She stood outside the parlor with the tea tray going cold in her hands, unable to open the door. Five years she had served this household, almost to the day. She could have done her job blindfolded, but she had never faced a guest like this. Because on the other side of that door was the man who had tried to kill her.
Dareston. Her husband. The Alpha King. He had been her husband for exactly one day before he tried to bump her off.
And the worst part? He thought he had succeeded. Rue, she reminded herself, the way she had reminded herself ten thousand times. Her true name still surfaced whenever she was frightened.
You are Rue. A plain old maid with a plain old face and steady hands. Felida had drowned. Felida had to stay drowned for her own safety.
What if Dareston recognized her? If he saw through the charm protecting her, the game would be over. He would finish what he had started. She chewed her lips so hard they nearly split.
All this time she had thought herself safe. The first year she flinched at every hoofbeat on the drive, every strange face at the gate. The second year, less. Somewhere in the third, the fear quietly packed itself away.
She had been born to silks and a royal court, but she had learned to scrub floors and wait tables gratefully. A maid’s aching back was a small price to pay for her life. This morning proved that assumption wrong. At dawn, word reached the servants’ hall.
The king is coming. A betrothal had been arranged for him under this very roof, a fresh bride, the daughter of the household. The other maids read her stillness as composure. None of them felt the cold fear turning over beneath her ribs.
Then came the order. You’ll carry his tea, Rue. Because she had the steadiest hands, she was to be his personal cupbearer. Of course.
It was quite a step down from what she had been to him. His bride. An arranged match, politics dressed in white. Now, somewhere above her head, a marriage was being negotiated for him this very hour, and she was the woman polishing the floors his new engagement would be danced across.
The sweet, poisonous irony of it all. Rue’s hand found the small charm at her throat, the one Betsy had given her, her only protection against the Alpha King behind that door. It had worked for five years without mishap, masking her true identity. With it, she looked to everyone like Rue, an ordinary and self-effacing maid.
A forgettable face. A forgettable voice. Little Miss Forgettable. Please, she prayed.
May the charm hold. Footsteps. Betsy bustled past with an armful of linen and slowed when she saw Felida’s face. “You’ve gone the color of the tablecloth,” she murmured, reaching up to smooth Felida’s collar with a quick, warm hand.
But the hand was not quite steady. There was a tightness about Betsy’s eyes that Felida had not often seen. Betsy was frightened, too. As the only one in the household who knew her secret, that made perfect sense.
“Keep quiet, sweet pea,” she said, low and even. “Don’t draw attention to yourself, and you’ll come through this just fine. ”
A pat to the cheek, and she was gone. Felida felt steadier for ten whole seconds.
The voices within rose, and one of them was his. Lower than five years of memory had kept it. A voice built for giving orders. It was the voice that had spoken her wedding vows in a hall full of strangers, and the sound of it chased the air from her lungs.
Her hands tightened on the tray until the china stopped its faint trembling. She gave her charm one last squeeze. It had held for five years. All it had to do was hold for a few days more.
She took a deep breath and opened the door. He stood right there in the middle of the room, tall and imposing, powerful of arm and jaw, dressed head to foot in unbroken black. It felt surreal to be in the same room as him again. A nightmare come true.
And he was still beautiful. The way a panther is beautiful. All black grace and banked power. Five years had not dulled him.
If anything, they had honed him, pared him leaner and harder. The other nobles in the room revolved around him. Lesser creatures arranging themselves around the source of power. No one noticed her.
She lowered her eyes and crossed the floor. She served the guests first, as was protocol, before shuffling up beside him. With bated breath, she poured, close enough to feel the heat radiating from him. Close enough to catch the scent that memory had kept better than his voice.
And she waited for the world to end. The tea ran amber into the cup without a tremor. This was the nearest she had been to him since the day she married him and the day she died. She set the cup on the nearest table beside him.
And then, she would never know why, after all that care, she lifted her eyes for half a breath before she could stop herself. Their eyes met. The question she had let herself stop asking for years came roaring back, filling her to the throat, leaving room for nothing else in the world. Will he know me?
For half a breath their eyes met. Felida had not meant to look. It was as if something stronger than her, a traitorous need to know, pulled her eye line to his. Quickly, she lowered her gaze and stared hard at the silver pot in her hands as though her life were poured into it.
Which it was. Don’t look up. Whatever you do, don’t look up again. Her heart slammed against her ribs hard enough that she feared he could hear it.
A wolf could hear a great many things. He had not looked away. She felt it the way prey feels the shadow pass overhead, the weight of his attention still resting on the side of her face. It’s just your imagination, she told herself.
And yet the moment stretched. One breath. Two. Longer than was normal.
Longer than was safe. He couldn’t recognize her. Not with the charm. And yet he was squinting at her as if trying to work her out.
Fear almost gave way to panic. It was all she could do to keep from sprinting out of the room and right out of the household. Then, mercifully, movement at the far doors caught Dareston’s attention. The daughter of the house was being brought in, fresh and hopeful in pale silk.
The king’s attention turned away from Felida and toward his bride-to-be. Felida retreated to the edge of the room, refilling cups, eyes glued to the floor, then vanished into the shadows with the other servants. There she steadied her racing heart and watched him. Her eyes returned to his black clothes.
Black head to foot, not a thread of color on him. An odd choice for courting. He looked more like he was preparing for a funeral. Perhaps he was in mourning.
But who could have been so important to Dareston that he would wear his sorrow into the place he was meeting a brand new wife? Felida watched the new girl come forward and curtsy, fresh-faced and beaming her pearly white smile while the family and courtiers fussed frivolously about them. He was courteous to her, but there was a stiltedness to his delivery. Behind every one of his lines, the lights were off.
A cold performance. Felida’s stomach turned. It was a carbon copy of her own experience. Five years ago, it had been her in the pale silk approaching the man carved from frost.
She had mistaken his silence for distaste and decided the fault must be hers. Too small. Too country to be worth the warmth of his heart. She still didn’t know why he had poisoned her.
That was the part that woke her some nights even now. One moment she had been a bride at her own wedding feast trying to smile. The next, liquid fire was racing through her veins. Something in the wine or the food, she had never known which.
Only that as the bright hall filled with roaring heat and hallucinations, she had been distantly aware that somewhere in that gilded room a hand had measured out her death and watched her swallow it. She remembered thinking with a strange flat clarity as the floor came up to meet her, “So, this is what they really think of the country girl. ”
She should have died if not for Betsy. Betsy, the head housekeeper in Dareston’s service at the time, had managed to get the antidote to her in time.
When Felida had surfaced at last, weak as a kitten and astonished to be breathing, it had been Betsy who told her the truth. Whoever had done this had meant for it to be terminal. She would not be safe in that house a minute longer than it took the poisoner to learn their work had failed. “There was a way out,” Betsy had said.
“But it meant giving up everything. Your name. Your face. The whole of the life you had.
”
Felida had chosen life. So Betsy arranged it. The drowning was her idea. She cast Felida’s cloak downstream for the searchers to find and spread a rumor that the frightened young bride had spoken of not wanting to go on.
When the river coughed up the cloak without a body, the court accepted the easy story. The girl had walked into the water of her own grief. Meanwhile, Felida was smuggled half dead out of that house in the dark. Betsy went with her.
A new household, a new identity, her old self hidden behind the charm Betsy gifted her. “You’re Rue now, sweet pea,” Betsy told her. “Felida drowned. We let her drown so you could live.
”
And somehow, it had all been for nothing. Because here he was again. The king who had tried to murder her. As she stared at his black garments, a horrible thought occurred to her.
If he was in mourning, it had to be a recent and important loss. Was it another wife? Five years had passed. It was altogether possible there had been other murdered women in the interim.
As she looked at the young lady batting her eyelids at him, she felt genuine fear trickle down her spine like cold ice. Run, she wanted to say to the girl. Whatever they have promised you, run. As if he had heard her shout out loud, Dareston suddenly turned.
His intense eyes picked her out at the back of the room immediately. A stillness came over him. The way a hound goes rigid at a scent on the wind. For one long beat, he did not look away.
“Don’t run,” Felida reminded herself. Running was a confession of guilt. She stayed where she was, staring straight in front of her, praying. “You.
” His voice was low, pitched for her alone, though the guests heard it and went quiet. “Who are you? ”
Every eye in the room turned upon her. Felida licked her lips and took a moment before answering.
“The maid, sire. ” A servant’s words in a servant’s voice. Underneath them her pulse went wild. And still he stared.
His gaze groped at her insistently. “Sire? ” The young lady’s voice, small and uncertain. “Is something the matter?
”
He surfaced, and Felida watched the mask slide down over his face. “Forgive me. ” He turned back to the girl with a visible effort. “She reminded me of someone.
”
Someone. Felida’s hands managed not to drop the tray. She waited a few minutes, then withdrew from the room on the pretense of checking on the new batch of tea being made in the kitchen. She felt Dareston’s eyes follow her the whole way with that unfathomable expression.
Had he recognized her? Why had he questioned her so directly? Her hand flew to her charm to check it was still in place. Did charms wear off over time?
A question for Betsy. She was deathly afraid because if he found out who she was, he would finish the job he started. She went to find Betsy. Betsy would know what to do.
Betsy’s quarters were cozy and smelled of dried lavender. It always felt safe in here. The housekeeper was at the little table by the window, trimming the stems of a fistful of wildflowers and settling them into a chipped jug, the same as she did most evenings. At the sound of the door clipping shut, she startled, a stem slipping from her fingers, then put her hand to her bosom with relief.
“How did it go? Did he suspect anything? ” she asked, waving her over. Felida hurried across, kneeling beside her and giving her a big hug.
They clung to each other for a few seconds. “I didn’t drop the pot, at least,” Felida laughed nervously. “But he stared at me like he could see through the charm. Like somewhere under it all he actually recognized me.
” She paused. “Betsy, can the magic of a charm wear off? ”
Betsy took Felida’s face in both hands. “All things wear down over time.
Five years of softening the edges of your face into someone else’s, dulling your scent, pitching your voice, that’s powerful magic. And five years is a long time to ask such a thing to hold true. Mayhaps the magic is weakening. ” She paused, then added, “It could also be him.
The charm is protecting you primarily from Dareston. The closer in contact he comes to it, the more it’ll weaken its defenses. ”
Felida’s hand reached for the charm anxiously. “But we’re a long way from it giving out,” Betsy clucked more encouragingly.
“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 for some reason, Felida felt a sharp pang in her heart, which felt like jealousy. Which was absurd, considering the circumstances.
Yes, she had been married to him, but only for a day. She had never truly known her husband. “Do you think he wore black for me? ” The question slipped out before she could stop it.
Betsy looked at her sadly, pity etched into her kindly features. “Now, don’t go getting any silly ideas, Felida. I didn’t risk our lives to get you out of there so you could let sentiment trip us up. ” She gave her hand a squeeze.
“The black is for show. Don’t forget, this is the man who tried to kill you. ”
“Are we sure it was him? ” Felida couldn’t help asking the question that had been turning in her head for years.
“We still don’t know why he would have wanted to. It wasn’t like my family had money or land or anything of worth. ”
“We’ve talked about this before, sweet pea. ” Betsy’s voice was firm.
“Even if it wasn’t him, whoever it was is still out there. And if they caught the faintest whiff that you were still alive…” She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to. “You’re tired,” Betsy said gently.
“Go to bed. In the morning you’ll be recharged to face him again. ”
Felida was passing the long window in the gallery when something below caught her eye. The king stood in the gardens, among the dark hedges in the last gray light of the day, hands clasped behind him the way a man stands at a graveside.
Quite still. Quite alone. He had a whole house of people inside who would have come running at a word, a bride being polished for him upstairs, a kingdom at his back. Instead, he had fled to the solitude of the garden.
His expression looked as lonely as Felida felt. Some part of her leaned toward him. Through cold glass, across a dark garden, something in her chest tipped his way like a needle finding north. He looked up, blinking as if he had heard something, and Felida stepped back from the window as though it had scorched her.
She’d imagined it. Her heart was squeezing. She could not pretend it wasn’t. But her heart could squeeze for all sorts of foolish reasons, and pity was a prime one.
Pity. That was all this was. You could pity a man and still know him for the murderer he was. She shuddered and made herself walk on.
But the thought had already lodged down in the place where she kept things too dangerous to hold. He’d looked like a man grieving. Was he grieving her? The thought struck her and refused to be dislodged.
No matter how stupid. No matter how ridiculous. It had been five years. They had been married for one day.
He had tried to assassinate her. But the thought kept her from sleeping for hours. The next morning, they sent her in with the king’s tea again. This time, he was alone.
The estate was quiet at that hour, light coming low and gold through the long windows. He sat by a table in the middle of the parlor, clad entirely in black, glazed eyes staring out the window. Like a sentinel at a vigil. He didn’t even glance up when she entered.
Inwardly, she was relieved. As long as she didn’t draw his attention, this encounter would be over quickly, and she would have survived another morning. She set the tray down as quietly as she could and started filling his cup. Every drop, every clink of china rang loud in the vacuum of silence.
Stay small. Make no sound. Be no one. It occurred to her that this was the first time she had ever been alone with him.
Not just in this household, but in their own marriage as well. They hadn’t exactly had much alone time before the attempt on her life. She had been so young and naive back then. A country girl who expected to be liked for her honest warmth.
Instead, the court had taken one look at her and snickered with derision behind their fans. And Dareston had been no better. Her husband-to-be had met her with a face like frost on glass. It didn’t matter how chatty and pleasant she tried to be.
She was met with the same cold blankness every time. It had been the queen mother who voiced what everyone was thinking. Wilhelmina, icy and unforgiving as a winter storm, had caught her alone three days before the wedding and looked her over with an expression that could have frozen fire. “You are not good enough for him,” she’d said.
“He’s better off dead rather than marrying the likes of you. ”
Only days later, they tried to put her in the ground. Felida glanced at the king. A question for another time.
For now, she just had to set the pot down, curtsy, make her exit, and she would have survived another morning. Soundlessly, she started across the carpet toward the door. “Stay. ”
The word stopped her and her heart mid-stride.
“Please. ”
His voice was low and rougher than she had ever heard it, as if he were waking from a deep sleep. And the thing that made her pause was that it wasn’t a command. There was pain in his voice, deep and vulnerable.
This was a plea. Despite her fear, unable to resist the request, she turned to face him. He was staring at her the same way he had been yesterday, as if trying to understand a dream. His eyes were filled with such intensity it stopped the breath in her throat.
They roamed over her face, searching, hungry. He moved slowly toward her, as if moving too fast would chase her away. “You look like my…” he started, and something else swam in his gaze. Grief.
Surprise. A deep desperation. “Your Majesty? ” she breathed.
At her voice, he blinked rapidly and shook his head as if waking from a dream. “Forgive me. ” He retreated into formality. “I thought I saw a ghost.
You may go. ”
Felida hesitated. A deep part of her wanted to reach for him even as he withdrew. Then her survival instincts kicked in again and she fled as quickly as she dared.
Around the first corner, with cool stone at her back, she stopped. Her heart raced like a beating drum. I thought I saw a ghost. The charm was failing.
That much was clear. Somehow, his gaze had pierced through it and he had seen her through the thick 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.
He should have recoiled. He should have panicked and called for the guards. Instead, he had stared at her with hope. An open flash of happiness.
He hadn’t looked remotely guilty. Which struck Felida as strange. Had she been wrong all along? Had Dareston actually been behind her poisoning all those years ago?
“Are you all right, miss? ”
Felida jumped. A servant she hadn’t heard appear stood before her. “Fine, thanks,” she managed, starting off for the kitchens again.
The servant fell into step beside her, touching her elbow gingerly. “Was it the king? He can be a little intense sometimes. ”
“I can see that,” Felida said, trying to say as little as possible.
“You needn’t be afraid of him, you know. He’s sad more than anything. ” The servant dropped her voice. “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.
”
Before Felida could allow any emotion to show on her face, she excused herself and hurried to the nearest bathroom. She splashed water on her face. Dareston grieved her. Not a wife in between her and his would-be bride.
Not someone he had bumped off in the five years in between. Her. For five years. Why would he grieve her?
They had only been married a single day. Was he really mourning the wife he was supposed to have wanted dead? The two pieces of the puzzle did not fit. They contradicted each other.
Because if this were true, then he couldn’t have wanted her dead. Couldn’t have tried to kill her. It didn’t make any sense at all. And that threw an uglier question into the mix.
If he hadn’t tried to murder her, then who had? By morning, she had come to her senses. It was gossip. That was all it was.
One servant with a loose tongue repeating the juiciest story a household had about their king. People loved to say such things. Swooning tragic romance was far more interesting than fact. But over the next few days, things started to happen that began to challenge her certainty.
As she kept his cups full of tea and wine, she started to see a man she had never had the chance to meet. She watched him listen to the stable hand dispensing advice on how best to care for his magnificent steed. She watched him give the man a copper for his troubles and thank him with a warm smile she had never seen. She watched him listen to the steward’s dull accounts with a patience no one was making him spend, nodding and even offering his consolation.
He never snapped, never talked down to the staff. He spoke rarely, only listened, and people were grateful to him for it. Then she watched the cook’s boy run into the path of his horse as they prepared to go riding, scaring the beast and nearly upending both him and the king into the mud. Felida braced for the cuff, the reprimand.
Instead, the king crouched down on the cold stone, on a level with the boy, asked a single question, and listened whilst the child fought a stammered sentence all the way to its end. Then he answered him gravely, as though the boy were a lord, and sent him on his way grinning. It made her wonder. Had he always been this kind?
It proves nothing, she insisted to herself. A man can be gentle to a child and a monster nonetheless. And yet, when she stared up into the dark ceiling at night, she wondered how a man could appear so cold outwardly but possess genuine warmth. And why had he never displayed that warmth towards her?
She asked Betsy about it. Her mentor shook her head and took Felida’s hand. “Can you not tell the difference after all these years of a man trained in the etiquette of the court? Sweet country child, you’d have withered inside a year in his keep.
”
It was only after Felida left that she realized Betsy hadn’t answered her question. That evening, she was summoned to the king’s quarters once more. Again, he was in the parlor, slumped in that chair. Again, he did not look up when she entered.
Felida wondered why he seemed to be spending so little time courting the lady of the house since he had arrived. It was as if he were actively avoiding it. Three decanters stood emptied at his elbow, and there was an irregular heft to his breathing. Felida realized he was drunk.
Even the stoic mask he wore all day had gone soft at its edges, melted down by drink and exposing an expression that could only be described as devastated. As if he had been crying. She found a fresh decanter already handily filled at the far end of the table and quietly started to fill his goblet. His hand shot out, grabbing hers.
His fingers closed around hers the way a drowning man closes on a rope. And yet his eyes looked past her, unfocused. “I had her a day,” he mumbled, his thumb moving slowly over her knuckles. “One single day.
” A breath that shuddered going out. “I couldn’t even keep her safe that long. ”
Felida stood very still and did not breathe. “I was cold to her.
” The words came out low and filled with regret. “She came to that wretched court with her whole heart in her hands, and I… I gave her nothing. Not one kind word. I told myself there’d be time, and all the while she stood in front of me thinking I didn’t want her.
” His jaw worked. “She must have been so frightened, so alone. Married to a man made of ice in a house full of people who looked down on her. And I didn’t have the gall to tell her I had asked for this.
That I had wanted her there all along. That it was my decision. ”
He pressed his fingers to his brow. “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. ”
He gave a shuddering sob. Felida’s heart broke clean in two. But it couldn’t be true.
Could it? She had never once imagined this. The man she was convinced had tried to poison her, inconsolable and blaming himself for her death. “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, underarmed, 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 were it glass. “I am so tired of surviving the people I fail. ”
Felida stared at him, her entire world turned upside down. 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 with that knowledge, she realized that by faking her death and disappearing the very next day, she had not only abandoned him.
She had handed him a grief he would carry as his own crime. She had let him believe he had indirectly killed her. The guilt came down like the roof itself. She wanted to take that ruined face in both her hands, kiss his brow, pull him against her, and tell him the truth.
That he had killed no one. That the girl over whom he grieved was alive and well and standing right here. That he was innocent. That he could set the weight down.
The longing to comfort him was so fierce it frightened her. But she did not move. Five years was a long time to fear a man. The heart did not turn on a single drunken confession.
Some deep frightened part of her was still braced for the cold to come back. Still waiting for the murderer she had run from to show his face. She could not unmake him villain and remake him victim in the space of one night. And there were still things that did not fit.
How could he mourn so deeply a woman he had barely known? A stranger of a single day. Grief like this belonged to a love she could not account for. Something at the center of it all was still missing.
So she only reached gently to take the wine from his hand. Out of care. The simple care of one person for another in pain. He surfaced and saw with dawning horror the liberty of his own grip on a servant’s hand.
He let her go as though she had scalded him. “Forgive me. ” The mask came down over the ruined face. “I forget myself.
You… you should go. ”
It was all she could do to turn and obey him. Retreat, reassess, deal with the confusing feelings raging inside her, and return clear-headed. That was the logical thing to do.
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, the last of the wine soaking dark into the carpet. His chest was working too fast, then not enough. A man’s body fighting something already inside it.
She knew that fight. She had fought it before. Poison. “Help!
Someone! Help! The king! Someone help him!
”
Her voice tore down the corridors of the sleeping house. The dead bride on her knees fighting to keep her husband breathing. And under the terror, a new question detonated, blacker than any that had come before. Who in this house wants him dead?
And why? The king had been poisoned. Within the hour, a rider had been dispatched to fetch the Queen Mother. Guards filled the halls.
Courtiers stood about in their nightclothes, ashen-faced, already wagering whose neck the blame might fit. Felida kept her head down and her hands busy. The king’s closest advisers had already expressed their gratitude to her. If she had waited a few minutes more, they would be preparing his funeral rather than his sickbed.
Felida knew sickrooms. She had been the patient in one herself. From the same poison as the one that had almost done for her. She had smelled that sweet licorice undertone on her own breath five years ago.
The same hand, whispered a small cold voice in the back of her head she did not yet want to listen to. The same poison and the same hand. She spread cool cloths over his bare torso. She coaxed water past his lips when he could swallow and held him down when the fever took him and he thrashed against it.
The hours folded into one another. Betsy helped when she could, lending Felida her steadiness whenever the worst of it came. And the longer she stayed, the thinner the charm wore. She could feel it weakening.
His fevered heat soaked into her, and her own scent rose with the effort and the fear. The magic that had hidden her for five years had never been asked to hold up under pressure like this. Pressed close as a lover against the one man in the kingdom from whom she was hiding. That was the terrible joke of it.
If he were well, the very nearness that was keeping him alive would have undone her in a heartbeat. But now, things were different. She knew he hadn’t tried to kill her, which meant she didn’t need to hide from him anymore. But she would have to reveal herself at the right moment.
The true killer was still on the loose, had tried to kill the king with the same rare poison they had slipped into her drink. If the murderer found out she was still alive, it didn’t bode well for her. No. She had to be clever and work from the shadows until she put the whole picture together.
Somewhere 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.
The smile of a man greeting a thing he had long given up for lost. “Felida, you came back,” he breathed. “I knew the water couldn’t keep you. ”
Felida went still to the bone.
He recognized her through the charm. Either that or the fever was making him hallucinate. Correct him. Tell him you’re the maid.
Tell him it’s just the fever. She opened her mouth. Nothing came. She could not make herself take it from him, this one impossible thing.
His dead wife come back to sit beside him in the dark. “Oh, my darling. ” The words fell from his lips, slurred and loose. He sat up, hands groping for hers and tucking her small fingers into his large ones reverently.
“I should have told you. ”
Unable to stop herself, she whispered back, “Told me what? ”
“I knew it the first hour you came to that wretched court,” he continued breathlessly, “that you were mine, my mate, and I said nothing. You were frightened and human, and I thought I’d scare you off.
I thought there’d be time to get you used to the whole idea. 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?
Felida was human, had never understood the concept of the mating bond. That strange magnetic pull she had heard shifters mention. And yet, the moment he named it, she realized it had been with her all along. Five years she had carried the thing with nothing to call it.
The traitor thread that leaned toward him across a hall full of people who despised her. The pull through cold glass in a dark garden. The certainty that he was in irrevocable danger when poison had touched his lips. Foolishness, she had called it.
Madness. Pity. Everything except what it truly was. “I drove you to that water.
” His grip tightened on her hands, and his fevered eyes filled. “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. And you walked into the river rather than spend one more day with me.
” A tear slipped loose. “Forgive me. Wherever you are, forgive me. I would give the whole kingdom to have told you.
”
Felida could not breathe. Her heart wanted to tell him he was wrong, that she had never walked into any river at all. But her mind held her back. It was still too dangerous to reveal herself.
“I can feel you again. ” His hand found her jawline, caressing it, and his fevered eyes shone with unbridled joy. “Which means I must be dying, too. I must be coming to join you.
” A weak, wrecked laugh before he shook his head with resolute happiness. “Good. 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. And the charm that had muffled her was wearing thinner by the hour. She had been loved.
It was the answer to her question and not the one she had expected. How could he mourn a woman he barely knew? This was how. By being the other half of his own soul.
He had known it from the first moment they had met. And that brought Felida’s own laugh to her lips. Because now that she understood what it was, she could feel the bond within her singing at his mere touch. And it didn’t feel out of place.
Staring into the eyes of the man she thought had wanted her gone, breathing in his scent, knowing the truth. It was overwhelming and wonderful all at the same time. But even as he leaned closer to her, as if he wanted to press his mouth to hers, his eyes fluttered closed, and in exhaustion, he passed out on her shoulder. She laid him down onto the bed again.
She stayed with him through the turning of the fever, and somewhere in the gray before dawn, his breathing changed. Deepened. Steadied. Found a rhythm and kept it.
The worst of it loosed its grip. He would live. She sat looking down at him in the failing candlelight and could not look away. She had thought him a predator, a murderer.
She had been wrong. And something in her chest was pulling toward him so hard it frightened her. It’s the bond, she told herself. That’s all this is.
A thing done to her without her leave. It was not the same as love. It couldn’t be. You did not fall in love with such a man across one fevered night, no matter what sang in your blood.
But she stayed at his side through the small hours with his hand loose in hers, and she did not let go of it. She found Betsy in the corridor outside and told her everything in a low, urgent tone. “The moment he wakes,” Felida said, “I’m going to tell him who I am. ”
Betsy took Felida’s cold hands in her warm ones and looked at her with such fear that Felida’s eyes stung all over again.
“Patience, child. Think a moment. Whoever did this is still under this roof, walking these halls, waiting to see if their work was successful. And if that person finds out that you survived as well… think about it.
Wait a while. Maybe till the Queen Mother gets here with more guards. ”
Then Betsy added the last of it, quiet, almost to herself. “If he makes it, child.
”
Felida accepted Betsy’s reasoning and went back in to take up the watch. Later that evening, the Queen Mother arrived. Wilhelmina swept in on a draft of cold evening air, five years older and not one degree softer, her traveling cloak still about her shoulders and her face like a drawn blade. The room dropped into silence and made way.
Felida rose from the bedside on instinct, head bowed, ready to melt back into the curtains where she belonged. Wilhelmina’s gaze swept the chamber once. It passed over the guards, the physicians, the wrung-out courtiers. It stopped on Felida.
“You. ” The voice had not warmed in five years, either. “You are the one who served him his wine. ”
It was not a question.
“Seize her,” said the Queen Mother. “I want this one questioned. ”
They locked her in a chamber at the top of the east tower. A small, cold room with a single, unreachable window.
Felida spent the first hours of her captivity perched on the edge of a narrow cot, trying to work things out. “Seize her. I want this one questioned. ” It made no sense at all.
She was the one who had screamed for help. She was the one found on her knees, her hands red with the work of keeping a king alive. By every reckoning, that should have placed her beyond suspicion. And it had, with the advisers, with the physicians, with everyone in that house.
Except Wilhelmina. Why, of every soul who handled his food and drink that night, did her eye fall on me? It was past midnight when the key turned again. Wilhelmina came in alone.
“Stand up,” she ordered. Felida obeyed. Wilhelmina circled her slowly. “What is your story, cupbearer?
No doubt you have a beautifully rehearsed lie for me. Let’s hear it. ”
“I… I only poured what I was given, Your Majesty. ” Felida kept her voice flat and small.
“The decanter was filled and ready when I entered the parlor. I swear it. ”
“Servants swear cheaply. ” Wilhelmina’s eyes moved over her face.
“I trust no one in this house, especially not the help. It’s always the help. So it’s in your best interest to confess anyway. ”
Felida saw the cold certainty in the woman’s pursed lips, the willingness to lock a girl in a tower on nothing but prejudice.
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. ”
At the time, Felida had taken it as a throwaway remark. But seeing her standing there now, with the careless way she was treating an innocent girl without a shred of proof, the words rang more ominously.
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. And here they were in exactly the same situation five years later. 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, and swallowed the poison intended for her husband. Five years she had believed herself the target of a murder, only to discover it had all been an accident.
It explained why Dareston still mourned her five years on. He had wanted to marry her, just as he had said. And this woman, this terrible monster, had given the order from afar 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 from her. “You’ve gone pale,” Wilhelmina observed. “It’s cold up here, Your Majesty.
”
The Queen Mother studied her a moment longer. “There is something about you,” she said slowly, and Felida’s heart stopped dead in her chest. “Something I cannot quite put my finger on. You seem familiar.
”
A fist hammered on the door below the lock. A guard’s voice, urgent through the wood. “Your Majesty, forgive me. The king is awake and demanding the girl who nursed him.
”
Frustration crossed Wilhelmina’s face. She looked at Felida for a long, hard moment. “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. ”
Felida was escorted down the winding stairs to the King’s chamber. Her mind raced. She had to get Dareston away from Wilhelmina as quickly as possible, but how?
She needed evidence. She couldn’t just point the finger back at her accuser. No one would believe her. 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, and something in his ravaged face eased. “There she is,” he breathed. He turned his head with effort to where his mother followed Felida in. “What is the meaning of this?
You locked her in a tower? ”
“She poisoned your wine, Dareston. ”
Felida bit her tongue. “She saved my life.
” It cost him to raise his voice. “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? ”
Mine. The word thrummed the bond within her.
“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?
”
Felida’s heart dropped into her stomach. Stranger. It was a small, clean knife, and it went in up to the hilt. He didn’t recognize her.
Had he confessed everything to her in a feverish delirium he no longer remembered? She knew that if she revealed herself now, in front of the guards and the Queen Mother, it would end badly. They would have both her and Dareston trapped in the same room with no witnesses. She couldn’t reveal herself yet.
For now, Felida closed her teeth on the truth and swallowed it down. “Rue, Your Majesty,” she replied. “My name is Rue. ”
The King was sitting up when she brought his broth the next morning.
A guard stood in the corner of the room. The Queen Mother had him under close surveillance. “Rue? ” He said it as though testing whether it fit.
He frowned at the bowl, then at her. “May I ask you something strange? ”
“Of course, Your Majesty. ”
“While I was fevered, did I…?
” He stopped, and for a moment the controlled face was open and almost lost. “I think I said things I have never said to a living soul. ” His gaze settled on her, searching. “It is the maddest thing.
When I try to remember the face, it is yours. Did I speak to you in the night? ”
Felida’s heart slammed so hard she was certain he must hear it. He remembered.
He just didn’t remember that it had been her. Felida, not Rue. Yes, she wanted to say. You called me yours.
You told me everything. She glanced at the guard and said carefully, “You were very ill, sire. Nothing you said made much sense. ”
He nodded slowly, looking disappointed.
His eyes stayed on her a beat too long, and she felt the answer in her own chest, the bond drawing taut between them. He was reaching for her. He did not know it was her, and she could not tell him. Not here.
Not with the door open and two of his mother’s people stationed in the corridor. Afterwards, she went looking for Betsy and found her returning through the little churchyard behind the chapel. “There you are,” Felida said. “I’ve been hunting you half the house over.
”
“Paying my respects,” Betsy said. Her smile was warm, though her eyes were red-rimmed. “The dead are better company than half the living. ”
Felida glanced around to make sure they were alone, then told her best friend what she had figured out about the Queen Mother.
“She’s the murderer,” she finished in a low voice. “I’m sure of it. ”
Betsy stopped by the chapel wall. “It’s possible, but what does she gain by it, sweet pea?
Think it through. A woman who wants her son dead does not spend five years trying to wed him. And what monster would want to do away with her son? ”
Felida opened her mouth and closed it.
It was true. It didn’t make her hypothesis less plausible, but it did sow a seed of doubt. “Then who? ” she whispered.
“If not her, then who? ”
“I’ve got an inkling,” said Betsy. She pressed Felida’s shoulder, warm and sure. “Sit here for a while.
You’ve given me a notion that needs checking. I’ll not be long. When I’m back, we’ll have the answers we need. ”
And she went, brisk and certain, back toward the house.
Felida sat on the low chapel wall and waited. Had she misjudged the Queen Mother? Had she been so hasty to cast the blame off herself that she had pointed her finger at the nastiest target without really thinking it through? Her gaze wandered idly across the stones.
Old graves, most of them, soft with moss, the names worn shallow. All but one. A different type of tombstone stood apart from the rest, set against the chapel wall. A memorial.
A marker raised by someone who had no body to lay in the ground and had wanted, all the same, a place to come and grieve. 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 Naiwer Canyon. Far from home, but never from his mother’s heart.
”
A soldier. Dead five years. And lying not here, but in some churned field a hundred miles away. While his mother, who could not bring him home, had raised this empty stone in the quiet of a borrowed churchyard so that she might have somewhere, anywhere, to lay her flowers.
Charles. Whom Betsy spoke about visiting. Whom she had painted as a living boy who had lots in common with Felida. Charles had been five years dead.
Slaughtered in Naiwer Canyon. Where Dareston had confessed to sending his soldiers to their deaths. Could it be? 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. A wave of cold dread broke over her. And abruptly, she felt Dareston through the bond. The way it had the night he had been poisoned.
Screaming down the length of it. Danger. She was already running. Sit here for a while.
You’ve given me a notion that needs checking. Betsy had risen from her son’s grave and gone to finish what she had begun on a wedding day five years past. Felida ran. Out of the churchyard and up through the gardens, the breath tearing in her chest and the bond howling.
One prayer left in her, beating in time with her feet. Not him. Please. Let me reach him first.
The king’s chamber stood open. The guard slumped senseless against the door frame. Felida realized she was too late. She barged through the half-open door at a run and stopped dead.
Dareston lay collapsed across the bed, one arm flung out, his chest moving too fast all over again, 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 across the room and on her knees at the bedside, her hands finding Dareston’s clammy brow, his heaving chest, the frantic stutter of his heart. And something broke open in her at the feel of him slipping away beneath her palms.
Not the man I love. It arrived plain and total. Not the bond. Not pity.
Not guilt. Love. The very thing she had been insisting the last few days she couldn’t possibly feel. And the prospect of losing him now, before she had ever once let herself hold the truth in her two hands, was a pain beyond anything she had known.
Worse than the poison. Worse than the river. Worse than five years of being no one. She had survived all of that.
She would not survive this. “Betsy, the antidote, please,” she begged. “You shouldn’t have come, sweet pea,” Betsy said softly. Felida stared into Betsy’s eyes over her dying mate.
“Please, Betsy. Think of Charles. He wouldn’t have wanted you to do this. ”
Betsy did not look up, staring at Dareston fighting for his life.
“You worked it out, then. You always were a clever girl. ” She set the cup down with great care. “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?
Stand by and let him get away with it? ”
“Then why not just kill him? ” Felida could barely say it. “Why did you wait five years here without just going out and finishing the job?
”
Betsy took a deep, shuddering breath. “Because five years ago, I stood over your sickbed, certain I had murdered an innocent girl by mistake. And I smelled it on him. ” Her eyes held Felida’s, almost gentle.
“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. ”
The floor went out from under Felida a second time.
“You knew,” she whispered. “You knew what we were. From the very beginning. ”
“I knew,” Betsy admitted.
“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,” Felida whispered. Betsy’s tears ran freely now, but her voice did not waver.
“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. ” She reached out as if to touch Felida’s face and let the hand fall. “Forgive me that lie, if you can forgive nothing else.
It was the cruelest thing I ever did. And I did it so I might keep you. ”
And Felida, standing in the wreck of five stolen years, with every reason in the world to hate her, found that she understood. She had lived inside the loss Betsy built.
She knew how grief could file itself down to a single unbearable point. But Dareston’s breath was failing on the bed beside her. “The antidote, Betsy? ” Felida whispered.
“Please. ”
Felida saw Betsy’s hand close 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, to him. ” Her face crumpled. “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, the way Betsy had taken hers a thousand times. “You raised me. You pulled me from the water. You have been the only mother I have ever had.
” Her own tears came now, blinding. “But if you let him die, you will lose me. You know that. So I am begging you.
Choose me. ” Her voice broke to nothing. “Choose me, Betsy, the way you did at the river. Choose me again.
”
For a long, long moment, Betsy stood with a son’s grave in one hand and a daughter’s life in the other, and the whole of her terrible love hung in the balance between the dead boy and the living girl. Then she pressed the vial into Felida’s hand and folded her fingers over it. “Three drops on the tongue,” she whispered. “No more, or you’ll stop his heart yourself.
”
Felida was on her knees at the bedside in a heartbeat, the stopper out, counting the drops onto his slack tongue with hands that shook and did not falter. One. Two. Three.
For a moment, nothing. Then his chest heaved, dragged in a great, ragged breath, held it, and his breathing began slowly to even, to deepen, to find its rhythm and keep it. The bond steadied in her chest as his dread bled away, soothed by a nearness he could not yet account for. She stayed where she was, kneeling, and stared at him.
He was beautiful, and the sight of him healing filled her up to the brim with joy. Time. Now, they would have time to learn about each other. A whole life of getting to know the husband she had been given for a single day and lost before she ever truly had him.
She had run from this man for five years. She could not wait now to spend the rest of her life walking beside him. 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 household, which had been holding its breath for days, finally let it go. The king would live. The poisoner had fled into the night and left no name behind.
Felida waited through those long hours for him to awaken, so that she could finally tell him the truth and relieve him of his burden. She could not let him continue to blame himself for sending her into the water. He had begged a ghost to forgive him, and the ghost was sitting right beside him, alive, waiting to do exactly that. It was early evening when he woke up.
Light beamed in amber through the high windows. His eyes opened and found her. “You’re still here,” he said. “I’m still here,” she agreed with a smile.
He studied her in the gold light, and that searching look came over him again. His eyes narrowed, trying to work her out. “Miss Rue? ” he said, though there was uncertainty in his voice.
Felida’s hand rose to her throat, to the small charm that had hidden her for five years. She had clung to it through a thousand frightened nights. It had been the wall between her and death, and it had become the wall between her and him. Felida 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 loosening, shifting, settling into a face he knew. A face he had carried in grief for five years and never thought to see again outside of a dream. She watched him stop breathing.
She watched the wolf in him reach the truth a half second before the man, his whole body going still and electric. The bond between them snapped taut and singing, no longer one-sided, no longer nameless. The thing that should have formed five years ago finally finding both its ends. “Felida.
” It came out of him broken. “Felida. ”
“It’s me,” she whispered. “You…” He could not finish it.
His hand came up and touched her face as though she might dissolve. “You drowned. I buried you. ”
“Listen to me.
” She caught his hand and pressed it harder to her cheek, needing him to feel that she was solid and real. “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. ” Her voice cracked. “I didn’t flee your coldness. I was taken, and I was lied to, and you grieved a death that never happened.
” She watched the guilt seeping out of him. “It wasn’t your fault. None of it. ”
The sound he made was half sob, half laugh.
The sound of a man learning that the sentence he had passed on himself was unjust, that the worst thing he had ever believed about himself was simply, blessedly, not true. “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 then, 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, too, in the long watch, the one truth she would keep.
Let him believe the poisoner a stranger, fled into the dark, never to be named. 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. Out of love and at a cost and asking nothing back. It was hers to bear now.
Weeks later, when he had stopped wearing black and the court had stopped whispering and his new betrothal had been quietly ended, they walked together in the garden. She was laughing at something, some small, foolish thing, and she caught him watching her with an expression full of wonder. “What? ” she said.
“Nothing. ” He took her hand and turned it over in his, tracing the lines of her palm as though committing them to memory. “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 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, as if he could scarcely believe he was allowed to touch her, and he kissed her. It was nothing like the cold, formal press of lips at their wedding, two strangers performing a vow. This was the thing the vow had promised.
The bond flared bright and whole between them, and Felida felt it sing through every part of her. The pull that had leaned toward him across crowded halls and cold glass and five years of running finally answered. She had spent so long teaching herself not to want this. She let herself want it now.
She wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back with all her strength, and he gathered her against him as though he meant to make up every lost day in a single breath. “I should warn you,” she murmured against him, a little breathless, the old country brightness flickering up in her voice. “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 that she couldn’t stop smiling.
