Page 150 of The Thirteenth Child
If I could open them from the outside.
If I didn’t fall to my death trying to get there.
If, if, if.
I pushed the worries from my mind. Little good could come from dwelling on all the things that could go wrong. I just needed to get into motion.
I needed to act.
Once I was far away from the palace, from this unhinged king, from the shell of this little girl, I could allow myself to fall apart. But not until then.
With a quavering breath, I approached Euphemia’s side of the bed, pillow in hand. Brilliance had begun to spill from her mouth, running past her lips and down her chin in bold rivers of dark sludge.
“I’m so sorry, Phemie,” I murmured miserably, lowering the pillow. “Please, please forgive me.”
Across the room, I heard a squabble of loud voices shouting in the corridor, and then the door opened.
“No! Hazel! Stop!”
Chapter 53
Alarmed, I turned to seeMargaux fumble past the guards flanking the entry. Once she was in, the door shut and the lock clicked back into place.
The oracle raced over and snatched the pillow from my hands.
“Don’t—Hazel! Please don’t!”
“What are you doing here?” I gaped, too surprised to put up a fight. “How did you know?”
“You can’t do this,” she said, squeezing the pillow tightly to her chest as if that was all it would take to stop me. “Euphemia is not meant to die. I had a vision.”
Of course she’d known what I was about to do. Of course the Holy First had shown her. Nothing about this night was destined to be easy. I could almost hear Calamité laughing at me.
Except…
There was a prick of wrongness at the back of my neck, ticking, tapping.
“The Holy First sent you a vision?”
She nodded fervently, looking radiantly flushed, bursting withpious authority and hope. “She said that Euphemia was sick but that you’re going to save her. She said that I’m to help you.”
It didn’t add up.
None of this did.
Merrick had made a bargain with the Holy First, allowing her to use me to save the lives of innocents. Why would she place a deathshead on Euphemia if she was going to show Margaux that I was meant to save her?
She wouldn’t.
So who had seen the correct vision? Margaux or me?
I cupped the princess’s cheek, watching as the skull blossomed over her. It was still there, staring up at me with the void of its empty eye sockets. Nothing had changed. My order was clear, even if Margaux was trying to muddle it up.
She could say the Holy First has declared the moon is made of pumpernickel and we all would have to believe it because no one can say otherwise.
Leopold had said that so many months ago as we returned from the Rift. He’d doubted Margaux from the very beginning, but I hadn’t listened. I’d thought her an ally, a friend at court who was just like me. A thirteenth child, a marionette whose strings were pulled by our designated deities.
But what if Margaux had been the puppet master all along?
