Page 129 of The Court of Venus

Kitty stared into the distance, lost in another time. It reminded me of Fulke—how quickly her mask fell. “When my family died,” she said quietly, the torch on the wall flickering across her face, “it was the happiest day of my life. But you are mistaken. I did not lie. Didn’t I tell you before, Mistress Mortlake? I despise liars. I saw them together, and I told the king what he needed to know.”

My voice shook. “Show me. I want proof.”

“What?” she snapped.

“I’ll see the memory.”

“Poor thing. Did you think he loved you?”

“Show me,” I demanded.

“Show her, Kitty.” Only at Roland’s insistence did she finally relent. And when I sank into her mind, she was already holding the memory aloft for me. I could feel the triumph in it.

Hal chuckled as he followed a woman along the garden path. The woman turned her head, ensuring no one was behind them. Moonlight limned her profile. It was indeed Alice Seton—the pert nose and pointed chin. A shock of pale iris, surrounded by thick lashes.

Kitty crouched low in the shadows, breathing heavily as she tiptoed forward, parting the foliage to find a better angle. She could see, through one eye, as the woman pressed Hal against one of the hedges. From this vantage, Kitty could no longer see her face, only Hal’s.

His eyes were wide as she bent to kiss his neck. They looked starved. Frenzied. Their hands roving over each other’s bodies like touching each other was a rare, stolen gift. He shoved her gown to the side—a flash of a white thigh—and thrust into her. She collapsed against his shoulder.

That was enough. I did not want to know how long Kitty Seton had watched for.

Pain ripped through me. My heart hollowed out. Kitty mistook my horror for betrayal, and she smiled. “You see, Your Grace, Mistress Mortlake? I did not lie. I told the truth. Treason was committed. I did my duty to the king. I told him his son and the woman he loved had deceived him. And the traitors died as they should.”

I walked unseeing out of the room and fell to my knees. In the cavern I saw all of our actions lined up, wavering. And a finger, slowly, so slowly, knocking the first one down, and in a rushing cascade they fell. They fell and fell and fell, until Hal’s body lay lifeless in the meadow.

Where had it begun? With whom? We made such intimate decisions every day, not knowing they were but a succession of choices that led to fate. I had wanted truth. I had wanted the past to show me an answer worth having. And I had wanted vengeance, for all the torment and pain and suffering to end.

“Release her,” I said into my hands.

Roland’s shadow fell over me. “Whatever for?”

“Release her.”

“Release her, after she sent her entire family to the scaffold based on a lie? Mouse, Hal would never do such a thing. I never saw any ties between them. Hal and Alice? This is madness.” When I glanced over my shoulder, he saw my devastation. He thought Hal really had betrayed me.

“Her eyes shone like opals in the memory,” I said, so soft he couldn’t hear. He folded over me, stroking my arms, his mouth buried in my hair.

“Sweetheart—”

“You don’t understand.” I had not mastered transformation yet—the eyes were always my trouble. I crumpled to the floor. “The real Alice Seton had brown eyes.”

Thirty-One

Power waxes and wanes.

—BIANCA MORTLAKE’S MOTTO

In the dead of night, on the banks of the Snake, I transformed the king back into a corpse. I believed he deserved to rest as himself, in the end. Have his body decay. Return one day, if we did return after death, if the Saturn realm was not our true end, as someone or something better. Miranda ripped him open, and we filled his body with heavy stones. Roland spat on the surface of the water, the ripples lapping into darkness. My tears fell in a steady rhythm. As King Richard sank into the muck of the Snake, the last thing I saw of him was his gray eyes, the eyes of his son.

How lost he seemed, how wretched and innocent in death.

It did not take much to kill a king, but it did take much to kill.

Our court gathered in the great hall.

Roland’s footsteps clipped across the wooden floors, a resounding, powerful echo. Roland, Roland, Roland, the court whispered. Roland is coming. The Venus King. All the nobility bowed. Ladies sank into demure curtseys. Even Queen Cecily and her two remaining attendants, Kitty and Agnes, lowered their heads.

The doors groaned, and there he was. Wide shoulders cutting through the crowd, a head taller than most of the men. He carried his sword at his hip, his pink hair a flare in the sunlight. The stained glass windows above were still shattered from Jasper’s fists.