The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queen's Window

Rayneh continued, her voice a whisper. “I regret it, Naeva. When Kyan came back, and I saw your body, cold and lifeless—I understood immediately that I’d been mistaken. I wept for days. I’m weeping still, inside my heart. But listen—” her voice hardened “—we can’t let this be about you and me. Our Land is at stake. Do you know what Tryce is going to do? She’ll destroy us all. You have to help me stop her—”

“Tryce!” I shouted. “I’m ready to see her bleed.”

Footsteps thudded across silk carpets. Tryce drew a bone-handled knife and knelt over her mother like a farmer preparing to slaughter a pig. “Gudrin!” she called. “Throw open the doors. Let everyone see us.”

Narrow, muddy legs strode past us. The twigs woven through the automaton’s skin had lain fallow when I saw him in the winter. Now they blazed in a glory of emerald leaves and scarlet blossoms.

“You dunce!” I shouted at Tryce. “What have you done? You left him alive.”

Tryce’s gaze held fast on her mother’s throat. “I sacrificed the baby.”

Voices and footsteps gathered in the room as Tryce’s soldiers escorted Rayneh’s courtiers inside.

“You sacrificed the baby,” I repeated. “What do you think ruling is? Do you think Queens always get what they want? You can’t dictate to magic, Imprudent Child.”

“Be silent.” Tryce’s voice thinned with anger. “I’m grateful for your help, Great Lady, but you must not speak this way to your Queen.”

I shook my head. Let the foolish child do what she might. I braced myself for the inevitable backlash of the spell.

Tryce raised her knife in the air. “Let everyone gathered here behold that this is Queen Rayneh, the Queen Who Would Dictate to a Daughter. I am her heir, Tryce of the Bold Stride. Hear me. I do this for the Land of Flowered Hills, for our honor and our strength. Yet I also do it with regret. Mother, I hope you will be free in your death. May your spirit wing across sweet breezes with the great bird of the sun.”

The knife slashed downward. Crimson poured across Rayneh’s body, across the rugs, across Tryce’s feet. For a moment, I thought I’d been wrong about Tryce’s baby—perhaps she had loved it enough for the counterspell to work—but as the blood poured over the dried petals Rayneh had scattered on the floor, a bright light flared through the room. Tryce flailed backward as if struck.

Rayneh’s wound vanished. She stared up at me with startled, joyful eyes. “You didn’t betray me!”

“Oh, I did,” I said. “Your daughter is just inept.”

I could see only one solution to the problem Tryce had created—the life’s blood of something I loved was here, still saturating the carpets and pooling on the stone.

Magic is a little bit alive. Sometimes it prefers poetic truths to literal ones. I dipped my fingers into the Queen’s spilled blood and pronounced, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath Your Window has betrayed you.”

I cast the blood across the Queen. The dried petals disintegrated. The Queen cried out as my magical protections disappeared.

Tryce was at her mother’s side again in an instant. Rayneh looked at me in the moment before Tryce’s knife descended. I thought she might show me, just this once, a fraction of uncalculated vulnerability. But this time there was no vulnerability at all, no pain or betrayal or even weariness, only perfect regal equanimity.

Tryce struck for her mother’s heart. She let her mother’s body fall to the carpet.

“Behold my victory!” Tryce proclaimed. She turned toward her subjects. Her stance was strong: her feet planted firmly, ready for attack or defense. If her lower half was any indication, she’d be an excellent Queen.

I felt a rush of forgiveness and pleasure and regret and satisfaction all mixed together. I moved toward the boundaries of my imprisonment, my face near Rayneh’s where she lay, inhaling her last ragged breaths.

“Be brave,” I told her. “Soon we’ll both be free.”

Rayneh’s lips moved slowly, her tongue thick around the words. “What makes you think…?”

“You’re going to die,” I said, “and when I leave this body, Kyan will die, too. Without caster or intent, there won’t be anything to sustain the spell.”

Rayneh made a sound that I supposed was laughter. “Oh no, my dear Naeva… much more complicated than that…”

Panic constricted my throat. “Tryce! You have to find the piece of leucite—”

“…even stronger than the rock. Nothing but death can lull your spirit to sleep… and you’re already dead…”

She laughed again.

“Tryce!” I shouted. “Tryce!”

The girl turned. For a moment, my vision became as clear as it had been when I lived. I saw the Imprudent Child Queen standing with her automaton’s arms around her waist, the both of them flushed with joy and triumph. Tryce turned to kiss the knot of wood that served as the automaton’s mouth and my vision clouded again.

Rayneh died a moment afterward.

A moment after that, Tryce released me.

If my story could not end when I died, it should have ended there, in Rayneh’s chamber, when I took my revenge.

It did not end there.