. She tried to poison you.”

“She tried to poison someone, Ian.” I set the goblet down. “Not me. Look at her.”

Ian looked at her. Eira Vail was sitting back on her heels, golden-haired princess in midnight silk, staring at the empty cup in my hand with an expression of genuine, calculating alarm. Not the alarm of a failed assassin caught red-handed. The alarm of a woman whose gun had gone off in the wrong direction.

“She has no idea,” I said slowly.

“Your Majesty?”

“The poison wasn’t hers.” I turned the cup. “Or rather — the poison was hers, but the delivery wasn’t. Someone swapped the cups on her. Someone in my own kitchen, in my own hall, tonight, in front of me.” I felt the slow, cold unwind of a thing inside my chest that did not like being played. “Who has access to my tables, Ian?”

Ian’s brow furrowed. “The catering contractor. Human. Appointed at border week by the steward. Named—”

“Leo. Yes. I met him.” I hadn’t, but I’d seen the name on the tags. “Find out who hired him. Find out if he breathes.”

But before Ian could move, my adjutant returned from the small, cold task I’d given him during the toast — the one I’d ordered without telling Eira, because I’d expected exactly this. He carried a folded sheet of paper, and his face was the face of a man who had found exactly what he’d been ordered to find.

“From her luggage, Your Majesty. Hidden in the lining of her traveling case. Tucked beneath a hairbrush.”

I took it.

It was a missive. Sealed with the Light Court’s own golden seal. Written in the precise, cold hand of a Light Court spymaster. And it said, in terms that could not have been clearer:

The princess proceeds. The Shadow King dies by her hand before the blood moon. The Vail girl is expendable once the work is done.

I read it twice.

A lesser man would have felt something like relief. Proof. The thing I’d known in my bones since she walked through my doors, now on paper. She was a spy. She was a knife. The bond was a trap, the Stele was right, and I was within my rights to have Ian drag her to the block before the dessert course.

Instead I felt nothing at all.

I felt the absence of the ache. That was the problem. Standing there, holding proof that the woman I’d drunk poison to protect was here to end me, I could still feel her pulse through the bond — fast, furious, terrified, furious again — and the three-hundred-year loneliness in my chest had not come back.