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FOR THE THRONE

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THE FOXGLOVE KING

Book One of The Nightshade Crown

by

Hannah Whitten

From the instant New York Times bestselling author of For the Wolf comes a brand-new adventure filled with dark secrets, twisted magic, glittering palaces, and forbidden romance.

When Lore was thirteen, she escaped a cult in the catacombs beneath the city of Dellaire. And in the ten years since, she’s lived by one rule: Don’t let them find you. Easier said than done, when her death magic ties her to the city.

Mortem, the magic born from death, is a high-priced and illicit commodity in Dellaire, and Lore’s job running poisons keeps her in food, shelter, and relative security. But when a run goes wrong and Lore’s power is revealed, Lore fully expects a pyre, but King August has a different plan. Entire villages on the outskirts of the country have been dying overnight, seemingly at random. Lore can either use her magic to find out what’s happening and who in the King’s court is responsible, or die.

Lore is thrust into the Sainted King’s glittering court, where no one can be believed and even fewer can be trusted.

It’d been three years since any of them had paid rent, but Nicolas still thought to send his most unfortunate son to ask at the end of every month. Lore assumed they drew straws, and assumed that someone cheated, because it was always the youngest and spottiest of the bunch. Pierre, his name was, and he carried it nearly as poorly as he carried his father’s already overfull purse.

A dressing gown that had seen better days dripped off one shoulder as Lore leaned against the doorframe at an angle carefully calculated to appear nonchalant. Pierre’s eyes kept drifting there, and she kept having to press her lips together not to laugh. Apparently, a crosshatch of silvery scars from back-alley knife fights didn’t deter the man when presented with bare skin.

She had other, more interesting scars. But she kept her palm closed tight.

A cool breeze blew off the harbor, and Lore suppressed a shiver. Pierre didn’t seem to spare any thought for wondering why she’d exited the house barely dressed, right at the edge of autumn. An easy mark in more ways than one.

“Pierre!” Lore shot him a dazzling grin, the same one that made Michal’s eyes go heated and then narrow before asking what she wanted. Another twist against the doorframe, another seemingly casual pose, another bite of wind that made a curse bubble behind her teeth. “It’s the end of the month already?”

“I—um—yes.” Pierre managed to fix his eyes to her face, through obviously conscious effort. “My father… um, he said this time he means it, and…”

Lore let her face fall by careful degrees, first into confusion, then shock, then sorrow. “Oh,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around herself and turning her face away to show a length of pale white neck. “This month, of all months.”

She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to. If there was anything Lore had learned in twenty-three years alive, ten spent on the streets of Dellaire, it was that men generally preferred you to be a set piece in the story they made up, rather than trying to tell it yourself.

In that regard, Pierre didn’t disappoint. From the corner of her eye, she saw his pale brows draw together, a deepening blush lighting the skin beneath his freckles. They were all moon-pale, Nicolas’s boys. It made their blushes look like something viral.

His eyes went past her, to the depths of the dilapidated row house beyond. It was morning, though only just, and the shadows hid everything but the dust motes twisting in sun shards. Not that there was much to see back there, anyway. Michal was still asleep upstairs, and Elle was sprawled on the couch, a wine bottle in her hand and a slightly musical snore on her lips.

“Is there an illness?” Pierre kept his voice hushed, low. His face tried for sympathetic, but it looked more like he’d put bad milk in his coffee. “A child?”

Lore’s brows shot up. In all the stories she’d let men spin about her, that was a first. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. She gently laid a hand on her abdomen and let that be answer enough. It wasn’t technically a lie if she let him draw his own conclusions.

She was past caring about lying, anyway. In the eyes of the Bleeding God, Lore was damned whether or not she kept her spiritual record spotless. Might as well lean into it.

“Oh, you poor girl.” Pierre was probably younger than she was, and here he went clucking like a mother hen. Lore managed to keep her eyes from rolling, but only just. “Do you know who the father is?” He raised his hand, settled it on her bare shoulder.

And every nerve in Lore’s body seized.

It was abrupt and unexpected enough for her to shudder, to shake off his hand in a motion that didn’t fit the soft, vulnerable narrative she’d been building ever since she opened this damn door. She’d grown used to feeling this reaction to dead things—stone, metal, cloth. Corpses, when she couldn’t avoid them. It was natural to sense Mortem in something dead, no matter how unpleasant, and at this point, she could hide her reaction, keep it contained.

She shouldn’t feel Mortem in a living man, not one who wasn’t at death’s door. Her shock was quick and sharp, and chased with something else—the scent of foxglove.

Her fingers closed around his wrist, twisted, forced him to his knees at the edge of the doorframe. It happened quick, quick enough for him to slip on a stray pebble and send one leg out at an awkward angle, for a strangled “Shit!” to echo through the silent morning streets of Dellaire’s Harbor District.

Lore crouched so they were level. Now that she knew what to look for, it was clear in his eyes. All poisons worked differently, and foxglove was one of the riskier ones. Pierre’s gaze was bloodshot and glassy; his heartbeat under her hand, slow and irregular. He’d gone to one of the cheap deathdealers, then. One who didn’t know how to properly dose their patrons, one who only gave them enough to make them sick, not bring them to death’s threshold. Stupid.

The Mortem under Pierre’s skin throbbed against her grip, thumping and meaty, a second, diseased pulse. Mortem was in everyone—the essence of death, the darkness born of entropy—but the only way to use it, to bend it to your will, was to nearly die. To touch oblivion, and for oblivion to touch you back, then let you go.

Most died before they got there. More never got close enough, earning only a sour stomach or blindness or a scattered mind for their efforts. And some didn’t actually want the power at all, just the euphoria, a poison high that skated you near death, but not near enough to wield it. It took a closer brush with eternity to use Mortem than most were willing to try.

The Bleeding God and Buried Goddess knew Lore wouldn’t have, if she’d had the choice.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she murmured to Pierre. “You are going to tell Nicolas that we’ve paid up for the next six months, or I am going to tell him you’ve been visiting deathdealers.”

That was enough to make his eyes widen, glassy and poison-heavy or not. “How—”

“You stink of foxglove and your eyes look more like windows.” Not exactly true, since she hadn’t noticed until she’d sensed the Mortem, but by the time he could examine himself, the effect would’ve worn off anyway. “Anyone can take one look at you and know, Pierre, even though your deathdealer barely gave you enough to make you tingle.” She cocked her head. “You weren’t after it to use it, I hope, or you were completely swindled. Even if you only wanted the high, you didn’t get your money’s worth.”

The boy gaped, the open mouth under his window-glass eyes making his face look fishlike. He’d undoubtedly paid a handsome sum for the pinch of foxglove he’d taken. If it wasn’t so imperative that she lie low, Lore might’ve become a deathdealer. They made a whole lot of coin for doing a whole lot of jack shit.

Pierre’s unfortunate blush spread down his neck. “I can’t—He’ll ask where the money is—”

“I’m confident an industrious young man like yourself can come up with it somewhere.” A flick of her fingers, and Lore let him go. Pierre stumbled up on shaky legs—Buried Goddess and her plucked-out eyes, she should’ve known he was on something; he stood like a colt—and straightened his mussed shirt. “I’ll try,” he said, voice just as tremulous as the rest of him. “I can’t promise he’ll believe me.”

Lore gave him a winning smile. Standing, she yanked up the shoulder of her dressing gown. “He better.”

Eyes wide, the boy turned down the street. The Harbor District was slowly waking up—bundles of cloth stirred in dark corners, drunks coaxed awake by the sun and the cold sea breeze. In the row house across the street, Lore heard the telltale sighs of Madam Brochfort’s girls starting their daily squabbles over who got the washtub first, and any minute now, at least two straggling patrons would be politely but firmly escorted outside.

Soothing, familiar. In all her years of rambling around Dellaire, here was the only place where it really felt like home.

“Pierre?” she called when he was halfway down the street. He turned, lips pressed together, clearly considering what other things she might blackmail him with.

“A word of advice.” She turned toward Michal’s row house in a flutter of threadbare dressing gown. “The real deathdealers have morgues in the back.”

Elle was awake, but only just. She squinted from beneath a pile of gold curls through the light-laden dust, paint still smeared across her lips. “Whassat?”

“As if you don’t know.” There was barely enough coffee in the chipped ceramic pot for one cup. Lore poured all of it into the stained cloth she used as a strainer and balled it in her hand as she put the kettle over the fire. If there was only one cup of coffee in this house, she’d be the one drinking it. “End of the month, Elle-Flower.”

“Don’t call me that.” Elle groaned as she shifted to sit. She’d fallen asleep in her dancer’s tights, and a long run traced up each calf. It’d piss her off once she noticed, but the patrons of the Foghorn and Fiddle down the street wouldn’t care. One squinting look into the wine bottle to make sure it was empty, and Elle shoved off the couch to stand. “Michal isn’t awake, we don’t have to pretend to like each other.”

It was extremely obvious to anyone with the misfortune of being in the same room as the two of them that Lore and Elle didn’t like each other, and Elle’s older brother knew it better than most. But Lore just shrugged.

Elle pushed past her into the kitchen, the spiderweb cracks on the windows refracting veined light on the tattered edges of her tulle skirt. She peered into the pot. “No coffee?”

Lore tightened her hand around the cloth knotted in her fist. “Afraid not.”

“Bleeding God.” Elle flopped onto one of the chairs by the pockmarked kitchen table. For a dancer, she was surprisingly ungraceful when sober. “I’ll take tea, then.”

“Surely you don’t expect me to get it for you.”

A grumble and a roll of bright blue eyes as Elle slunk her way toward the cupboard. While her back was turned, Lore tucked the straining cloth into the lip of her mug and poured hot water over it.

Still grumbling, Elle scooped tea that was little more than dust into another mug. “Well?” She took the kettle from Lore without looking at her. “How’d it go?”

Lore kept her back turned as she tugged the straining cloth and the tiny knot of coffee grounds from her cup and stuffed it in the pocket of her dressing gown. “We’re paid up for six months.”

“Is that why you look so disheveled?” Elle’s mouth pulled into a self-satisfied moue. “He could get it cheaper across the street.”

“The dishevelment is the fault of your brother, actually.” Lore turned and leaned against the counter with a cat’s smile. “And barbs about Madam’s girls don’t suit you, Elle-Flower. It’s work like any other. To think otherwise just proves you dull.”

Another eye roll. Elle made a face when she sipped her weak tea, and sharp satisfaction hitched Lore’s smile higher. She took a long, luxurious sip of coffee.

Another knock, shivering through the morning quiet and nearly shaking the thin boards of the row house.

Elle rose up on her tiptoes to look out the small window above the sink, head craned toward the door. She raised her eyebrows. “Your boss is here.”

Swearing under her breath, Lore plunked her mug on the counter with a dangerous clink of porcelain and strode toward the door.

“Hey,” Elle whined from the kitchen. “There was too coffee!”

For the second time that morning, Lore wrenched open the door, the squealing hinges echoing through the row house. “Val.”

Green eyes glinted beneath a faded scarf, white-blond hair a corona around pale cheeks sunburned to ruddy. Val always wore the same scarf and the same braid, and she never wasted time with pleasantries. “You and Michal need to be headed for the Ward in fifteen minutes.”

“Good morning to you, too.”

“I’m not playing, mouse.” Val gave a scrutinizing look to Lore’s dressing gown, her mussed hair. “This could be a hard job. You need to be ready.”

“I always am.” In the ten years since Lore had been running poisons for Val, she’d never had the woman herself show up like this, right before a drop. A confused line carved between her brows. “Is something the matter, Val?”

The older woman shifted on her feet, her eyes flicking away for half a heartbeat before landing on Lore’s again, steadied and sure. “It’s fine,” she said. “This is just a new client. I want to make sure everything goes off without a hitch.”

“It will.” Lore nodded, channeling confidence she didn’t quite feel. “Don’t worry.”

Val stood there a moment longer, mouth twisted. Then, whip-quick, she leaned forward and pressed her dry lips to Lore’s forehead. She was off the stoop and headed down the road before Lore’s teeth clicked shut, chasing the shock off her face. The old poison runner might be the closest thing Lore had to a mother, but she still wasn’t one for affection.

Lore’s brows stayed furrowed as she went back to the kitchen and collected her coffee again—though the look on Elle’s face said chances were high she’d spit in it—then drifted toward the stairs.

Could just be nerves. It’d been a while since Val picked up a new client. Most of the deathdealers they ran poison for were well established, dug into the underbelly of the city like rot in a tooth. Mari, Val’s partner, was historically picky about who the team took on. The two of them had raised Lore on tough love and hard choices, and be careful about who you let in was high on their list of lessons.

Maybe the collective coffers were low, though Lore couldn’t imagine why. It seemed to her like more and more people were gobbling down poison every day, stuffing their mouths with petals to chase power or death or a few hours of kaleidoscopic high.

Whatever. She’d never had a head for the business side of things. Just the running. Lore was good at running.

The stairs of the row house were rickety, like pretty much everything else, and the fourth one squeaked something awful. Lore made sure to grind her heel into it. Fifteen minutes weren’t much, and Michal needed the job with Val’s team. Even with rent taken care of, they could use all the coin they could get. She didn’t want him in the boxing ring again.

Michal had apparently heard the squeak. He was sitting up when Lore pushed aside the ratty curtain closing off their room, sheets tangled around his waist and dripping off the side of the mattress to pool on the floor. The light through the cracked windows caught his gold hair, so like his sister’s. He ran a hand through it and squinted at her. “Coffee?”

Lore leaned against the doorframe. “Last cup, but I’ll share if you come get it.”

“That’s generous, since I assume you need it.” He grumbled as he levered himself up from the floor-bound mattress, holding the sheet around his naked hips. “You had another nightmare last night.”

Her cheeks colored, but Lore just shrugged. The nightmares were a recent development, and random—she could never remember anything about them, nothing but darkness and the feeling of being trapped. Usually she could trace her dreams back to a source, pick out a piece and see how something she’d thought about that day had alchemized as she slept, but since the nightmares were so vague, she couldn’t figure them out. It made them more unsettling. “Sorry if I kept you up.”

“At least you didn’t scream this time. Just tossed and turned.” Michal took a long drink from her proffered mug, though his face twisted up when he swallowed. “Damn, that’s bitter.”

She didn’t tell him that the taste was probably not improved by his sister’s spit. “Val came by. We need to leave in fifteen minutes.”

Another squint. His eyes were blue, also like Elle’s, but deeper and warmer. If Elle’s eyes were morning sky, his were twilight. “Guess I’ll be late, then.” He leaned in and kissed her, mouth hungry and as warm as his eyes.

She kissed him back, just for a moment, before pushing him away. “If we don’t make it to the rendezvous point in time, it’ll be crawling.”

Michal frowned, concern cutting through the haze of heat and sleep. “I wish Val didn’t make you watch the drop point,” he said quietly. “It isn’t safe.”

The solemnity in his voice made her stomach swoop, for more reasons than one. Lore poked his shoulder, and her lips bent the corner of a smile. “I can take care of myself.”

“Doesn’t mean you should have to.”

Her wry smile flickered.

But Michal didn’t notice, running a hand through his hair to tame it while he bent to pull clothes from the piles on the floor. The sheet dropped, and Lore allowed herself an ogle.

“I don’t get why she always gives you the most dangerous jobs,” he said, voice muffled by thin cotton as he pulled a shirt over his head. “Didn’t she and Mari raise you? They act like your mothers, and then they send you to be the lookout. It doesn’t make sense.”

Lore just shrugged. She’d only given Michal her history in broad strokes, an outline she had no intention of ever filling in. He knew it, too, though sometimes he prodded. “Yes, they raised me, but that just means I know my shit,” she said, turning to slip her feet in her well-worn boots. “And we need to get a move on. Val won’t tolerate lateness, even if the guilty party is my…”

She didn’t finish the sentence. She wasn’t quite sure how.

The mischievous curve to Michal’s mouth said he noticed. Now dressed, he crossed the room, hooking his hands languidly on her hips as she turned away to hide an answering smirk. He leaned forward, chest against her back, brushing his lips over the shell of her ear. “Your what?”

Lore turned, flicking his collarbone, biting her lip to keep it from turning up. “Mine,” she finished decisively, and let him kiss her again.

Still, cold clawed into her chest. She could feel Mortem everywhere, now, like her realization that it was somewhere it shouldn’t be had sharpened her perception of all the places where it should—the cloth of Michal’s trousers beneath her hands, the stones in the street outside, the chipped ceramic of the mug on the windowsill. Here on the outskirts of Dellaire she didn’t feel it as intensely as she would near the catacombs, near the Citadel, but it was still enough to make her skin crawl.

The Harbor District, on the southern edge of Dellaire, was as far as Mortem would let her go. She could try to hop a ship, try to trek out on the winding roads that led into the rest of Auverraine, but it’d be pointless. She was tied into this damn city as surely as death was tied into life, as surely as the crescent moon carved into her palm.

All of it, reminders—she shouldn’t linger too long. She shouldn’t get too close. It wasn’t safe.

Michal’s mouth found her throat, and she arched into him, closing her eyes like it might shut out the cold in her chest and the itch of so much death. Her fingers clawed into his hair, and his arm tightened around her waist like he might lift her up, carry her to their mattress on the floor, and forget all about running poison for Val. Forget about everything but safety found in skin.

She wanted to let him, and that was the decision-maker, in the end. Lore had to stop using people like fences, like moats, like things to wall herself in with.

Masking it as playful, she pushed Michal away. “Go. Val won’t wait.”

Blue eyes hazy, Michal pulled back. “Will you?”

He asked every day. Neither of them knew if it was a joke. But today, there was something newly apprehensive in his face, as if for the first time he knew the answer was no.

So Lore kissed him again instead of speaking.

He lingered at her lips a moment before stepping back. “I’ll see you at the Northwest Ward, right?” He switched into reciting the plans for the drop-off instead of asking her anything further. Smart man, not to push. “Right at the bell, when the guard is changing. Leave the cart at the old storefront. And you’ll stay with it until it gets picked up from the catacombs’ entrance.”

A tiny shiver slunk over Lore’s skin at the mention of the catacombs. “Shouldn’t take long,” she said, trying to sound reassuring. It wasn’t so bad, the outer branches of the catacombs—outside of the city center, they were little more than tunnels, the dead were all kept under the Citadel—but being close to them still made her feel twitchy.

Lore knew the catacombs. Not just in the sense of someone who remembered the twists and turns of a place—Lore felt them, a part of her, like if you turned her skin inside out, a map would be printed on the wet, bloody underside. And because of that uncanny knowing, she’d be able to tell if someone was coming through them.

Another handy side effect of a dark, strange childhood.

She’d been the watchdog for the crew since she was thirteen, when Mari first found her wandering the streets with blank eyes, and brought her back to Val’s headquarters at the docks. Val, thankfully, didn’t ask why or how Lore had acquired such an odd skill. She just put it to use.

And if Lore stayed with Michal, who was increasingly vocal about his objection to her dangerous position, things could get precarious for him.

She closed her eyes.

A calloused hand on her cheek made them open again. Michal kissed her, sweetly this time, without heat. “Be careful,” he murmured. Then he slipped out.

Alone, Lore took a deep, ragged breath. Despite the chill outside, the sun through the cracked window was warm on her skin. She rested her forehead against the glass and counted her breaths, an old trick from childhood to calm her heart, calm her nerves.

They’d still be looking for her. Lore knew that. And the longer she stayed in one place, the easier she’d be to find.

She could move in with Val and Mari again, if she wanted. That door was always open. But having someone who tried to control her comings and goings never sat well with her, after… after what her life had been like before.

So not with Val, then. But staying here wasn’t an option.

It’d be awkward to end things, with both her and Michal on Val’s team. Val would intercede where she could once she knew the situation, but it would be impossible for them not to see each other at all. Val had warned her as much, when Lore first took up with Michal. Lore had thrown it back at her, saying that Val and Mari had obviously made it work, so why couldn’t she? But both of them knew it wasn’t the same, that it was an argument for the sake of arguing. Lore wasn’t looking to be settled. Lore was always running, always moving. She just liked to rest sometimes.

She sighed, forehead still pressed to the glass. It’d be easiest if she could make Michal hate her, probably. And though the thought was an ice pick, she knew she could do it. She could make Michal glad she’d decided to leave, hurt him so badly that he’d never try to get close again.

That would be easiest.

Lore opened her eyes, straightened. She pushed aside the curtain that served as a door and walked down the stairs.

A flounce of tulle on the couch indicated that Elle had resumed her pre-breakfast position. Lore huffed a laugh. “Bye, Elle-Flower.”

Elle groaned in response.

At the threshold, Lore paused, placing her hand along the weather-beaten wood of the lintel. She’d stayed here longer than any of the previous places—with Michal, with Elle. He was a good man, one of the first she’d encountered. He cared about her.

She’d miss him more than the house, more than the safety. That was new.

Another pat against the doorframe. “Goodbye,” Lore murmured, then she slipped out to lose herself in Dellaire’s streets again.