Miri stared up at her attacker. His skin was tinted pale by the light of the moon, and she recognized the narrow face and bright eyes of the king of Ironwood.
Instead of feeling cowed by a man who was king, Miri felt rage at a man who had killed her mother. His eyes were not on hers but the swell of her chest. She was arched toward him, trapped by his grasp and his blade, and Miri watched as his gaze followed the line of blood that ran from the wound beneath her jaw and into her dress.
A lady’s dress, Miri remembered. She was a maid to the queen.
“She tries to murder me?” Edwin hissed into Miri’s ear. “In my own castle?”
Miri drew a careful breath, focusing on the stone beneath her palms and her knees. She could press him back, rise suddenly into him and knock the blade away—as long as she managed before he stabbed her. Edwin had always been quick. But he thought her a lady-in-waiting to the queen, not a threat or a fighter.
Edwin pressed the blade harder to Miri’s skin, angling the point right where a bit of pressure would be deadly. He would watch her bleed out slowly and likely gather the queen to make her watch. If Miri had to guess, she thought he was probably considering how to best punish his wife at that very moment.
“You’ve punished her enough,” Miri whispered. She only meant to buy herself time and throw Edwin’s attention for a heartbeat while she made her move, but Edwin jerked her closer, the blade going deeper into her skin. Gods, she was done for. She whimpered, and it was not part of the act. “She’s had to watch you make a fool of her all this time as you parade a lowborn through these halls.”
Miri knew the insult would hit him hard, but she did not expect the rage with which he would attack. Edwin slammed her face toward the stone. Miri’s arms barely protected her from a solid ledge capable of fracturing her nose. He twisted her, coming down hard with a knee into her ribs, and held her in place with his weight as he pressed the knife to her stomach. Slower, he’d decided, then. He would let her guts spill over the floor and into his precious tub.
His golden eyes burned into hers, finally staring at the woman he plainly intended to kill. Miri’s fingers were already under the folds of her dress, her palm wrapping tight around the handle of a dagger. The moment his weight shifted, she would have to stab him and run.
But his weight didn’t shift. His dark brows drew together, and his gaze roamed over Miri’s features—not the blood or the disdain for a simple maid. It was different. It was the line of her face, the press of her mouth, and both of Miri’s honey-brown eyes. Edwin’s knee pressed harder into Miri’s frame, his blade pricking her skin through her dress as his free hand latched onto her jaw. He gripped hard, turning her head in the moonlight, and examined her. His weight was too much to draw her trapped dagger free, and Miri’s chest heaved beneath the burden of him and a corset that felt far too tight.
She saw the moment recognition came—the moment Edwin, self-named king of Ironwood, recalled the second daughter of the Lion Queen.
Miri gave him a feral grin. “Murderer.”
Edwin drew a breath, but Miri couldn’t know whether he was merely startled or intended to call for the guards. She’d already slid a foot from her slippers and pressed her bare sole hard against the stone, and she shoved him back so that she could free her arm. It drove his blade at her stomach closer, but the corset and the movement had twisted it from what otherwise might have been a deadly blow. He’d stopped her momentum, though, his grip on her jaw sliding in blood, but his entire body spun over her to pin her back down. Edwin was no fool. He’d noticed Miri’s prowess as a child. He’d said as much, in front of crowds of watching lords. “That girl is deadly. I pity any man who draws her ire.”
Miri was a girl no longer. She wasn’t a fragile thing, half his size. She was a lion, raging for vengeance and desperate to survive. The struggle rolled them into the carved stove edging the tub, and Miri freed an arm to slam it into the inside of Edwin’s elbow, making him loosen his grip and crash his knuckles against the stone. His blade clattered free, and he raised a fist to strike her, but she twisted beneath him, all claws and knees and teeth. Her daggers were trapped beneath her skirts and his legs. Edwin’s hand, slick with Miri’s blood, went for her neck again. She let him try then landed a solid strike to his throat with the base of her hand. He choked out a cough but did not let up, his long limbs trapping her.
She struck him in the side as he raised his fist again, and when his blow landed, it glanced off her blood-slicked jaw. Her ears rang, and her pulse hammered, and Miri twisted beneath him once more. She finally thought she might have him off balance, but his hands were knotted in her braids and her dress, and he hauled her toward the edge of the tub. To drown her or smash her head, she wasn’t sure, but he’d moved, and her hand was on the second dagger at her hip before he’d made it two steps.
Miri slid the knife across the back of his knee, the only decent spot she could reach in their struggle, and Edwin hissed and lowered automatically. The thin material of his nightclothes gave him no protection from her steel. As the blood blossomed over the material, Miri grabbed Edwin’s wrist where he held her hair and pulled herself upward with one hand as her dagger drove home between his ribs. He bit down a cry, jerking her head with him as their bodies crashed to the floor, and Miri pulled the blade free, her eyes on Edwin’s as she ran it into his neck.
The king’s blood was everywhere, a warm pool that ran over the stone too fast and too red. Edwin couldn’t draw air to call for help, but the light had not gone out of his eyes. She had to pry his fingers from her hair, then she stumbled back from him and the blood. She tripped on his legs and landed hard on her bottom, and through the tingling of her limbs and the pounding of her heart, Miri felt the first stings of pain.
Miri had been nicked in at least three places by his blade and punched half a dozen more. She pushed the hair from her face and felt the sticky mess that was matted on her cheek and in her hair. She suddenly stood, staring at the blood that coated the floor. It was her blood.
Miri remembered the sorcerers, who were only a few towers away, and her hands began to tremble again, her entire body nearly shuddering in panic. She grabbed a bucket from near the tub and upended it so that tepid water splashed over her bare foot and the blood on the floor that was hers. Then she took a full bottle of oil—one that had not been poisoned—and doused it over the mess. She hoped it worked.
Miri stared down at herself, a monster in lady’s clothes, and wanted to weep. At a gasp from across the room, Miri glanced up, the bottle in her fingers smashing to the floor when she saw Edwin’s mistress. The woman stared at Miri then the king, her slender hands going to the flesh at her naked throat.
“No,” Miri whispered, holding a bloody finger to her lips. “I don’t want to kill you. Please do not make me.”
There was a moment of silence. Then the woman screamed.
Miri burst into the corridor outside the king’s rooms, and her dagger found the thigh of one kingsman as the second ran toward the screams through another pair of doors. Shouts rang through the hallway, and her footsteps staggered, one bare, the other in a damp and bloody slipper. Both were beneath a mass of torn skirts. She’d lost a dagger, her palms were slick with sweat, and her body shook with exhaustion and fear. She would never make it out alive or even down the stairs. But she had to try anyway.