Page 19 of The Crown’s Temptation

I am on a bed.

The ceiling above me is low and damp. There are sounds I cannot immediately place. A low keening somewhere to my left. Something rhythmic and wrong. There is the sound of women moving, of fabric and footsteps and the scratch of something being written.

I turn my head.

The room is full.

Women in various states of undress. Some pacing, their lips moving around words I cannot hear. Some pressed against the walls with their knees drawn up. Some strapped to beds identical to mine, leather straps worn soft with use. Several are pregnant. Several are screaming. One is laughing in a way that has nothing to do with anything funny, a sound that goes on and on without pause for breath.

Servants move between them. Administering something from small vials. Adjusting restraints. Writing in ledgers with the calm efficiency of people performing a task they have performed so many times it no longer requires thought.

Their fingers.

I notice their fingers first. The tips gray, the skin at the knuckles pulling in a way that does not belong to anything living.

Deathmages.

Serving as maids.

I sit up and immediately regret it. Everything hurts. My abdomen most of all, a deep pulling wrongness that is not the same as a wound but is not nothing either. I press my hand to it.

Two servants cross to me.

"Where am I?" I say before they can speak. "Where is my husband? My children. Where are my children?"

They look at each other.

"The North Tower," one says. "You must have failed to give His Majesty what he needs."

"I do not know what that means. I need to know where my husband is."

The second one shakes her head, almost sympathetically. “You are in the yellow room. His Majesty only puts the daughters of value in the yellow room,” the first one says. She smiles and points at the walls. “You should be honored. Look at these walls, are they not beautiful?” She points to the yellow walls.

I look. They are old and stained and on furthest wall is a very obvious bloodstain.

Where the fuck am I?

Her face darkens. “You must behave or you may get sent to the blue room.” A pause. “Or the gray room.”

“Fuck you,” I say before I can stop myself.

They ignore me. “You are likely with child," the second one says, reaching for my wrist. "You must not exert⁠—"

I pull my wrist back. "I already have children. I need to know how I got here."

They look at each other again. One of them opens her ledger.

I stop listening.

I think about Colsar. About the Great Hall and the harpist and the clock reading six thirty-one. About whether he is looking for me. He is looking for me. He does not know where I am and neither do I and I cannot afford to fall apart here.

I open my eyes.

"I need to leave," I say.

I stand.

The guards are at my arms before I finish standing. Two of them, appearing from somewhere behind me, lifting me and carrying me back to the bed. The straps go around my wrists. Good leather. Well made. Buckled with the care of someone who understood that the people they were restraining were not ordinary.