From that moment on, I was Couterie. And from that moment on, I planned my attack on Queen Magrit.
My first order of business was moving into Lavendra’s room, where I would finally be able to read the Ana. The book held the key to my mission. In its pages were maps of the royal palace, daily routines of both Prince Mather and the Queen, and other essential information I needed to kill the Queen.
But when I closed and locked the door behind me, I saw the room with new eyes. It was the first time that I wasn’t worried about Lavendra coming in to chastise me. The first time I wasn’t anticipating her every single need. Instead, someone else would wait upon me.
I opened the doors to the closet and ran my fingers along the dresses. I touched the bed that I had made a million times. Finally, I threw myself upon the chaise where I had waited on Lavendra for so many years.
I opened the pouch, wanting to show Hecate our change of fate.
“Hecate?”
She didn’t stir. She’d been cooped up so long during all my machinations the last few days.
“Hecate?” I said again, and she finally rushed out.
“We have all this space now,” I boasted as the ashes zigzagged around the room, making a slight breeze that rustled my dresses.
She continued to speed up, creating a funnel of ashes in the center of the room, which blew a few pieces of stationery across the desk and knocked over a tray.
“Hecate,” I whispered again, and the whizzing cloud of her ashes finally slowed down in front of me.
I put my hand out, and she mirrored me like she had when I was small. When I moved my other hand, she did the same.
“Why can’t you just talk to me? Why can’t you just tell me that I am doing the right thing?”
I finally moved again, and she moved with me.
“You’re infuriating,” I said, but some part of me wondered if what she’d done then was to let me know I wasn’t alone.
A few seconds later she returned to her pouch, and I picked up the Ana from the bedside table. Holding the leather-bound book in my hands, I thought about Lavendra.
Only Couterie were given permission to read the Ana—never Shadows. I had stolen glimpses before, but I had never gotten to read it in its entirety. Now I could pore over every detail. Now I could plan. Whether the ashes liked it or not.
Settling in on the bed, I cracked open the Ana. There were lists of things that Prince Mather liked and disliked. His abilities and failings. His opinions on politics. And stories from maids and ladies, valets and footmen, and interviews with the prince and Queen Magrit.
. . . Speaks in perfect paragraphs . . . Curses but only himself when he finds himself at fault. Unnervingly polite . . . Remarkable physical specimen from a rigid diet and exercise routine insisted upon by the Queen. He steals sweets from the kitchen, but the patisserie chef knows and leaves his favorites for him. Until he protested, he was assisted up and down staircases to ensure that he did not have a fall . . . Examined daily by the royal doctor . . . Without a spare heir the prince’s physical safety is the Queen’s most vital concern, second only to her own.
As the only heir, everything is designed to make sure that he survives to succeed.
The prince was forbidden to leave the palace. But there were a handful of incidents in recent months of him sneaking out with no report of where he had been. He was admonished by the Queen for his unsanctioned absences and put under twenty-four-hour guard.
“Where do you go?” I wondered aloud as I looked at this puzzle of stories and facts.
The result was a picture of a young man who seemed in some ways the same as the sad, petulant little boy I had seen in the palace the day of the Burning, and, in others, seemed all grown up. Had he ended up like his grandmother, the kindly Queen Meena, or his mother, the evil Queen?
“Who are you now?” I asked as I turned the pages.
I stopped on a passage that startled me.
Many people are afraid of what the prince’s future holds. Will he take the throne? Is he a harbinger of the end of Queendoms? And the beginning of kingdoms?
I guffawed at the idea. There had been no such possibility of a “kingdom” until Prince Mather. From the beginning of Hinter, and maybe even from the beginning of time, our lands had always been ruled by queens.
There have been several attempts on the prince’s life by other Queendoms to ensure that he will never be king.
Part of me felt a surge of pity for the prince. No child deserved to have his or her life threatened. I knew that better than anyone as a child of the Entente.
I flipped through the pages, searching for one thing: his feelings on the Entente.
Agrees with Queen Magrit on what should be done: eradication. Sworn to help the Queen take over the Thirteenth Queendom, her greatest threat, since it’s an unknown land that will not denounce magic.
He had grown up to be just as his mother had trained him to be. The proof was on the page.
Each entry was initialed and annotated. Overheard. Seen. Experienced. And by whom. Staff. Ladies-in-waiting. Or signed by Madame Linea herself.
He hadn’t learned from his brief encounter with us. Those tears he had cried for his grandmother were probably his last. His heart had hardened.
I flipped to another page.
His Court of Gentlemen is charged with constant companionship and vigilance of the prince, but friendship has eluded the prince except for Hark, the Queen’s Right Hand.
“So you never made friends—except for someone paid to serve your mother,” I murmured.
The prince spends his time reading. He is happiest in the palace kitchen curled up in the window nook. He is often seen walking or riding his horse around the grounds. There is a window in his bedroom that overlooks the gardens, and he is said to haunt it, looking out at the world that he will one day rule but is forbidden to play in . . .
“No wonder he sneaks out,” I murmured, feeling an involuntary pull toward the necessary chess piece in my plan. But I stopped myself. I reminded myself that the prince was not an object of sympathy. He was a means to an end.
I was deep into my research on Prince Mather when Tork pushed open the door. He jumped back in surprise upon seeing me. “Farrow! Oh, I was just . . . I mean . . . I didn’t realize you had already . . . ,” he muttered, wiping his eyes quickly.
“Do you miss Lavendra? I am sorry, Tork,” I said.
And I was sincere. I had no bone to pick with Tork. I could see that he was hurting because of what I had done. I patted the chaise, encouraging him to sit next to me.
“My heart. My stupid heart,” he exclaimed.
My brow furrowed. Lavendra, despite her uncharacteristically graceful exit, had always been selfish and insufferable. And Tork was probably the kindest of all the Couterie. But it was more than the unlikelihood of their connection that puzzled me. It was the unlikelihood of any connection. After thinking of only revenge for years, and as an Entente who did not believe in romantic love for herself, love was as foreign to me as the Thirteenth Queendom. And falling in love was something that Entente did not do. Even if I was the last of us. But whatever I knew or didn’t know of love, the idea of Lavendra and Tork together just did not make sense.
There were all those secret walks and that distant look that Lavendra had had of late, which I had attributed to her musing about the prince. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. When Tork and Lavendra were together, they did nothing but trade barbs . . . I felt the realization hit me in the face and my cheeks burned from missing what was now obvious. Under all that animosity, there was love.
Tork must have seen my confused look because he began to try and explain.
“It started as practice.”
“Practice?”
“We kissed a few times. It was supposed to be practice. But after a while, when I kissed her and she kissed me, I was never thinking of the Queen of Blenheim and she was never thinking of the prince. We were thinking of each other. Or at least that’s what I believed . . . But how could she leave if she felt anything at all for me?”
Maybe she didn’t have feelings, I thought first, snarkily.
“I am sorry, Tork,” I repeated.
“Don’t be—you didn’t make her run. And yes, I was in love with her. But I was too scared to tell her. I was such a fool, Farrow.”
“You are many things, but never a fool,” I countered.
“After you won the Challenge, I decided to give up being Couterie. So we could be Shadows together and live out our lives here. But now she’s gone, and I never told her how I felt. I never had the courage to give this to her,” Tork said, pulling a folded paper from his pocket.
I looked down at the letter. “A love letter? May I?”
He nodded.
I was surprised by the beauty of the prose, and I read a particularly gorgeous line out loud.
“ ‘I would forgo today if we could have forever . . . between barbs . . . between lessons . . . between dares . . . between airs . . . between kisses . . . I know not when I went from loathing you to knowing there was no in between with you. There’s only you . . .’ You’re a poet, Tork.”
Tork blushed. “Maybe if she had read this, she wouldn’t have run. But who really knows?” He took the letter back.
“Maybe she didn’t know what she felt. Maybe it had nothing to do with you or maybe it had everything to do with you, but maybe she had something she needed to do for herself,” I said out loud as I felt around for an answer.
Tork cocked his head and looked at me. Maybe I’d said too much about a subject I clearly knew nothing about.
“Thank you, Farrow . . . ,” he said, sounding like he meant it. Like, maybe, just maybe, I’d helped him feel a little better.
“She would have made a terrible Shadow,” he added, brightening.
“And I am going to make a terrible Couterie,” I returned, hoping the sentiment made him feel better.
“You will be perfection. But you must learn to be a better liar,” Tork said as he got up and made his way to the door.
If only he knew.
“Can you do me a favor?” Tork said.
“Anything.”
“Don’t look at me like there’s a cloud over my head, Farrow. I can’t stand it. I can’t take your pity for the rest of my time here.”
“I promise. You’re not the center of everything, Tork . . . ,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. But instead my mind went to Lavendra, out there on her own. I hadn’t thought about what would become of Lavendra or the Couterie before I enacted my plan.
“You’re the center of everything now, Farrow. You’re the prince’s Couterie,” Tork said with a smile, before he made his way into the hall.
I got up and closed the door.
I felt the ashes rustle around my neck again.
“Mother! Please,” I said, pulling open the string on the pouch.
The ashes continued to rustle, but Hecate did not—would not—emerge.
“I’m sorry, Hecate. I know you do not like what I am doing. But I have spent my life waiting for the chance to make things right. To balance the scales. I will make her pay for what she did to you.”
The ashes went still.
Again, I was grateful that Hecate could no longer see my future the way she used to when she was fully alive. Or at least she had never hinted that she could. If she didn’t like this part, I didn’t know how she would handle what was to come.