Chapter 40

A ria returned to the party in a daze. Her practiced etiquette allowed her to hold conversations, to smile, to dance.

Even as her heart was breaking.

The deadly spy in her father's private council was only a lost boy, unrestrained in his own curiosity. Having seen Corvin transform, she could picture a cornered gray cat, a burst of mist, then a trembling boy with hands desperately extended, trying to explain. Met with a sword.

Her father had killed Charlie, and it wasn't about protecting the kingdom. It was from a misguided fear of magic. Perhaps he'd thought it a mercy to conceal Charlie's nature as a shapeshifter, so that members of court wouldn't look at Clarissa Morton with additional fear. As if anything could be a mercy after slaughtering her son.

Or perhaps he couldn't face the truth. One shapeshifter per century—that was the belief. If her father admitted Charlie's nature, he would have to admit the understanding of shapeshifters was flawed, and if it was flawed in one regard, it could be flawed in all. A landslide of uncertainty. Aria knew well the feeling of being trapped beneath that.

When she'd gone to Northglen to negotiate peace, she hadn't even known the woman she was facing, had no understanding of her son or her daughter, of the depths of her power and her grief, of the things she fought to defend with the desperation of a woman who'd lost everything else.

Aria had been a fool, and the marks in her mind tallied without an end to the condemnation. After getting everything so very wrong, did she even deserve another chance?

"Your Highness."

Something about the tone pulled her back to the moment. She stood in the entry room, nodding at the departing guests. Just beyond her, Baron stood at the door with Corvin and Huxley, thanking guests, shaking hands. Far more people conversed with Baron than with Huxley, even as the man tried to draw attention.

Earl Wycliff had lingered beside Aria.

"Forgive me, Lord Wycliff. I was distracted."

The man nodded graciously. His graying hair usually gave him a distinguished look, but now, he seemed only aging, tired. Though he stood upright, his face sagged with sorrow.

Looking at him, Aria's heart took another blow.

"I'm sorry about Henry," she whispered.

Perhaps he'd come to accuse her. To demand an explanation of how she could smile and dance while his son was on a ship to Pravusat, never to see his family again.

Instead, the earl said, "You carried no hand in Henry's fate. His Majesty has always enforced strict justice, but in recent months, we have dropped the justice and enforced what remains."

Aria wished she could defend her father.

She could only think of Charlie.

"I wanted to thank you for your earlier remarks, Highness. You made an impassioned case." Lord Wycliff glanced toward Baron, then back. "Marcus was a dear friend, and I thought I always treated his son with fairness, yet I now realize how that very thought was my first mistake, as if my fairness was consolation. I'm ashamed to say I even told the boy his loss of title was inevitable rather than an injustice, and in the same breath I told him what a fine example he was. I have been a hypocrite."

Aria blinked. "I . . ."

"I'm grateful," Lord Wycliff said, smoothly covering her deficiency. "You've opened my eyes. I know I'm not the only one."

"I'm very glad to hear it," she managed at last.

He bowed before moving to speak with Baron. No doubt the conversation followed a similar track, judging by the way Baron stood straighter and Corvin grinned.

Aria thought Earl Wycliff would resent her. Blame her. Instead, he considered her words. He thanked her. And if Henry's father could somehow still see her beyond the shadow of her father ...

Perhaps there was hope for someone else.

Inevitability had been building within Aria, a recognition that any path forward could only point one direction, lead to one destination. If she refused to resign herself to shame and die in silence, then she could only revisit her worst mistake and give one last try to make it right.

After every guest had gone except Silas, who waited for Aria, she told Baron her decision.

"I'm going back to Northglen."

Aria's return to the castle was nothing like the comfortable journey she had enjoyed with Baron through the night. Instead, it was full of the silence of two strangers lost in their own thoughts. She wasn't sure what Silas thought about while he stared grim-faced into the distance, but it didn't seem any more pleasant than the subjects occupying her own mind.

She wished she could lose herself in the memory of a sunlit, secret passage and Baron's spine-tingling kiss, but her curse kept interrupting that just as it had interrupted the real thing. Stealing her happiness. Counting the days.

Sixteen days left.

Roughly an hour before they reached Sutton, Silas stopped beside a thin branch in the road. Aria wheeled slowly to face him.

"I'm not going back," he said. "I'm leaving the country either way, so I'd rather it be on my own terms."

Aria's hand tightened on the reins. "If you abandon the challenge, my father will view it as cowardice. He may escalate banishment to execution."

"Can't execute what he can't find. Besides, what's my guarantee he won't execute me for failing? From what I hear, no one expected what happened to Wycliff, and when I had my audience with the king, he made it quite clear he expected more from me than both previous attempts."

A fair point. Aria hated the truth of it.

"When I'm queen," she said, "you'll be pardoned, so come home. Don't keep your sister waiting."

Silas smirked. He wheeled his horse, then stopped. With a clear debate raging in his expression, he turned back again.

"Look. There's nothing I can do about your curse, though I would if I could. For Gilly's sake, at least. I owe him my life, and I've never paid that back. Apparently I never will."

Aria raised an eyebrow, waiting.

"Obviously, I have no right to ask favors."

She gave a quiet laugh. "Ask, Silas."

"My father's arranging a marriage for my sister to Rupert Brightwood, the duke's son."

"The widower?" Aria frowned. Margaret hadn't even seemed to be eighteen yet, and certainly not in desperate straits.

"The widower, the raging drunk, and so on. My father doesn't care. It's only the prestige of connection to a duke's family he cares about. Maggie doesn't know yet. I'd hoped to find some solution on my own, but I find myself ... out of time."

Aria nodded slowly, considering.

"As it happens," she said, "I lack a lady-in-waiting. I could recruit Margaret."

She would have elevated Jenny to the position, but she didn't dare risk her father's ire. Still, between Jenny's help and Eliza's constant company, Aria had never found the need for a lady-in-waiting.

"It's an honor reserved for the upper ladies of court," she added, "which should satisfy your father's desire for prestige. And he certainly can't protest if I require my lady-in-waiting to remain unwed as long as she's in service. Besides, this way Margaret can see snow."

"Thank you," said Silas, with more gratitude than he likely would have shown for anything on his own behalf.

Aria shook her head. "It's not a favor. As it so happens, I need something as well."

"Shrewd." But he didn't seem to begrudge it, instead waving for her to continue.

"My own sister, Eliza. She ran away a week ago, chasing Henry Wycliff. She suffers the same ... ailment I do, and I worry constantly that she's in danger, that she's ..." Aria took a shaky breath, looking away. "That she'll never come home."

"I can't bring her home if I'm exiled."

"I just want to know she's safe, wherever she is. I want you to ensure my father's soldiers don't drag her back. She deserves to make her own choices."

"This is a taller order than my request, Highness."

Aria looked at him with pleading eyes. "If you could just try. I have to know someone tried . I would go myself, but I have to deal with Morton."

If Aria couldn't fix that problem, Eliza would die anyway. As would Jenny.

"Very well," said Silas. "It's a deal."

He set off down the trail in earnest, and Aria returned to the castle alone.

Standing in the throne room like a prisoner brought for judgment, Aria withstood her father's berating, his claims that she made a mockery of him by breaking house arrest, and when he demanded to know the location of Silas Bennett—who was meant to have brought her home—she lied.

"He is gathering resources to break the Artifact. He'll be here shortly."

Her father did not believe her. He did not even pause to confer with his advisers, who stood in the wings, before giving an order.

"Search the countryside!" the king barked. "A whole battalion of soldiers! Find him!"

Aria looked out the stained-glass windows at the fading sun, drowning in the horizon. She thought of soldiers collapsed in sleep across the hills, exposed to the freezing temperatures of night.

"I lied," she said. "There's no point searching for him. He's gone to Northglen."

Forgive me, Silas. She had to try something to protect all the lives the king would damage.

"He knew he couldn't break the Artifact, and he feared you would have him executed. ‘Better to join with Morton,' he said, ‘if I'm enemy to the king already.' He finds her mercy greater than yours. Perhaps rightly so."

Lord Philip paled. Aria heard the guards whisper beside the door. Her father gripped the arms of his throne with white-knuckled hands.

"A coward and a traitor!" The king's face flamed to match the red edging of his uniform. "No doubt sent by Morton from the start!"

Aria could clearly see the cracks in her father. He was a patchwork of red and white, divided like stained glass, and she could follow the divisions like a map, one leading her back days, weeks, months, along a clear path in the growing wildness of his words and actions, in the justifications she hadn't even realized were justifications, in regret disguised as strength.

At Eliza's ball, he'd told her there was only one right path. It is your consistency as a ruler that forges right. Consistency is the only foundation stable enough to carry a kingdom. He'd ordered her to do her duty without looking back, without reconsidering and second-guessing.

In killing Charlie, her father had committed to a path. He would not renounce it, would not retreat. He was charging forward on sand, as if he could manifest a road through sheer strength of will, and Aria knew he would sink until swallowed. How many others would he drag down with him?

She had to prove he was wrong, but Aria had never convinced her father of such a thing in all her life.

"Father, I know the truth about Charles Morton."

The king stood with the suddenness of a lightning strike. Aria wished she'd climbed the dais before speaking, wished she didn't feel him bearing down from such a height, as if she were the one sinking in the ground while he stood tall.

"I know—"

"You have betrayed me," her father said, speaking right over her words. "It was not enough to confine you to the castle, I see. To your room, then, with guards posted outside at every moment. You will not leave it until this business with Morton is concluded, once and for all."

"No, listen to me. Charlie—"

"You will not speak!" he thundered. "You have lost your voice in this court, Aria. I can no longer trust it."

"You never trusted it from the start! You have demanded perfection of me all my life, and I have tried to deliver but fallen short every time!"

Controlled temper , said Baron in her mind, but her words were already galloping, and she could not find the reins.

"Everything I've ever done has been a mistake to you, and I've never even figured out who I want to be as queen because I've been so busy chasing this impossible puzzle of trying to be what you want! I can't be. I can't. Because what you want is law without mercy, and I don't."

She gasped in a breath, having gone too long without air, and it seemed not just to fill her lungs but her soul. Like breathing in truth.

Her hands caught the reins at last.

"This is a mistake," she said. "Losing my temper. I admit my mistakes, Father. It was a mistake for me to go to Northglen. I wanted peace, but my attempt at it was selfish. When the Upper Court dismissed my concerns, I determined to solve things myself, to prove my rightness , when I should have raised my concerns again—and again, if I had to—until I was sure they were heard. Until the council functioned properly in considering the best path for the kingdom. Because what's right isn't selfish."

She looked up, not at her father, but at his advisers. "I wish to petition Widow Morton again for peace. I still believe it can be reached. I still believe she can be reached, and I know with all my heart that peace is what's best for everyone in our kingdom."

Things were different this time. Aria knew her enemy, and she was not hoping to prove herself a worthy ruler; she was only hoping to save lives—her own and others. The details of Widow Morton's curse had mystified her from the start. Why put everyone in the castle to sleep but make only one strike at night, one that was more warning than true threat? Why sentence the king's line to death but draw it out for one hundred days?

Widow Morton wanted peace too. At least some part of her did, the part that delayed, even now.

Silence had fallen in the throne room. Aria's father had composed himself, though the hold on his rage seemed tenuous, and she could see in his clenched jaw how near the surface it still simmered.

"I have given my command," the king said, looking to the guards, to his advisers, to her, daring anyone to contradict. "Guards, take my daughter to her room. Ensure she remains there. There will be no petition to Northglen, only an attack I have put off far too long. No small force of soldiers this time. If it takes the whole army, so be it. I want them mobilized in three days."

The guards and advisers stood pale-faced and silent. Aria caught Philip's eyes, his expression troubled. After a moment, he spoke.

"Your Majesty, I wish to consider Her Highness's request. Considering the circumstances, I don't believe she would suggest another negotiation with Morton if such a thing held no hope."

Joy rose inside Aria, bursting out in a smile.

The king pointed at Lord Philip, a lance of condemnation. " Her Highness is compromised by her curse. She suggests negotiation only as Morton's puppet, because the widow wishes us to be weak, to continue vacillating while she gathers power."

Lord Emmett spoke hesitantly, "Highness, can you prove Morton has no ability to direct you?"

"I don't know how I would prove that, Lord Emmett. I can only ask for you to consider the best path forward." With another glance at the setting sun, Aria added, "And I can say that I have a better understanding of the situation than anyone here."

"Guards," said the king, gesturing sharply.

"You may want to find a comfortable position," said Aria. "And a pillow."

The guards took only a step forward before their expressions glazed. Everyone in the room staggered and slumped, gripped beneath the sleeping Cast.

As the entire room collapsed, Aria stood tall.

She could do this. But this time, she would start with a plan, and it was not just a plan against Widow Morton she needed; it was one against her father. In three days, he would start a war, which meant she had two to stop it. One night to prepare.

On the next, she would return to Northglen, and no matter the outcome, her fate would be decided, along with her entire kingdom's.