He looks a little surprised but smiles. “I think that’s a brilliant idea,” he tells her.
Sophronia smiles back, a jolt of pleasure running through her. She realizes that part of her thought he would turn down her offer, that he might laugh at the thought of her being capable enough to do anything. It’s what her mother would have done. But Leopold, for all of his many flaws, believes in her.
It shouldn’t matter what he believes in, it shouldn’t make her heart beat faster, it shouldn’t let her forget, even for a second, who she is and why she is here. But it does, and that makes it dangerous.
She urges her horse to go faster, as if she can outpace her thoughts. “Come on,” she says over her shoulder. “Let’s race.”
She hears Leopold make a noise that is half shock and half indignation before he presses his horse into a faster pace as well and the thunderous hoofbeats grow louder behind her.
The castle grounds blur past her, and she’s aware that courtiers are milling about the gardens, watching them. She’s riding too fast to make out much, but she can tell that the palace grounds are immaculately maintained, full of impossibly green grass, artfully pruned trees, and more flowers than she can possibly count. And when they leave the gardens behind and enter the sprawling woods, she’s surprised that even the trees here look like they were designed by artists. There is nothing wild about the woods here—the setting could be plucked straight from an idyllic watercolor painting.
“Sophie!” Leopold calls behind her, closer than she expected.
“Catch me if you can!” she yells back, urging her horse to go faster.
“Sophie, wait!” Leopold calls, but Sophronia is enjoying herself too much to heed his words.
She can see a cliff’s edge up ahead and decides that will be the finish line. As she approaches, she pulls her horse to a stop, looking out over the cliffside and realizing where they are.
The city of Kavelle is spread out below like a dirty blanket. After the splendor of the palace grounds, it’s jarring to see it—crooked stone streets covered in grime, houses and shops that look like they might fall over in the face of a mild breeze, and more people than Sophronia has ever seen in one place. Surely too many people to fit in the city.
“Sophie,” Leopold says behind her. “Come on, let’s go home.”
But Sophronia doesn’t move. They’re too far up to see any details, but she can tell even from this distance that Kavelle—Temarin’s capital city—is struggling even more than she’d thought.
“What’s going on there?” she asks, pointing to a particularly thick crowd of people in the middle of a city square.
“I don’t know.” He says it so quickly that she doesn’t believe him.
“Then perhaps we should go see,” she says, urging her horse along the cliffside until she sees a path that leads down to the city, blocked by an imposing gate and two guards.
“Sophie,” he says again, following her. “Fine. It’s an execution.”
She stops her horse short and looks back at him. “An execution,” she repeats. “Whose?”
He doesn’t answer, and she urges her horse forward again until Leopold gives a sigh. “Just criminals.”
That might have been answer enough, might have let her imagine he was talking about murderers or rapists, those whose crimes are punishable by death even in Bessemia. But he won’t look at her, so Sophronia knows there is more he hasn’t said.
“Criminals,” she repeats. “What sort of criminals?”
He looks even more uncomfortable. “I believe most of them are thieves,” he says, and something clicks into place.
“Would they include the thieves who attempted to rob my carriage?”
He lifts a shoulder in a shrug. “I assume so,” he says. “Executions are held once a week for anyone arrested in that time.”
Sophronia shakes her head. “Your mother said they’d been released, that they were home with their families.”
As soon as she says it, she feels like the greatest fool. Eugenia told her a pleasant lie to soothe her, the way a parent would tell a child that a dead pet has been sent away to live in the country. The lie ruffles her that much more—she isn’t a child to be condescended to, she is a queen.
“I discussed it with her,” Leopold says. “We decided against making an exception.”
The we doesn’t fool Sophronia. Leopold would have spared the boys to make her happy, she’s sure of this. Eugenia made this decision, and Leopold didn’t have the strength to go against her.
Sophronia can’t stand to look at him; instead she turns her gaze back toward the city and the gathered crowd. Now that he’s said it, she can make out the vague outline of a scaffold, of ten figures standing below a beam, ropes around their necks.
“They’re children,” she says.
“They knew that what they were doing was wrong,” Leopold says. “They knew the consequences. They did it anyway. If I showed mercy, it would only lead to more thievery—and the next victims might not be as lucky as you were.”
More of his mother’s words, she imagined. She thinks about the reports from the spies, how things have changed in Temarin in the year since Leopold took the throne. Raising taxes, removing people from their homes, executing every level of criminal—Sophronia thought them the actions of a careless, cruel king. She’s had trouble reconciling that with the Leopold she knew, but now she suddenly understands. Leopold is none of those things—not careless, not cruel, not a king. Not really. He is a puppet, content to let his mother pull his strings, never questioning what she does with them.
In the distance, she hears the sound of the scaffold floor falling away, the shouts of horror and glee from the spectators, but she doesn’t hear the thieves at all—they die quietly, but they die all the same.
She turns back toward the scene in time to see several men dressed in black removing the bodies from the nooses and carrying them away. Seconds later, another ten figures are brought out, and Sophronia feels sick all over again.
“How many are there?” she asks.
Leopold doesn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t know,” he admits. He reaches out to touch her arm, drawing her gaze toward his. It takes all of her self-control not to jerk away from him.
“Let’s go home,” he says.
Sophronia smiles, but she doesn’t feel it. She smiles because she knows she should, because she knows that if her mother were here beside her, she would tell Sophronia to smile and flirt with her husband and wrap him as tightly around her finger as she can. She would tell Sophronia that the surest way to loosen Queen Eugenia’s hold on Leopold is to establish her own.
And she needs that hold, she realizes. Not because of her mother’s plans, not even for Bessemia’s sake. For Temarin’s.