The Queen Will Betray You

by Sarah Henning

  But then instead of her father’s voice came his actions.

  “We stay the course.”

  The moment the words were out of her mouth, a new energy ignited within her belly.

  Yes. This was right.

  “The Warlord sent a letter via caracara to Geneva telling her she was coming with me in tow. She wanted to beat Inés there, which means she planned to arrive to Ardenia by midday tomorrow at the latest. So, we stay the course—and have the Warlord deliver me to my mother.”

  Amarande caught eyes with everyone in the room. She squatted to Ula and tipped the girl’s chin up to hers. Reading her face shape. Her height. Osana would’ve been better, but yes, this might work.

  “Ula, how would you feel about donning a tyrant’s clothes?”

  Amarande expected the girl to balk. Sigh. Or put up some other form of a fight. Instead, she simply asked, “Do I get to keep my sword?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Koldo’s face puckered. “It is a good idea, Princess; it is. But Geneva handpicked this Warlord. Even if the rest of us manage to disguise ourselves well enough to appear as guards, which is doubtful at best, she will know Ula is an imposter the instant she opens her mouth.”

  Now came the Warrior King’s advice, perfect and true—straight from her own line of thoughts rather than a menu of tenets.

  Amarande grinned. “Which is why we must make the first mark.”

  CHAPTER 56

  TAILLEFER had not imagined the end would be like this. Covered in blood that might be his. Might be Captain Nikola’s. Might be someone else’s.

  It didn’t matter, of course.

  He was still alive and mostly upright, lashed to Nikola’s torso and manning the reins from behind, adding blood he knew was his to the mess that was both his shirt and the captain’s uniform with each sputtering cough. That was the blood he should be concerned about—the kind that signaled a festering problem from within and grew darker with each new wheeze and hack.

  But no. He had much larger things on his mind.

  As the sun peeked over the eastern horizon of the Port of Ardenia, the stolen horse they were riding was pulled to a pause. Taillefer read the scene below like a memory because it was exactly as he’d pictured it.

  At least fifty warships crowded the mouth of the harbor. It wasn’t a full armada—too many soldiers were inland, protecting the borders—but it was still impressive and was designed to be. Just the size alone was meant to be a warning shot in intimidation.

  A single ship among them had docked, flying a triptych flag—Mountain Lion, Bear, Shark. But the body of the ship was pure Pyrenee. His mother, awaiting entree from Ardenia. The gangplank was lowered, guards with their eyes on the ribbon of road that ran down from the Itspi.

  She’d likely sent her demands already, hoping to win this war on intimidation alone, accept a quick surrender, and move on.

  Taillefer drew in as deep a breath as his damaged lung would allow.

  It would not be that easy.

  “Up there with you.” It could’ve been a question, but the captain was bleeding from too many places to add the extra uptick in his voice.

  “Yes, yes, up there,” Taillefer answered, dismissively. To his mother. Yes.

  The pair picked their way down the swinging switchbacks to the harbor, the horse moving fast despite the long ride through the night from the Torrent to the eastern edge of Ardenia. Taillefer hung on to the reins as Nikola listed with each turn, the captain’s massive body barely anchored in the stirrups.

  “You’re almost to your queen. Straighten up, man. I will not be delivered by a captain who is looking less than professional.”

  He jabbed the captain in the side and Nikola’s chin shot up, his back wrenching from a concave slump to a rigid shoulders-back arc of pain. The soldier grunted.

  “There. Was that so hard? Easier to make your announcements without your voice projecting at our ankles.”

  The soldiers atop the gangplank tensed at the advance of a rider. Expecting Ardenia, of course, but then, upon closer inspection, receiving the shock of familiar faces aboard a pilfered pony, black in color rather than the typical Pyrenee white. When escaping a massive battle, one must take the horse one can get.

  “Captain Nikola?” one asked, squinting and leaning forward, the dawn light winking off the gold pieces on his aubergine uniform. Of course Taillefer’s mother would only trust Pyrenee men in these early hours. “Is that you?”

  “Aye.” Taillefer jabbed him in the side again, and the captain straightened further, planned words on his lips. “Queen Inés ordered me to deliver Taillefer, disowned prince of the Kingdom of Pyrenee, to her, and I have done so. I must have an audience with her at once. Permission to board?”

  “Yes, Captain,” the men answered, making way.

  The horse was nudged up the gangplank. The captain and his captive dismounted in a tangle together, Taillefer’s arms wrapped about Nikola’s torso, in a way that meant they moved as one, their weight oddly distributed in a shuffle and slide across the deck planks, toward the queen’s quarters.

  “Shall I fetch Medikua Aritza?” one of the soldiers asked the captain, concerned.

  “Can she embalm a body? That is the real question,” Taillefer answered, though the inquiry was not meant for him. He accentuated it with a shuddered cough, splattering the shiny deck with spots of his royal blood. The soldier took a full step back in mild horror—clearly this one had yet to see a battlefield. “Leave us be. The medikua will have much to do in time.”

  The soldiers gave them a wide berth after that, wrenching open the doors to the royal quarters. “My queen, Captain Nikola has arrived with the former prince.”

  From within, his mother’s voice, laced with delight: “Oh, you’re kidding!? What a surprise!”

  Nikola and Taillefer entered as one, the prince hooked under the soldier’s arms, grasping tightly to his body. The queen stood from where she’d been alone at a desk, discarding the parchments she’d been shuffling, and bustled over to shut the double doors herself. “Leave us, boys; we have much to talk about! Knock only if word arrives from the Itspi.” She smiled back at the pair, her glacier-blue eyes cold with light. “Though this should not take long.”

  The doors clicked and Inés arced around the captain and his captive, who had not moved far from the threshold. “Captain, I will admit I thought you’d been unsuccessful. I’d resigned myself to it, and yet here you are, with my treasonous traitor of a son in your grasp. Obviously, having the princess, too, would have been preferable given the lever we’re trying to pull, but when one expects nothing she cannot be disappointed with something.” She set her eyes upon Taillefer. “And this one is certainly something.”

  “Hello, Mother. I’ve missed your backhanded compliments.”

  A smile flickered across her face. “I am glad you have, Taillefer, but I was engaged in conversation with Nikola.”

  “I know.” With that answer, Taillefer straightened, all his weight on his own—and in moving his hand from where it had been hooked around Nikola’s torso, twisted and removed a dagger from where it had been lodged in the soldier’s liver for hours on end.

  No longer held upright and lifeblood gushing from the punctured organ, the captain lurched and staggered. In one terrific sway, he crumpled to a heap. The candles stationed around the room sputtered and nearly extinguished at the gust of air generated by the falling body.

  Taillefer tested the point of the blood-soaked blade on his finger, his eyes never leaving his mother. “It is truly a marvel of precision in weaponry that he did not bleed out hours ago. This blade was the perfect blockage.”

  The prince reached behind him, barring the doors with the pull of the crossbar lock.

  The queen began to back away, toward her desk. She likely had a weapon in there—perhaps a letter opener or possibly an actual dagger—but Taillefer had eyes only for the chemical warfare lined up in neat rows of vials in open-top wooden cra
tes behind her.

  “If you’ve come here to kill me, it won’t work. One scream, and a hundred men will rush those doors. They’ll come down the flue if they have to. They will come and you’ll be dead.”

  “What does it matter if I’ve already succeeded in killing you?”

  He advanced with the knife, and she skated two steps back—knocking into her desk, the candles there wobbling in their glass cages. Still, her chin remained impossibly high, and Inés looked down her nose at him, though she stood a head shorter than her son.

  “Taillefer, I don’t know what you think you’re getting at, but no matter the end game, you have no claim to Pyrenee—not upon my death, not upon your blood, not upon anything.” She leaned on the edge of the desk now, as if she’d meant to bump it. “You are no longer an heir. No longer a prince. No longer anyone of consequence. Simply put, my boy, you, like the Sand and Sky, are mine.”

  His favorite sly grin slipped across his face. “You have named me disowned, but the only way that works for treason is with a trial. Believe me, I read up on the laws before I fled the Bellringe.”

  “Anything can happen with the right people in the room.” Inés tossed her arms about, showing off the space. “It happened right here, you know. The councilors and I, the paperwork, the proof—technically it was simply the contract we pulled from the captured pirate, rotting away in our dungeons. But I knew when none of the rest of them did that we were actually surrounded by hundreds more pieces of evidence.” She did not need to nod or wave or gesture in any way to the vials. “Did you think I would be so stupid or so blind by ambition that I wouldn’t question why Domingu requested the contents of your workshop as dowry?”

  Taillefer smiled. Held off the cough rising in his blood-addled lung. “Mother, of course I knew you would question it. I just did not know how you would use that information. I am often called clever, but you, letting Domingu’s own plan play out and twisting it your way? That was a stroke of genius.”

  She held up parchment pieces from her desk. None of it signed, the top note was the last one.

  The tiger has fled, the mountain lion is dead, the wolf has found his head.

  “I’ll admit I did not expect compliments on the murder of your advisor.” Inés waved it in front of him. “I’m willing to bet you sent this to the Warlord, too. Playing all sides. No matter how much you admired Domingu, you knew he was using you to get what he wanted. Poison in his hands. Poison in Sendoa’s drink. Poison in mine. Poison, poison, poison, from a boy who was more than pleased to do anything the old king said.” She lifted a brow. “Though I’m assuming having Amarande kill Renard was your idea, not his—more creative and painful. That is your hallmark, is it not?”

  Taillefer didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

  Inés dropped the paper along with the rest in a cascade of proof of his relationship with Domingu, dating to his father’s funeral. When one ambitious younger brother took aside a devastated child and told him about all the things a younger brother could be. What he could do.

  Far from his thoughts, Inés laughed. “Did you think I would not recognize the penmanship I’d paid for with that trollop of a governess?”

  “Do not speak ill of Alisea; she did more to raise me than you ever did.”

  “She raised something, all right. I believe it is my right as a scorned wife to use that term when discussing the woman who slept with my husband,” Inés answered as if Taillefer did not wield a knife.

  “That was no reason to kill him.”

  His mother smiled tightly. Changed the subject. “Nevertheless, compliments will not make an ally of me this late in the game.” She arched a brow. “Did it work on Amarande? That’s where you were, wasn’t it? When Nikola found you? Trying to pull off the marriage your brother could not and steal the throne from under my nose.”

  “The throne you stole from Father,” Taillefer spit. “You poisoned him daily.”

  “You have no proof.”

  “Ah, but I do have an encyclopedic knowledge of what every plant and potion on this damn continent will do to a body. Sanded brimstone in tea, was it? Daily for two years? That would do it.”

  Her smile widened. “You’re very lucky I waited so long to murder him. You wouldn’t be here if I’d followed your mentor’s plan.” She let that hang, relishing the flicker of surprise across his face. “But keep at it, boy. Though, just like everything else here, you won’t win.”

  Taillefer lunged at her then, dagger charging for any piece of exposed skin.

  But that cough he’d suppressed could no longer wait. His blade bobbled, and his step faltered, his entire body shuddering uncontrollably. She spun out of his trajectory, and Taillefer and his dagger caromed into the desk. The blade skittered away, onto the floor, bouncing off built-in bookshelves and angling toward the queen.

  Taillefer gripped the desk, blood dribbling heavily down his chin, clotting on the papers, and drew a deep, wheezing breath. And when he saw his mother again, she held aloft the dagger.

  His eyes followed as Inés and the weapon crossed to the crates of vials, which were neatly stacked and so high they brushed the bodice of her dress. Domingu didn’t need much to poison the wine at the wedding—three vials at most. More than a hundred sat there calmly, his fire swamp and concentration of hemlock both. There was enough there to kill every last soul on this continent with the right mechanism. A good amount in a popular water source. Wine casks. Sagardoa. Any number of sauces popular throughout the region. The vehicles were as endless as they were unobtrusive.

  “There are only two ways this ends for you, my traitorous, treasonous, disowned-but-clever scion. You die, or you wish you were dead.”

  Taillefer swallowed and righted himself. There was no letter opener on the desk. No seal stamp or anything else heavy he could use against that dagger.

  “If you survive me now, if you survive whatever internal damage you’ve clearly acquired, I will lock you away in one of my castles—honestly, whichever I have to visit the least, because I’m sure your suffering will be quite distracting—and you will make more of this. You make the antidotes, too,” she announced. “You will churn out vials until you keel over or ingest one of your concoctions yourself simply because you want out.”

  Taillefer wheezed.

  Satisfaction sparked in his mother’s eyes. “I do see myself in you. And for that, I cannot let you succeed. You are less experienced, yes, but still very, very dangerous.”

  A grin slipped across her face, and for once Taillefer saw himself staring back—fox-like, ambitious, unforgiving. Standing in front of his hard work, toiled upon in the shadow of his grief for his father.

  Knuckles blanching, Taillefer gripped the sturdy scrolls and swoops of the solid wooden desk and pulled himself to standing, careful to avoid elbowing her candles off the top. He brushed the blood from his mouth but only served to smear it.

  He was dying, yes. But he’d come too far for this to be the end.

  “One thing about being the creator of the fabulous tinctures at your back, Mother, is that I know more about what is in those vials than anyone else.” His eyes were as cold as hers. “And one thing I know about the liquid is that it is highly flammable.”

  With all the strength he had left, Taillefer tossed both the desk candles at the vials.

  The glass surrounding the candles shattered in a hail of shards, hitting the corners of the wooden crates SMASH SMASH—the sound shoving Inés out of frozen disbelief and into action.

  As the fire caught, she and the dagger spun away from the crates, hands thrust up to protect her regal head as she dashed for the door.

  But to get there, she had to pass the desk—and Taillefer was ready.

  He popped the cork of a vial hidden in his tunic. It was half-used, and his hands were unprotected. But he didn’t care.

  And, as he splashed the remaining vial of fire swamp on the woman who bore him, he thought of Amarande’s horror in her prison cell. You would purposefu
lly use that on a human?

  The right one. Yes. He regretted Luca—a little. But he would never regret this.

  The bright green liquid caught Inés mid-turn, droplets hitting her from the point of her chin, down the side of her neck, her chest, all the way to her kneecap. It burned straight through the silken aubergine gown she wore, through her skin, through her capacity to scream.

  She fell almost as hard as Nikola had, dissolving with a thump and gag as the tincture went to work on her windpipe.

  Taillefer furiously rubbed at his hand, spotting with smoking holes from the tiny droplets that had sprayed back upon him with the thrust of the vial. He gathered himself as her movements began to slow, crossing to the crates and stamping out the flames, the damage minimal.

  When he turned back to her, she was only shivering now. Not really breathing.

  The tincture had dissolved the skin at her throat, the meat of her exposed, veins and capillaries burned back like parchment blackening and curling in flame before vanishing altogether.

  It was a mishmash of exposure, the very inner workings of this woman who called herself queen, revealed for all the stars to see, her beautiful exterior gone. The blackness within bare in the light.

  Taillefer bent and peered into the single eye facing him, the other swallowed under hair and pinned to the floor. It watched him, unblinking, but still full of life.

  “Mother, you should know by now that I lie as easily as I tell the truth.”

  She couldn’t answer, of course. Her voice taken along with the air from her windpipe, all exposed. If he’d had the time, it would make fascinating research.

  But he did not have the time or the tools.

  As the light faded in that one brilliant eye, Taillefer saw her out with an exact replica of the smile she’d given him. Clever, confident, malicious. It was fitting that this was the last thing she would ever see.

  “I only wish your death had been as slow and painful as what you did to Father. Rot in the stars, Queen.”