Chapter 5: The Consort Is Dead

I woke up to the taste of metal and the wrong ceiling.

My tongue felt thick. My arms were slow to answer. For a few seconds I only knew that the cot under me was not my cot and the air smelled of cold stone and something sweet that did not belong in any storage room or sleeping quarters I knew.

I turned my head.

The movement sent a dull pulse through my skull. I was lying on a low padded bench against a wall. Heavy curtains blocked most of the light. Across from me a wide bed sat in disarray, covers thrown back, pillows on the floor. A woman's arm hung off the far side of the mattress, fingers curled and still.

I knew that arm.

Recognition came in a sick rush. The body was of Pernilla Claesson. The Alpha King's consort. The woman the entire Crownlands had been watching for months because she finally carried the child everyone said would secure the succession.

I pushed myself up on one elbow. The room tilted. My stomach lurched. I swallowed hard and forced my legs over the side of the bench. My bare feet touched a rug that felt expensive even through the numbness.

There was blood on the floor near the bed.

Not a lot at first glance. Then I saw the rest. Dark spread under the edge of the mattress. More on the sheets where her body lay half turned toward the wall. Her eyes were open. Empty.

I scrambled backward until my shoulders hit the wall.

My hands came up in front of me without thought. There was blood on them too. Under the nails. Across the palms. Smeared along the inside of my wrists like I had tried to wipe them clean and only made it worse.

A sound tried to leave my throat and died there.

I looked around the room in hard, fast glances. My bag was gone. The small knife was gone. The clothes I was wearing were not the ones I had packed in. These were softer, finer, and already marked with the same dark stains that covered my hands.

Someone had moved me here while I was under the drug.

Someone had put me in this room with a dead woman and left my hands looking like I had done the killing.

Voices rose in the corridor outside. Sharp. Urgent. A man's voice I did not know shouted for the guard. Another answered. Footsteps gathered fast.

I tried to stand. My legs folded. I caught myself on the edge of the bench and stayed there, breathing too hard, staring at Pernilla's still face while the truth arranged itself with ugly clarity.

Jörgen and Yvonne had not only stopped me from leaving.

They had built a frame so complete that no one would ever believe I simply wanted to walk away.

The door slammed open.

Light from the corridor cut across the room. Two guards came in first, blades already drawn. Behind them a man in dark formal clothes stopped dead at the sight of the bed. His face went white. Then he looked at me, still half on the floor with blood on my hands and the dead consort only a few steps away.

"Do not move," the first guard said.

I could not have moved if I wanted to. My body was locked.

More people filled the doorway. Someone started shouting for the King. Someone else ordered the wing sealed. A woman near the back made a broken sound when she saw the bed.

I kept my eyes on Pernilla's face because looking at the living people felt worse.

One of the guards stepped closer, careful, the way you approach a dangerous animal. He saw the blood on my hands and the state of the room and reached his own conclusion without asking a single question.

"On the ground," he ordered. "Now!"

I lowered myself the rest of the way. The rug pressed against my cheek. The smell of blood and the sweet drug still coating my mouth mixed until my stomach turned again.

Boots stopped near my head. A new voice spoke, colder than the others.

"Is she alive?"

"The consort is dead, my lord. The woman was found with her."

A pause. Then the same cold voice.

"Secure her. No one speaks to her until the King arrives."

Hard hands pulled my arms behind my back. Something metal closed around my wrists. I did not resist. There was nothing left to resist with.

As they hauled me up I caught one last look at the bed.

Pernilla's open eyes stared at nothing. The future the Crownlands had pinned on her child stared at nothing with her.

And every person in that doorway already believed they were looking at the woman who had ended both.