Chapter 2
Before His Majesty’s rise to power, you had always associated sadness and fear with crying. Sobbing. Screaming. But as you stand here, in the most ornate room you have ever seen, being fitted for all kinds of fine garments that you will wear no more than once, you are beginning to understand that isn’t entirely accurate. There is a certain brand of grief that is not only beyond words, but beyond sound; some things are so terrible that the only appropriate response is silence.
Shari is dead, and you have as good as signed your life away without a second thought. You have no plan. You want revenge, but how are you to achieve it in the twelve hours you have left before taking a scythe to the neck?
“Milady, your bath has been drawn.”
The bathwater is the warmest you’ve ever felt, so unlike the tepid leftovers you’re used to at home, and filled with some exotic-smelling oils that permeate the entire bathroom with their sweet scent. It’s a shame you are required to be bathed by your new ladies-in-waiting. Nakedness wasn’t exactly something you’d prepared yourself for when you’d decided to volunteer, and your self-consciousness at being so exposed is ruining your enjoyment of the luxuries at hand. When else will you have the chance to dry yourself off with hand-woven cotton towels? Or be enveloped in a robe so soft, it must have been spun from the clouds themselves?
The bath, the robe, the weighty jewels being clasped around your neck and wrists and to your ears and nose, all of it would be a dream in any other circumstance. But it is so heavy, all of it. The jewelry. The perfume. The promise of death. It is the last one which hangs in the air of your chambers—death. You sit on edge of the bed, draped in bright colors and dazzling embroidery, and all you can think is that the last time the sun set, Shari was exactly where you are, in this room—perhaps even on the same spot of the bed that you are on right now—and that, in a mere twenty-four hours, a new girl will have taken your place, and all you can do now is sit and stare and wait for—
“Hello.”