Page 155 of The Thirteenth Child
Margaux jumped as the room’s attention fell on her. She looked mildly queasy, sensing that the last bit of her plan was unraveling into a big messy pile right before her very eyes.
“I? Nothing,” she began. Her voice squeaked, breaking too high.
“Give it up, child,” Calamité advised with a sigh. “You overplayed your hand and there’s no way out now.” His eye flittered toward the ceiling. “Such a waste.”
“What did you do to the queen?” I asked, prompting softly, the words too terrible to speak at full volume.
“Nothing…much.” Margaux’s eyes darted from me to her god, then back to Leopold. “I…Well. Before she went out to ride that day…” She licked her lips. “I might have put a bit of oleander in her canteen.”
I couldn’t stop my gasp. “You poisoned her?”
She turned to me, her eyes impossibly round and pleading. “She didn’t suffer. I didn’t want her to suffer.”
“Why?” Leopold demanded, his voice stony and loud enough to stir Euphemia from her slumber. She shifted uneasily in the bed, the muscles along her jawline twitching in staccato beats. “Why wouldyou do such a thing? My mother was kind to you. She brought you here, made this palace your home. She—”
“It was regrettable,” Margaux began, having the decency to glance down in remorse. “Certainly not personal. You’re right, Aurélie always treated me well. She was lovely, without fault, truly.”
Calamité broke into a laugh. “Other than that dalliance with her husband’s brother, of course.” He looked about the room, as if expecting us to join his mirth. He squinted at Leopold. “You do know that’s the real reason your uncle left court, don’t you?”
Leopold looked sick.
Margaux took a step forward, hands outstretched, as if to reassure the prince of her good intentions, then stopped short, thinking better of touching him. “It did not bring me joy, poisoning her, watching her go out on that fateful ride.”
“Yet you did it all the same,” Leopold muttered, voice dark as an approaching storm.
“For the greater good,” Margaux explained. “For his good,” she added, nodding toward Calamité. Her lips twisted, showing her sudden dismay. “For all the good it did.”
“It was a promising start,” Calamité offered.
“Your uncle was meant to have been blamed for Aurélie’s death,” Margaux explained, looking to Leopold. “Once she’d fallen from the horse, snapping her neck, I left a torn scrap of scarlet fabric near her body, with Baudouin’s sigil stitched on it. It was supposed to start the war. Marnaigne was to strike first. Baudouin would retaliate. It would have been…” She paused, her eyes growing distant. “It would have been beautiful. A beautiful, calamitous ruin, the likes of which the world has never seen.”
Calamité sighed, wistful over what might have been, but Leopold gritted his teeth. “No sigil was ever found.”
“No,” Margaux agreed miserably. “Your mother’s maid never saw it. The foolish girl came across the body and panicked, trampling about, screaming her head off like some unhinged imbecile. By the time a game warden found her, the fabric had been smashed in the mud or lost in the grasses. I looked for it later, once the queen had been taken away, but it was gone, unrecoverable. So I had to adjust my plan.”
“You’ve caused suffering and untold horrors, and for what?” I exclaimed, all but shouting. “Forhim?” I shot a terrible glance Calamité’s way. He had the audacity to wink back. “You said she began the Shivers,” I reminded him. “How? You don’t just start a plague.”
He shrugged, his shoulder rising and falling. “It’s her gift; she can use it as she pleases.”
“What gift? She’s not actually an oracle, is she?” I turned toward Margaux. “Are you?”
She laughed. “Of course not. Who’d want to be saddled with a curse like that?”
Calamité reached out and cupped her chin, smiling fondly. “Margaux has been blessed with the gift of discord. She has an unusual talent for making a disordered mess everywhere she goes. Each time she uses it, she feeds me, venerates me. The more she uses her talents, the stronger I become. The stronger I become, the moretime I can steal away from…well, all of them.” He gestured toward Félicité’s blank expression.
I studied the other thirteenth child with fresh eyes. “You truly started an entire plague?”
Margaux couldn’t help but smile. “When my first attempt at revolution didn’t work, I had to try something different. I traveled north, to Baudouin’s duchy. It was clear his province was thriving.Fertile farmlands, happy villagers. I tried to think up something that would disrupt that, something grand and dramatic for my godfather, something that would make it all fall apart.”
“The Shivers,” I prompted, tired of this conversation, exhausted with her expression of pleasure.
She beamed. “My eyes may not be able to predict the future, but my hands can certainly shape it. You don’t think it coincidence the sickness runs gold, then black, do you?”
“Marnaigne colors,” Leopold murmured. “I never…I never put that together.”
Margaux smiled sweetly, unsurprised. “Of course not, Your Royal Highness. But Baudouin did. He immediately believed the plague to have been summoned by your family in an attack against him. So he rallied those around him who were left and began his march south.”
Her cheery recitation horrified me. “Thousands of people have died because of you,” I whispered.
