Chapter 7

“Hah! Wonderful! What a devoted man you are!”

Cassian threw his head back and howled, then signaled his men. Rosalind's ropes were cut and she was shoved toward the narrow door that led down to safety.

She half ran, half fell down the stair, and threw herself into Lucien's arms, sobbing.

Cassian turned, grinning, toward the woman who had been left where she was.

“Well then. Goodbye, Imperial Consort.”

Almost in the same instant, crossbows fired out of the darkness along the battlement. The bolts went through Cassian and three of the men around him, each one exactly where it needed to go.

His body jerked and stopped.

The mad pleasure was still in his eyes as he went over backward—and with the last strength he had, he twisted and shoved Evelyn hard, and she was already half over the edge.

“Evelyn—!”

Lucien watched her fall. That thin figure went off the top of the wall like a kite with a cut string.

The sound she made when she hit the flagstones below was flat and heavy and final.

She twitched once. Then she was still.

Something closed around Lucien's heart like a hand, and squeezed until he couldn't breathe.

He ran.

“Evelyn! Evelyn—”

He went down on his knees on the stones and gathered her up as carefully as he knew how. Her face was bloodless. There was blood at the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were shut.

But she was breathing.

“A physician!” His voice tore. “Get me a physician!”

“Your Majesty—” From a little way off, Rosalind made a small choked sound. A thread of dark blood ran from the corner of her mouth, and she folded to the ground.

“Rosalind?”

She caught at his sleeve. Her voice was barely there at all.

“That traitor—before you came—he forced me to swallow something. A pill. I don't know what it was. Your Majesty, am I dying? Don't—don't mind me. Go and see to my sister first...”

Lucien looked down at the woman in his arms, who was still breathing.

Then at the one bringing up blood on the stones.

The wall wasn't as high as it looked, he told himself. She was breathing. There was nothing obviously broken. She would be all right.

Rosalind had swallowed God knew what.

He set his teeth. He laid Evelyn down on the stones, gently, and shouted at the guards running toward him.

“Move! Get the Imperial Consort back to her palace and summon the physicians at once. I'll follow.”

Then he gathered Rosalind up in both arms and went at a near run toward the nearest building, his voice cracking as he went.

“Where are the physicians? Where are they?”

Evelyn was carried back through the gates at speed. A physician was already waiting.

He examined her thoroughly and let out a breath.

“Fortunately the wall isn't as high as it appears, and something seems to have broken her fall. Surface injuries, some bruising of the organs—nothing to the bone, nothing life-threatening.”

He began cleaning and binding the wounds.

The bleeding stopped quickly.

He had just opened his mouth to say that her ladyship was out of danger and would only need rest when Evelyn, without any warning at all, brought up a great mouthful of blood.

Then a second. Then a third.

It soaked through the clean nightclothes they had just put on her and ran red over the physician's hands.

“This—this isn't possible.” The color drained out of his face. He got two fingers to her wrist again, and under them the pulse was scattered and thin and going out fast, like something draining away. “Why has it collapsed like this? It was steady a moment ago—it was perfectly steady—”

The room came apart. The maids were screaming. The physician's hands flew—needles, decoctions, anything—and none of it did the slightest good.

Evelyn's mind was going under, in cold and in pain.

She knew what it was. The draught had come.

The timing was exactly right.

She lay there and looked up at the embroidery on the canopy while it all receded, and the last thing she felt was the physician's hand trembling as it left her wrist.

He sank down onto his knees, and his face had gone the color of ash.

“Go—go and inform His Majesty.

“The Imperial Consort has passed.”

Evelyn closed her eyes.

There was the faintest smile at the corner of her mouth.

Free, at last.