Page 137 of The Rebel and the Rose
Now she was trapped in his uncle’s dungeon.Again.
A cold slick of dread came over her.
‘Where is the king, Bibi?’
Bibi huffed a short laugh. ‘How on earth should I know? It’s not like he’s ever visited me. Not that I’m complaining. Only the soldiers come down here, and they’re usually too brash or too busy to hold any kind of intelligent conversation with. Although one did slip me a pack of playing cards when he heard me singing.’ A small sad smile glimmered in the dimness. ‘If it wasn’t for that morsel of kindness, I think I’d have gone mad by now.’
‘I’m so sorry, Bibi.’ Guilt nudged Sera closer to the bars. She wished she could wrench them apart too, crawl to her friends and throw her arms around her. ‘You don’t deserve this.’
‘None of us deserve it,’ said Bibi fiercely. ‘All we ever tried to do was help the kingdom. Why should we be punished for it?’
‘Because bad men are afraid of good magic.’ Saint Oriel’s face flickered in her mind, the echo of her dream still whispering faintly.There is a wrongness in fate’s tapestry. A thread that does not belong. You must pull it out.
‘We’re not giving up, Bibi.’
They couldn’t afford to cower now. Not after everything she’d witnessed at Marvale. The king was one kind of poison, but Andreas Mondragon was a snake coming up from the long grass. A lethal, powerful charmer who had to be stopped at all costs. Left under his care, the entire kingdom would fall to ruin.
‘Do you have a plan?’ said Bibi. ‘Please tell me you have a plan.’
Sera did not have a plan.
But she had hope, and clarity of mind, and that was not nothing. She might not have the prince’s favour, but she knew she had his attention. His interest. Heneededher to make his court, to empower his chosen minions. All she had to do was turn that need to her own advantage. Charm the silver-tongued saint, while sticking a knife in his back.
‘You’ve got that wild look in your eyes.’ Bibi’s voice was wary. ‘The kind that means you’re about to do something reckless.’
Damn right. ‘I’m going to kill the prince, Bibi.’
There was a strange spluttering sound. ‘How?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ she admitted. ‘First, I have to find him.’
‘He has to be here,’ said Bibi. ‘The soldiers changed the night you arrived. Not their faces, but their eyes. How they move. It’s like they’re all trapped in a fog.’
‘All saints,’ muttered Sera, trying not to shudder. If Andreas had already installed himself at the Summer Palace, then what had become of the king?
And more importantly, what would become of them?
Days passed with maddening slowness, the constant dark making it almost impossible to keep count of the hours. They kept time by the meagre meals that came three times a day: cold porridge in the morning, a bread roll with cheese for lunch and a sliver of fatty meat and boiled potatoes for dinner. The howling wind was worse at night, stealing under their blankets and filling their cells with the fetid tang of seaweed.
Val slept on and off, often waking in such a fog that at times she would have to sit in the darkest corner of her cell with her head in her hands, waiting for the pain to pass. Andreas’s commands wormed through her thoughts, surfacing whenever they spoke of the prince. It was then that she would retreat, unable to speak against the Silver-tongue or conceive of a plan that would lead her to harm him.
Though Sera missed the physical closeness of her friends, the ability to hold their hands, to hug them during the cold howling nights, she was glad that Bibi and Val could offer that comfort to each other. That they weren’t alone in their fear and uncertainty. That whatever came next, they would be able to face it together.
In the meantime, they waited, and they listened to the patter of footfall overhead. The palace was growing busier, a rising chorus of voices echoing through the damp stone walls as servants scurried about at all hours of the day and night.
Outside, whenever the ocean quietened to a gentle hush, Sera heard the palace gates groaning open to let carriages through. Wheels trundled across the grounds, punctuated by the excited chatter of voices and the tell-tale thrum of heels striking the polished floors.
‘Something’s happening,’ Val said to her one afternoon, when her eyes were clear, and she was sitting at the front of her cell. ‘I swear it sounds like a party up there.’
Bibi, who was shuffling their playing cards between games of rummy, went to the back wall to count the chalk markings there. ‘Oh,’ she said, in a strained voice. ‘I think it’s King’s Day.’
The king’s birthday.
An annual kingdom-wide celebration of Bertrand Rayere IV. Ordinarily, there would be banners hung in every town and village of Valterre, the children wearing paper crowns, colourful ribbons in their hair, while lively music spilled out of the taverns onto the streets and revellers gathered to toast another year turning. Another year of their king.
Even back in the plains, Mama always made a butter cake for the occasion, letting Sera stay up well past her bedtime to sip wine and watch the stars, imagining themselves as queens for the night. Mama never cared much for the king or his ilk, but she never passed up a reason to eat cake.
Sera wondered what King’s Day would look like today in the rebelling heart of Fantome. Whether Andreas’s followers were burning their pyres and tossing nightguards into the Verne. Whether people were watching the royal flags go up in smoke from their windows, fearing what the following year might hold.
