Page 119 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

She cracked a cold grin, her eyes empty of goodness. “I found nothing. For all my digging, I found nothing. I returned to your queendom today in desperation to find anything that might weaken you, and your mother offered up the vial from her grave.She gave it to me.”

My grip loosened.

The princess rubbed her throat. “Your own mother sought to poison you. Though when Princess Bring searched me before pushing me into the dungeon, I believed all was lost. She was so eager to kill herself and ‘saving monsterdom’ that she failed to lock me in. She should not be the one dying right now. It should be you.”

Princess Bring melted to the floor. Her color was changing. There was no rapid loss of moisture as in the faking of her death. She was boiling alive. Her pants became moan, which became cries, then screams.

I rushed to her side and fell to my knees. I was a queen of monsters, and monstershadto live. The truth of this was unshakeable in me. “You will live.”

I poured power into her. Or tried to. My power slipped off the surface of her.

“Save her,” her king choked out.

Their union had been mended too little too late. “I will,”I said on a gale of wind that knocked over those closest to me.

“The queen would not save her,”Candor said sadly.

I ignored her and tried to stab power through the barrier of the poison next to no avail. I could not find an entrance, and the all-seeing parts of my mind whispered that there was no entrance, because there was no cure.

Pawns were crowded around me. Princesses, excluding Change, hovered around their dying friend.

Her screams wrenched at the deepest parts of me. Bubbles began to appear in her, popping at their height.

And then, quite horribly and suddenly, her screams were halted. The boiling stopped and steam rose from the puddle of her melted blobs and slime. The steam rose high and carried the fluid of her remains away, leaving only a tiny trace of dust behind.

Pawns and princesses and kings and a queen stared at the dust.

“No,” I said numbly. “No.”

There was no other sound.

A princess was dead.

ChapterTwenty-Six

Fifty mothers

No weakness.

“Aprincess is dead,” whispered Candor.

I did not wish to hear the truth any longer. Not tonight. A monster was dead, and she had been the best of us, good in every blob and speckle of slime. “We have been robbed.”

King Bring dragged in a breath, and no one who had been listening to his labored pants could miss the fullness of it.

I glanced up at him to watch as black crumbled from him. The cracks were already filling in. More of his crimson skin was apparent by the second.

I looked to pawns and watched as the black veins afflicting them receded. Princesses rushed to their kings, who were also healing.

I closed my eyes, longing for King See. I closed my eyes and mourned a princess who had seen to the heart of a simple matter. The plague of monsters had originated when King Bring sampled a curse not consumed by its intended victim.

Until it was.

I pressed a hand over my heart and sobbed once. “Princess Bring, we might have figured it all out. The wellness and future of monsters did not need to rest in your sacrifice.”

“Please,” rasped King Bring. “Please gather up the dust of her. Please…”

Such rage in me toward the fool king. None of this would have happened if not for his corruption. I glared upward. “You do not deserve her in death. You did not in life.”

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