Page 126 of The Court of Venus

After I showed him the memory, worry strained his face. Not for the king, but for me. He pulled me against his chest. I trembled there, clutching him. He pressed soothing kisses to my brow, to my cheekbones, to my mouth. “It is done now,” he murmured. “You carried out his destiny. That is all. He was meant to die today, and now he is dead.” When I didn’t respond, he took my shoulders and shook me a little. “Mouse, he was always going to die. He was an old man, and he deserved such an end. He deserved to feel such anguish.”

I lifted my face. His lips tasted of salt now. “But would I have done it if I hadn’t already known he was to die? If we hadn’t found that star chart?”

“Would he have murdered his own son if he knew it would lead to this end?” he countered.

Both of us stared into the beckoning portal. I knew why I was being summoned, and I didn’t want to walk toward it alone. I had isolated myself for so many years. Convinced myself I was better off. But even my magic refuted that belief. Loving—and being loved—was the armor itself, not the gaps in it.

“I changed the color of my gown,” I told him. “So it would all blend—” I trailed off.

He understood. The satin was now the red of the king’s blood.

Roland’s magic seeped the bloodstains out of the wood floors and out of my gown. We locked every door of the apartments, shut the windows, pulled every curtain.

“We need to hide the body.” He reached forward and touched my hair when I didn’t respond. “Mouse, we need to hide the body,” he repeated. “Can you transform it?”

I flinched. I had been staring at the wall. The king looked so feeble dead. So small—incapable of all the horror.

I wondered, not for the first time, what the limits to my exalted magic were. I had turned stone into coin. Could I do the same for a corpse?

“What shall he be?”

Roland frowned. “A plant? A coat?”

“A coat. You’ll wear him, so we can take him with us.”

“This is sickening. Will it smell like him? Can’t you make him a ring?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I can do. A ring seems too small.”

I laid my hand on the king’s body and pictured fabric and folds and embellishments in tiny golden thread. I thrust the transformation out, let it hover over his skin, sewing him into something new. The coat looked like one Wyatt Francis would wear, with its thick fur collar the same gray as the king’s hair.

Roland sniffed it. “I’m not wearing it. We’ll leave him in the wardrobe. When we return, we’ll bury him.”

A chill draft drifted from the Saturn doorway. “What if we don’t return?”

“Well.” He hooked the king inside a wardrobe and shut him in. “No one will guess that the king of Alvion hangs in his own wardrobe, now, will they?”

Balthasar waited in his audience chamber of dark, igneous stone.

He seemed surprised when Roland stepped through the archway at my side, but he recovered quickly, drawing his face into a tight smile.

“Roland Daymour,” he said in his quiet, curious voice.

Roland swept into his courtier’s bow. “Balthasar.” His playful grin was just as forced.

Balthasar seemed to disappear under a cloak of space itself, materializing several feet away from us. The air clouded with his breath. His gaze slinked past Roland, fixating on me. “Bianca Mortlake. You are just the person I wanted to see. Thank you for answering my call.”

Roland frowned mockingly. “Oh, that’s a shame, Baz. I thought you would be delighted to see me, too.” He began to circle the Saturn like some kind of mountain cat, his thumb brushing the back of my hand as he passed. “So. You’ve summoned Bianca here because the king of Alvion passed through into your realm. Didn’t he?”

“Smart man,” Balthasar said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I was waiting, wondering who it would be. But what was more intriguing, in fact, was when a specter named Tom Guildford arrived yesterday.”

Roland had begun inspecting Balthasar’s throne, and my mouth fell open in shock when he sat in it, testing its comfort. “This requires padding, Baz. The jagged stone intimidates, of course, but I would add a cushion.”

“Get out of my chair,” snapped Balthasar.

Roland tilted his head. “You were asking us about Guildford, were you not?” He bit his lip. “Well, some men are so rotten, they are far better suited to your dreary court.”

“Get out of my chair,” demanded Balthasar a second time. Roland held his hands up, rising to his feet.