For five years, she had believed herself safe. Now, standing outside the parlor door with a tray of tea growing cold in her hands, Felida knew she had been a fool. On the other side of that door was the man who had tried to kill her. Dareston, her husband of exactly one day.
The day he had tried to end her life. She was supposed to be dead. Felida had drowned, or so the world believed. The river had taken her cloak, and the court had accepted the easy story—a frightened bride walking into the water of her own grief.
But Felida had not drowned. She had been pulled from death’s door by Betsy, the housekeeper, and given a new identity, a new face hidden behind a magical charm, and a new name: Rue. She had been Rue for five years now. A plain maid with a plain face and steady hands.
She had scrubbed floors, learned to serve tea, and found happiness in simple things. She had stopped looking over her shoulder. And then, at dawn, word had come: the king was coming. A betrothal had been arranged for him under this very roof.
A fresh bride. And she, with her steady hands and proven composure, had been ordered to serve his tea. The irony was poisonous. She had once been his bride, an arranged match dressed in white.
Now she would be the maid polishing the floors his new engagement would be danced across. Her hand found the charm at her throat, the one Betsy had given her. It had masked her identity for five years. She squeezed it and prayed it would hold for a few days more.
She opened the door. He stood in the middle of the room, tall and imposing, dressed head to foot in unbroken black. He was still beautiful, the way a panther is beautiful—all black grace and banked power. A thing you admired from the safe side of the bars.
And he was still dangerous. She served the guests first, as protocol demanded, then shuffled up beside him. She poured his tea without a tremor. She set the cup down.
And then, for reasons she would never understand, she lifted her eyes for half a breath. Their eyes met. Please, she prayed. May the charm hold.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. He did not look away. He squinted at her, as if trying to work her out. The moment stretched, longer than was safe.
Then, mercifully, the daughter of the house was brought in, fresh and hopeful in pale silk, and his attention turned away from Felida and toward his bride-to-be. Felida retreated to the shadows with the other servants. She watched him from behind her tray. He was courteous to the girl, but there was a stiltedness to his delivery.
A cold performance. Felida’s stomach turned. It was a carbon copy of her own experience. She still didn’t know why he had poisoned her.
That was the part that woke her at night. One moment she had been a bride at her own wedding feast. The next, liquid fire was racing through her veins. She remembered thinking, with strange flat clarity, “So, this is what they really think of the country girl.
”
Then, as she stared at his black garments, a horrible thought occurred to her. He was dressed in mourning. Was it for another wife? Had there been other murdered women in the interim?
She looked at the young lady batting her eyelids at him and felt genuine fear trickle down her spine. “Run,” she wanted to say to the girl. “Whatever they have promised you, run. ”
As if he had heard her shout, Dareston suddenly turned.
His intense eyes picked her out at the back of the room. A stillness came over him, the way a hound goes rigid at a scent on the wind. “You. ” His voice was low, pitched for her alone.
“Who are you? ”
Every eye in the room turned upon her. Felida licked her lips. “The maid, sire.
A servant’s words in a servant’s voice. ”
And still he stared. His gaze groped at her insistently. Then the young lady questioned him, and he surfaced, the mask sliding down over his face.
“Forgive me,” he said, turning back to the girl with a visible effort. “She reminded me of someone. ”
Felida fled to find Betsy. The housekeeper’s quarters always felt safe, smelled of dried lavender.
Betsy was trimming wildflowers at the little table by the window. Her smile was warm, but her eyes were tight with fear. “Did he suspect anything? ”
“He stared at me like he could see through the charm,” Felida said, kneeling beside her.
“Betsy, can the magic wear off? ”
Betsy took her face in both hands. “All things wear down over time, sweet pea. The closer in contact he comes to it, the more it’ll weaken its defenses.
But we’re a long way from it giving out. We just need to get you through his courting of the new girl, and then he will be out of our lives once more. ”
It was meant to comfort, and it did, a little. But Felida felt a sharp pang in her heart that felt like jealousy, which was absurd.
“He’s dressed completely in black,” she said. “Like he’s mourning someone. Do you think he wore black for me? ”
Betsy looked at her sadly.
“Don’t go getting any silly ideas. This is the man who tried to kill you. ”
“Are we sure it was him? ” Felida couldn’t help asking.
“We never knew why. ”
“We’ve talked about this before. Even if it wasn’t him, whoever it was is still out there. And if they caught even the faintest whiff that you were still alive…
”
She didn’t finish it. She didn’t have to. The next morning, they sent her in with the king’s tea again. This time he was alone.
He sat clad entirely in black, glazed eyes staring out the window. He didn’t glance up when she entered. She set the tray down, filled his cup. Stay small.
Make no sound. Be no one. She started across the carpet toward the door. “Stay.
”
The word stopped her mid-stride. “Please. ”
His voice was low and rougher than she had ever heard it. It wasn’t a command.
There was a pain in it, deep and vulnerable. This was a plea. Despite her fear, she turned. He was staring at her the way he had yesterday, as if trying to understand a dream.
He stood slowly and towered over her. She couldn’t help noticing the flecks of black in those golden eyes, or how, remarkably like the day of her wedding, he seemed to her like the most beautiful person in the world. He moved toward her slowly. “You look like my…
” Something swam in his gaze—grief, surprise, a deep desperation. “Your Majesty? ” She breathed. He blinked rapidly and shook his head.
“Forgive me,” he retreated into formality. “I thought I saw a ghost. You may go. ”
She fled.
In the corridor, she pressed a hand flat to her chest and breathed. The charm was failing. He had seen her through the fog, if only for a moment. But the look on his face hadn’t been that of a man surprised by the apparition of his murdered wife.
He should have gone white, recoiled, called for the guards. Instead, he had stared at her with hope. An open flash of happiness. A servant in the king’s employ approached her.
“Was it the king? He can be a little intense sometimes. ”
“You needn’t be afraid of him, you know. He’s sad more than anything.
They say he never got over his wife. Five years and not a soul since. Not for want of the council trying. All of this courtship is the council’s doing, not his.
They say he buried his heart with her and never dug it up again. ”
Felida excused herself and hurried to the nearest bathroom, splashing water on her face. It was too much to take in. Dareston grieved her.
Not a wife in between, not someone he had bumped off. Her. For five years. Why would he grieve her?
If this were true, then he couldn’t have tried to kill her. It didn’t make sense. And that threw an uglier question into the mix. If he hadn’t tried to murder her, then who had?
Over the next few days, she started to see a man she’d never had the chance to meet. She watched him listen to the stable hand, give him a copper and thank him with a warm smile she’d never seen. She watched him listen to the steward’s dull accounts with patience, nodding and offering consolation. He never snapped, never talked down to the staff.
Then the cook’s boy ran into the path of his horse, scaring it and nearly upending both of them. Felida braced for the reprimand. Instead, the king crouched down on the cold stone, on a level with the boy, asked a single question, and listened. It proved nothing, she told herself.
A man can be gentle to a child and a monster nonetheless. But she wondered. That evening, she was summoned to his quarters. Again, he was slumped in that chair, and three decanters stood emptied at his elbow.
He was drunk. The stoic mask he wore all day had gone soft at its edges, exposing an expression that could only be described as devastated. As if he had been crying. She started to fill his goblet.
His hand shot out and grabbed hers, closing around her fingers the way a drowning man closes on a rope. “I had her a day,” he mumbled, thumb moving slowly over her knuckles. “One single day. I couldn’t even keep her safe that long.
”
She stood very still and did not breathe. “I was cold to her. She came to that wretched court with her whole heart in her hands, and I gave her nothing. Not one kind word.
I told myself there’d be time. ” His jaw worked. “She must have been so frightened, so alone. Married to a man made of ice.
And I didn’t have the gall to tell her I had asked for this. That I had wanted her there all along. Is it any wonder she walked into that river? I drove her to the water as surely as if I’d carried her there myself.
”
Felida’s heart broke clean in two. It couldn’t be true. Could it? This felt like the confession of an innocent man.
“The court thinks I have no emotions,” he went on. “Like with the soldiers I put in the ground during that senseless war five years ago. I sent them charging into Naiwer Canyon without support. And they were slaughtered.
I couldn’t save my wife, and I couldn’t save my soldiers. ” He gripped the goblet so hard it would have shattered. “I am so tired of surviving the people I fail. ”
A murderer did not grieve for the wife he had tried to kill.
A man who had measured out her poison did not sit five years later weeping that his own coldness had sent her into the water. He hadn’t tried to murder her. Someone else had. And by faking her death, she had handed him a grief he would carry as his own crime.
She wanted to comfort him, but deep down she knew this was not the time. She turned to go. She had not made it three steps when a certainty out of nowhere seized her by the throat. He is in danger.
This very moment. She whipped back around. The king slumped to the floor, the glass tipped beside his open hand. His chest was working too fast, then not enough.
She knew that fight. She had fought it before. Poison. “Help!
” she screamed. “Someone! Help him! ”
Within the hour, a rider had been dispatched to fetch the Queen Mother.
Guards filled the halls. Felida knew sickrooms. She had been the patient in one herself, from the same poison. The same licorice undertone on the breath.
The same hand, whispered a small, cold voice in the back of her head. The same poison and the same hand. She spread cool cloths over his bare torso, coaxed water past his lips, held him down when the fever took him. And the longer she stayed, the thinner the charm wore.
His fevered heat soaked into her, and the magic that had hidden her for five years had never been asked to hold up under pressure like this, pressed close against the one man in the kingdom from whom she was hiding. But she knew now that she didn’t need to hide from him anymore. The true killer was still on the loose and had tried to kill the king with the same poison. If the murderer found out she was still alive, it didn’t bode well for her.
She had to work from the shadows until she put the whole picture together. In the deepest dark of the night, when they were alone, he surfaced. His eyes opened, glassed and unseeing, and found her face above him. And he smiled.
A slow, broken, wondering smile. “Felida,” he breathed. “You came back. I knew the water couldn’t keep you.
”
She went still to the bone. He recognized her through the charm, or the fever was making him hallucinate. Correct him, she told herself. But she could not make herself take it from him.
“Oh, my darling. ” His hands groped for hers. “I should have told you. ”
“Told me what?
” she whispered back. “I knew it the first hour you came to that wretched court that you were mine, my mate, and I said nothing. You were frightened and human, and I thought I’d scare you off. If I’d known we’d only have a day, I would have told you in a heartbeat.
”
The word went through her like a struck bell. Mate. She had never understood the concept, that strange magnetic pull shifters spoke of. And yet, the moment he named it, she realized it had been with her all along, the traitor thread that leaned toward him, the pull through cold glass, the certainty that he was in danger.
Foolishness, she’d called it. Madness. Pity. Everything except what it truly was.
“I drove you to that water. I was so cold to you. I let you stand there thinking you weren’t wanted, and you were the only thing I have ever wanted in my life. Forgive me.
Wherever you are, forgive me. ”
“I can feel you again,” he said, his fevered eyes shining with unbridled joy. “Which means I must be dying, too. I’d sooner die feeling you than live one more year without it.
”
He couldn’t have been more wrong. He wasn’t feeling her because he was dying. He was feeling her because she was alive and three feet from him. She had been loved.
It was the answer to her question, and not the one she’d expected. He had known it from the first moment they had met. He leaned closer, as if to press his mouth to hers, but his eyes fluttered closed, and in exhaustion, he passed out on her shoulder. She stayed with him through the turning of the fever.
Somewhere in the gray before dawn, his breathing deepened and found a rhythm. He would live. She found Betsy in the corridor and told her everything. “The moment he wakes, I’m going to tell him who I am.
”
Betsy took her hands, looking at her with such fear. “Patience, child. Whoever did this is still under this roof. If that person finds out you survived as well…
Wait a while. Maybe till the queen mother gets here with more guards. ”
Later that evening, the queen mother arrived. Wilhelmina swept in, five years older and not one degree softer, her face like a drawn blade.
Her gaze swept the chamber once and stopped on Felida. “You,” she said. “You are the one who served him his wine. Seize her.
I want this one questioned. ”
They locked her in a chamber at the top of the east tower. It made no sense. She was the one who had screamed for help.
Why, of every soul who had handled his food, did her eye fall on me? It was past midnight when the key turned again. Wilhelmina came in alone. “What is your story, cupbearer?
No doubt you have a beautifully rehearsed lie for me. ”
“I only poured what I was given. The decanter was filled and ready when I entered the parlor. ”
“Servants swear cheaply.
I trust no one in this house, especially not the help. It’s always the help. ”
Felida saw the cold certainty in the woman’s pursed lips, the haste to find a culprit. And a thought began to take shape that turned her cold from the inside.
Five years ago, three days before her wedding, the queen mother had cornered her and said, “He’s better off dead rather than marrying the likes of you. ”
Dead. Not “I’d sooner not see you married. ” Not “you’ll never be queen.
” Dead. She had wished her own son dead sooner than see him lowered by a country bride. It hit Felida so hard she almost sat down. She had been certain the poison had been meant for her, the unwanted bride.
But what if the cup had never been intended for her at all? The poison had been meant for the king. She had simply drunk it first, lifted the wrong cup in the chaos of her own wedding. Five years she’d believed herself the target of a murder, only to discover it had all been an accident.
It explained why Dareston still mourned her. And this woman had given the order and turned up later so the blame could not be laid squarely upon her. She had tried to kill her son, not once, but twice. And why?
Because she couldn’t stand the idea of a common country girl taking her son away. “You’ve gone pale. ”
“It’s cold up here, Your Majesty. ”
“There is something about you.
Something I cannot quite put my finger on. You seem familiar. ”
A fist hammered on the door. A guard’s voice: “Your Majesty, forgive me.
The king is awake and demanding the girl who nursed him. ”
Frustration crossed Wilhelmina’s face. “This is not the end of it. ” She said quietly.
“My son’s grief made him soft once already. I will not watch it make a fool of him a second time. ”
The king was propped against his pillows, gray and hollowed out, but his eyes were clear. They found Felida the instant she came through the door.
“There she is,” he breathed. He turned to his mother. “What is the meaning of this? You locked her in a tower?
”
“She poisoned your wine, Dareston. ”
“She saved my life. She never left my side. ” His gaze came back to Felida, warm and grateful.
“You will not touch her again. She is under my protection. Do you understand me, Mother? ”
“As you wish,” said Wilhelmina frostily, in a tone that promised it was nothing of the kind.
The king turned to Felida, his voice softening. “I don’t know how to thank a stranger for my life, but I mean to try. What is your name? ”
Her heart dropped into her stomach.
Stranger. He didn’t recognize her. Had he confessed everything to her in a feverish delirium he no longer remembered? She knew if she revealed herself now, in front of the guards and the Queen Mother, it would end badly.
She couldn’t reveal herself yet. “Rue, Your Majesty. My name is Rue. ”
The next morning, he asked her, “May I ask you something strange?
While I was fevered, did I… I think I said things I have never said to a living soul. When I try to remember the face, it is yours. Did I speak to you in the night?
”
Yes, she wanted to say. You called me yours. You told me everything. “You were very ill, sire.
Nothing you said made much sense. ”
Afterwards, she went looking for Betsy and found her returning through the little churchyard behind the chapel. “You managed to escape the Queen Mother’s baseless accusations? ” Betsy asked with a relieved smile.
Felida told her everything she had figured out. “She’s the murderer. I’m sure of it. ”
“Think it through, sweet pea.
A woman who wants her son dead does not spend five years trying to wed him. ”
It was true. It didn’t make her hypothesis any less untrue, but it sowed a seed of doubt. “Then who?
If not her, then who? ”
“I’ve got an inkling,” said Betsy. “Sit here for a while. You’ve given me a notion that needs checking.
I’ll not be long. ”
And she went, brisk and certain, back toward the house. Felida sat on the low chapel wall and waited. Her gaze wandered across the stones.
Old graves, soft with moss. All but one. A different type of tombstone stood apart from the rest, a memorial. A marker raised by someone who’d had no body to lay in the ground.
On the grass before it lay a small, fresh posy. Wildflowers bound with a bit of kitchen twine. She rose. Her feet carried her to the stone.
She read the inscription and the world went very quiet. Charles. Beneath the name, the year. Five winters gone.
And an inscription: “Fell in service in Nywer Canyon. Far from home, but never from his mother’s heart. ”
A soldier. Dead five years.
Slaughtered in Nywer Canyon. Where Dareston had confessed to sending his soldiers to their deaths. Could Charles have been one of his soldiers? Did that mean that Betsy?
No. Not her. Not the woman who pulled her from the water. It could not be her.
Suddenly, she felt Dareston through the bond, screaming down its length. Danger. She was already running. Betsy had risen from her son’s grave and gone to finish what she had begun on a wedding day five years past.
The king’s chamber stood open. The guard slumped senseless against the door frame. She was too late. Dareston lay collapsed across the bed, his chest moving too fast, a body fighting poison in his blood.
And beside him, calm as a Sunday morning, an empty cup in her hand and her face wet with tears, sat Betsy. Felida was already on her knees at the bedside, her hands finding his clammy brow. And something broke open in her. Not the man I love.
It arrived plain and total. Not the bond, not pity. Love. “Betsy, the antidote, please,” she begged.
“You shouldn’t have come, sweet pea. ”
“Please, Betsy. Think of Charles. He wouldn’t have wanted you to do this.
”
“You worked it out, then. You always were a clever girl. The cup at your wedding was destined for him. I have always regretted that you drank from it.
” Her chin trembled. “He took my Charles. What do you expect a mother to do? ”
“Why did you wait five years?
” Felida could barely say it. “Because five years ago I stood over your sickbed, certain I’d murdered an innocent girl by mistake. And I smelled it on him. He’d found his mate.
After all his years alone, he’d found her at last. And his mate was the very girl dying under my hands. ”
“You knew,” Felida whispered. “You knew what we were.
”
“I knew. I thought, let him keep his crown and his long life and lose the one thing the war could never give back. Let him grieve his mate to the end of his days and never know she walked the earth. ”
“You told me he was glad to be rid of me.
”
“If you’d known he grieved you, you’d have gone back to him. And I could not give him back the one thing that would have made him whole again. Forgive me that lie if you can forgive nothing else. I did it so I might keep you.
”
Felida understood. She had lived inside the loss Betsy built. But Dareston’s breath was failing on the bed beside her. “The antidote, Betsy?
Please. ”
Betsy’s hand closed around a small dark vial at her waist. “If I give it to you, he lives, and he takes back his mate, and gets everything. And I lose my Charles, and I lose you, too.
Killing him was the only way to keep you mine. ”
Felida did not reach for the vial. She reached up and took the older woman’s wet face in both her hands. “You raised me.
You pulled me from the water. You have been the only mother I have ever had. But if you let him die, you will lose me. You know that.
So I am begging you. Choose me. Choose me, Betsy, the way you did at the river. Choose me again.
”
For a long moment, Betsy stood with a son’s grave in one hand and a daughter’s life in the other. Then she pressed the vial into Felida’s hand and folded her fingers over it. “Three drops on the tongue. No more, or you’ll stop his heart yourself.
”
Felida was on her knees at the bedside in a heartbeat. One, two, three. For a moment, nothing. Then his chest heaved, dragged in a great ragged breath, and his breathing began slowly to even out.
The bond steadied in her chest. When she lifted her head, Betsy had gone. Dareston slept the rest of that night and the whole of the day that followed, and Felida did not once leave his side. The queen mother, faced with the fact that the maid she had accused had twice saved her son’s life, withdrew her suspicion gracelessly.
The poisoner had fled into the night and left no name behind. It was early evening when he woke up. His eyes found her. “You’re still here,” he said.
“I’m still here,” she agreed. He studied her, and that searching look came over him again. “Miss Rue? ”
Felida’s hand rose to her throat, to the small charm that had hidden her for five years.
It had been the wall between her and death, and it had become the wall between her and him. She was so very tired of walls. Without hesitation, she unfastened it and set it down on the table beside his bed. She watched the realization rise in his face like the dawn, the maid’s plain features settling into a face he knew.
She watched him stop breathing. “Felida,” it came out of him broken. “Felida. ”
“It’s me,” she whispered.
“You drowned. I buried you. ”
“Listen to me. I never walked into the river.
I was poisoned the same as you. A cup that was never meant for me. And someone pulled me out half dead and told me lies to keep me running, and I believed them. It wasn’t your fault.
None of it. ”
The sound he made was half sob, half laugh. “Five years,” he managed. “Five years I mourned you.
”
“And you were pouring your tea,” she said, and gave a wet, helpless laugh of her own. “I’ve been right there the whole time. ”
He pulled her down to him, careful and disbelieving, and the bond settled into place between them, the long empty tether finally tied at both ends. She did not tell him it was Betsy.
She had decided that in the long watch, the one truth she would keep. Let him believe the poisoner a stranger. Betsy was gone and would stay gone, and the daughter would carry the mother’s secret the way the mother had once carried the daughter out of the water. Weeks later, when he had stopped wearing black and his new betrothal had been quietly ended, they walked together in the garden.
She was laughing at something small and foolish, and she caught him watching her with an expression full of wonder. “What? ” she said. “Nothing.
I’m only glad the water couldn’t keep you. ”
“It tried its best,” she said. He laughed, the frost melted clean away. “Five years.
I told myself that if I could have one hour back, just one, I would spend it telling you that I had loved you from the first hour when you walked into that hall with your chin up and your eyes frightened and your whole brave heart on display. ”
“No rush now,” Felida whispered. “You have the rest of our lives. ”
He drew her in then, slowly, and kissed her.
It was nothing like the cold formal press of lips at their wedding. This was the thing that the vow had promised. “I should warn you,” she murmured against him, breathless. “I’m a great deal more trouble as a wife than I ever was as a maid.
”
“Good,” he said, and she felt him smile against her hair. “As long as there’s no more hide and seek. ”
And Felida leaned into the warmth of him, no longer a ghost, no longer hiding, no longer anything but herself.
And found she couldn’t stop smiling.
