I walked into the outer chamber, my hair tucked into a cap, and my face bowed into a stack of towels piled high in my arms. A flask dangled from my hand. I shuffled forward with indifference, while my feet burned to run. Even my father, no matter how angry with me, would still be raw with Walther’s loss. A glimmer of doubt was all it would take for him to rescind his order. I’d make him listen if I had to hold a blade to his throat and take him hostage.
“I’m here to sponge the king with a tincture ordered by the physician,” I said in a thick Gastineux brogue, sounding like my aunt Bernette when she was angry. The sleepy nurse sitting in a chair by the door perked up.
“But no one—”
“I know, I know,” I grumbled. I swallowed and forced my words out in an annoyed drawl. “No one ever tells us anything until the last minute. Here I was about ready to go home. Maybe I can talk you into doing this? If I were to—”
“No,” she said, thinking the better of it. “I’ve been stuck here for hours. I could use the break.” She glanced at the guard standing by the open door to the inner chamber. “Need his help?”
“Pfft. Ain’t doing much more than his brow. Don’t need help for that.”
She stood with relief and was out the door before I could say anything else.
The inner chamber was dim. As I passed the guard, I asked him to close the door behind me since my arms were full. “Protocol,” I chided when he hesitated.
The door gently shut behind me, and I faced the large bed on the opposite wall. I almost didn’t see my father in it. He was small and sunken, like he was being eaten up whole by pillows and blankets. His eye sockets were shadowed, and the skin thin over his cheekbones. He was someone I didn’t know. I set the towels and flask on a table and stepped closer. He didn’t stir.
He’s dying.
They are killing him.
My pulse raced. The citadelle had already whispered this truth to me. I’d thought it meant everyone but him, not the man who had always been bluster and power—all that I had ever known.
“Father?”
Nothing.
I dropped to his side and took his hand in mine. It was limp and warm. What was wrong with him? I desperately wanted to see him loud and angry in all the ways that Walther had described him, the way he had always been, but not like this.
“Regheena?”
I startled at his weak voice. His eyes remained closed.
“No, Father. Mother is busy elsewhere. It’s Arabella. You must try to listen to me. It’s important that you order Bryn and Regan home immediately. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He frowned. His eyes slivered open. “Arabella? You’re late. And it’s your wedding day. How will I explain it?”
My throat pinched. A misty fog filled his gaze. “I’m here now, Father.” I lifted his hand to my cheek. “All will be well. I promise.”
“Regheena. Where is my Regheena?” His eyes drifted closed again.
My Regheena. My mother’s name was tender on his lips. Even my name had been spoken with tenderness, a gentle reprimand, not an angry one.
“Father—” But I knew it was no use. He couldn’t issue an order for a drink of water, much less make a demand for Bryn and Regan’s safe return. He had already floated back to his unconscious world. I laid his hand on his chest and pressed my fingers to his neck. His pulse was firm and steady. If it wasn’t a weak heart that had laid him low, what was it?
I stood and went to the bureau, my fingers carelessly running through the mountain of tinctures, syrups, and balms—all remedies I recognized. My mother had given them to me and my brothers many times. I opened the bottles and sniffed. The scents brought back memories of stuffy heads and fevered brows. I rifled through a box of herbs and liniments and then moved on to the bureau drawers. I didn’t even know what I was looking for—an ointment? Liquid? Something that pointed to his true ailment? They are killing him. Or maybe they weren’t treating a simple illness properly. I looked elsewhere in the room, searching behind a mirror, a pedestal that held a tall vase of flowers, in his bedside table, and even slid my hand beneath the mattress, but turned up nothing.
I went to the door of the adjoining physician’s office, pressing my ear to it. When I judged the room to be empty, I gently eased open the door and searched there too, but short of tasting every elixir and waiting to see the effect, I had no way of knowing what may have caused my father’s weak and confused state. Maybe it was his heart. Maybe I had broken it just as the rumors said. I returned to his chamber, and my eyes lit on the box of herbs and liniments again. The physician had always disdained the cook’s kitchen remedies. When Aunt Bernette made tea from rapsi blossoms for Aunt Cloris’s headaches, he would shake his head and smirk. I searched through it again, more carefully this time.
Beneath the other bottles, I found a small vial no bigger than my little finger. It was filled with a golden powder I’d never seen. An herb for the heart the nurse was neglecting to give him? I pulled the cork from the vial, but could detect no herbal scent and began to lift it closer to my nose. No. Don’t. I held it at arm’s length, examining
the shimmering gold, then replaced the cork and set it back with the others, shutting the lid.
“Your Highness.”
I spun. The Chancellor stood there in all his glory, his crimson robes flowing, his knuckles glittering, his arrogant tight-lipped smile beaming with triumph. Two guards with drawn swords stood behind him. “How amusing that your note said I should be afraid,” he said, his tone cheerful. “I think, my dear, it is you who should be afraid.”
I glared at him. “Don’t be so sure.” I shrugged off my cloak so my weapons were easier to draw and looked past him to the guards. I didn’t recognize them. Had he changed the guard who kept the citadelle secure? Still, they wore the Royal Guard insignia. “Lay your weapons down,” I told them. “By all that is holy, do not defend this man. He’s a traitor who’s sending my brothers into an ambush. Please—”