“Do you think we gave them too much?” Gisella asks, biting her lip, though she doesn’t sound too concerned.
Beatriz checks both men’s pulses. “They’re fine,” she says. “Just sleeping. It should last half an hour, but if they wake up sooner—”
“I know,” Gisella says, shooting her a quick grin. “I’ll express my concern and tell them you ran for help and then very subtly…” She trails off, holding up Beatriz’s poison ring, with its hidden needle. “And when we’re through with this, you must tell me where I can get one of these.”
“When we’re through with this,” Beatriz echoes, taking the ring of keys from its peg beside the guards. Now she has thirty minutes—preferably closer to twenty to be safe—to figure out which of the fifty or so keys will unlock Lord Savelle’s cell.
Beatriz hurries down the hall, away from Gisella, sparing each cell a glance only to confirm that Lord Savelle isn’t inside. Most of them are empty—the main prison is down in the city, and both are mostly cleared out every two weeks on Burning Day—but a few are occupied by servants or minor courtiers who angered the king in some way or other. A few call out to her as she passes, but she ignores them, aware of the heavy key ring she holds and how quickly twenty minutes can pass.
She almost hurries right past Lord Savelle’s cell, coming to a sharp stop when she recognizes his light brown hair in the moonlight coming through the small window above him. Stripped of his usual fine clothes and dressed in the same threadbare dull gray outfit the rest of the prisoners wear, he looks like a stranger.
“Lord Savelle,” she whispers, stepping up to the bars and beginning with the first key.
Lord Savelle blinks at her. It takes a moment for him to see through her disguise. “Your Highness?” he asks. “What are you…?” He trails off when his eyes fall to her fingers, trying the first key, then the second, and he gets his answer. “Why?” he asks instead.
Beatriz doesn’t answer at first, trying a third and then a fourth key, to no avail. She’s played tonight’s events countless times in her head during the past day, running over every little thing that could go wrong and smoothing them all out. She never did figure out what to say to him, though. She decides to tell him the truth—she feels she owes him that at least.
“Because we both know that if one of us should be imprisoned for using magic, it should be me,” she says, her voice a whisper in the darkness, an admission she has never before spoken aloud. It’s much harder to ignore once she says the words. It’s also impossible to take them back.
Lord Savelle isn’t surprised, though. Of course he isn’t. She thought he might have guessed, but now she knows for sure.
“I was worried you would tell someone that you suspected me,” Beatriz says, focusing on the lock so she doesn’t have to look at him. “So when the opportunity came to…remove you, I took it. I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t tell him the rest of it, about her mother’s plan, though she’s tempted to.
For a long moment, Lord Savelle doesn’t reply. Beatriz manages to try six keys in that time, none of them the right one.
“I can’t say I fault you for that, Beatriz,” he says softly. “If my daughter could have lied to save herself—even if it meant pushing the blame on another…stars help me, I wish she had.”
Beatriz was ready for fury and condemnation, expected him to react as her mother would have. But if she’d had a thousand years to guess, she couldn’t have imagined him forgiving her. In her bewilderment, her fingers fumble with one of the keys and she drops them, letting out a curse. She picks the ring up. She isn’t sure which key she tried last, so she has to start again.
She considers telling him the rest. He must assume the stardust she planted in his room was stardust she created herself—he can’t know her mother had anything to do with it. This, she finds, is a secret she can’t surrender. It’s too big, too much a part of herself. Once it’s gone, she isn’t sure what will remain.
“My friend has a boat,” she says instead, leaving another wrong key in the lock so she can reach into her satchel and pull out another servant’s cloak, pushing it through the bars to him. “Put this on,” she adds before going back to the keys.
How much time has gone by since she left Gisella? Five minutes? Ten? She isn’t sure.
“A boat?” he echoes.
“To take you to Temarin,” she explains. “It’s the only way to save you—and to prevent a war.”
At that, Lord Savelle gives a surprised laugh. “War might be a bit extreme,” he says. “Only a mad king or an idiot would…” He trails off.
“King Cesare hardly seems sane, does he?” she asks. “And though I’ve heard enough about King Leopold to question his intelligence, my sister tells me the declaration of war he sent was a forgery. If we can get you back to Temarin, it might be enough to prevent the war from happening. But we have to hurry.”
Lord Savelle doesn’t need to be told twice. In a few quick motions, he throws the cloak over his shoulders. It’s long enough to mostly cover his prison clothes, and it’s dark enough out that no one should look too closely at him. Beatriz tries a few more keys, but the door stays locked. Her heart is beginning to pound loudly in her ears, drowning out every other thought.
“Are you coming too?” he asks her.
Beatriz looks up, surprised, and almost drops the keys again. “What?” she asks.
“To Temarin,” he says. “Surely you don’t mean to stay here.”
She blinks. The thought had never occurred to her, though now that he’s said it, she wonders if it should have.
“Beatriz, if you stay here, they will find out what you are, sooner or later,” he says slowly. “And they will kill you for it.”
Beatriz frowns, trying another key, then another. “It isn’t that simple,” she says, thinking of Pasquale and Gisella and Nicolo. She doesn’t want to leave them, to abandon them to the whims of a mercurial king. “I think someone is poisoning the king, causing his madness. I can’t prove it yet, but when I do—”
“Ah,” he says, looking at her with appraising eyes. “I’m merely the first part of your plan, then. You mean to make yourself a queen.”
Beatriz bites her lip, shame heating her face. Daphne always said she was shameless—if Beatriz sees her again, she’ll delight in telling her sister she was wrong.
“You can’t deny, Cellaria will be a far better place with Pas and me on the throne,” she says. “We could change things, fix things.”
It occurs to her as she says it that it’s what her mother has always said—the same justification she gives for all of her ugly deeds. It’s not the same, Beatriz tells herself, but she doesn’t quite believe it. And then there is the threat her mother now poses—Beatriz knows she won’t let go of her dream of a united empire without a fight. But if Beatriz and Sophronia form an alliance, they might stand a chance. A small, optimistic part of her imagines Daphne joining them, though she doubts that possibility. Beatriz loves her sister, but she knows that Daphne is the empress’s creature, through and through.