Chapter 5

Evelyn's head came up. She stared at him, unable to believe it.

Lucien avoided her eyes. His voice dropped.

“My intelligence service isn't as useless as all that. I know perfectly well who's been stirring the water.”

He knew. He knew Rosalind had staged the whole thing from start to finish.

The words hit somewhere under Evelyn's ribs and left behind a sharp, ridiculous, almost unbearable pain.

“Then Your Majesty—” Her voice shook.

“It's Rosalind.” Something tired came into his tone, and something helpless with it. “I have told her, over and over, that there has never been anything of that kind between you and me. That marrying you was forced on me by circumstance. But she's—she's a woman. She needs to feel safe. She's watched us be married for years. She's seen me look after you, now and then, and it frightens her.” He paused. “This time she simply took an opportunity. She wanted to test where my heart was.”

He looked at her, and his eyes were complicated.

“I couldn't wound her. And to prove to her where I stand, I had to play the part beside her. I've wronged you.”

"I've wronged you."

Three light words, and inside them: a fabricated charge, a public beating, a maid dead in a courtyard, flesh opened by irons, and two days at the bottom of a dungeon where she had genuinely expected to die.

One of them had staged it to feel secure. The other had watched it happen to prove a point. Between the two of them they had put her in hell, and now she was expected to understand how difficult it had all been for them.

Evelyn looked at him, and then, unexpectedly, she smiled.

It was a bloodless thing, and there was something in it close to self-mockery.

The smile went into him like a splinter, and he felt a confusion he couldn't explain.

He took it for grief. For a heart gone cold.

“This time the fault was mine.” His voice softened, and there was something in it close to a promise, which was rare enough. “Rest properly and get your strength back. I'll make it up to you. Between Rosalind and you—I give you my word. Next time, I'll choose you. Once.”

Next time. Choose her. Once.

Evelyn closed her eyes and felt tired all the way through.

“There won't be a next time,” she murmured, almost too softly to hear.

“What?” He hadn't caught it.

And then Lionel spoke carefully from beyond the doorway.

“Your Majesty—you've been here a full day and night. There are several ministers still waiting for an audience, on the matter of the flooding in the south.”

Lucien frowned. He looked at the woman in the bed, white-faced, eyes shut, saying nothing.

“Tell them to wait a little longer.”

“Your Majesty,” Evelyn said, and her voice was perfectly level. “The realm comes first. I'm out of danger. Please go.”

He looked at how far away she was, how cold, and the nameless anger flared in him again—but under it there was mostly a kind of stopped-up helplessness he had no idea what to do with.

In the end he said nothing at all. He stood, looked at her for a long moment, and left.

After that, Lucien did seem to be making good on it.

Gifts came into Silverleaf Palace like water. Rare antiques. Bolts of silk. Even a few tribute items that by rights only the emperor and empress were permitted to use.

Then he sent word that he meant to take her out to the royal hunting preserve beyond the capital, for a change of air.

That ground belonged to the emperor and empress alone. No consort had ever set foot on it.

Evelyn was still working out how to decline.

Because today was the day the draught was due to act.

Inside the palace she could simply drop dead and no one would think about it twice. Dying on the road to a hunting preserve would raise questions she wouldn't be there to answer.

She had just called for one of her new attendants to carry the message when a figure in black came through the window.

She opened her mouth to shout.

Pain exploded at the base of her skull.

Everything went dark.