Page 95 of Grave Flowers
“That Primeval pig you call Father is mine as well. I was his bastard, born to my mother after he used her, over and over. And he calls her a whore. If there ever was a whore, it was him!”
“You’re my … brother?” I stared into Yorick’s face, aghast and seeing it anew. The same hand had drawn Father’s features, though Yorick’s were much more delicate, tempered by the other half of his parentage, Rosalinda.
“I am your brother but in no way that matters. My mother always hoped King Sinet might help us. Royal bastards are often given titles, lands, provisions, even if they are never claimed. But he gave us nothing, and she died in the same room he used to visit her. So I tried to gain my way into his service, but he had too many precautions in place. I never reported to him directly. Ask your father the name of his last Acusan spy.”
“Father, who was your Acusan spy?” I gasped.
“Yorick.” Father said the name simply, vaguely, as though it were of no consequence to him. “But I had him killed.”
“It’s true,” Yorick said. His hold on me tightened in rage, causing me to cry out. “After Princess Inessa died, your father had me murdered because he no longer trusted me. How silly of me. He sent me a bottle of wine, and I assumed it meant I was doing well in my service. I drank at a court party, longing to pass the time, cursing his name as I did. It was the same poison you gave the Radixan. I died instantly but with no visible symptoms. I fell into a fountain, and in the party’s chaos, no one noticed till morning. I woke a ghost, unable to leave the palace.” He took a long, slow breath, one full of pain. “But I’ve done it. King Sinetshall shortly die. My mother has been avenged. I care not for anything beyond that.”
“And what of me, Yorick?” I whispered, twisting in his grasp. “I thought you were my friend, my very first one. And if what you say is true, we are more than friends. We are family, brother and sister.”
Only that quelled the bite of his rage. There was a softening to his face, and I saw a flicker of the old Yorick, buried within his anguish. “We are star-crossed, Princess. Not as lovers, but as blood. I did what I had to do. And I wish you happiness … though I know you’re ensnared by the beyond.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can touch you.” He shrugged. “I can’t touch or interact with any other living person unless they’re also dead. I needed your fingers to kill our father.” He released me and stepped back. His hand lifted, and I flinched, but all he did was carefully wipe Father’s blood from my face. “For what it’s worth, conspiring with you was the loveliest time of my life. Yet don’t be too proud about it. I haven’t had a very lovely life.”
He vanished, leaving nothing but emptiness in his place.
“It was Yorick?” Aeric had regained consciousness. He spoke from the floor, his voice weak. “The jester?”
“Yes,” I said. “Aeric, I—”
I wasn’t certain what I meant to say to him, but I never finished. He pulled at his sleeve, rolling it up. The cut festered, reddish foam bubbling around it.
“By the Family, my uncle poisoned his sword,” Aeric muttered. He cast a frantic gaze at me. His teeth chattered. “Madalina, I would’ve liked to …” The rest of the sentence turned to senseless mumbling. He sprawled across the floorboards, his limbs lifeless and his eyelids flushing blue.
Aeric was dying.
Chapter
TWENTY-EIGHT
Ifound myself at Aeric’s side. I could not recall the steps that took me to him, but suddenly I was there, the floorboards rough against my knees, my husband lying before me. Convolution made my thoughts lurch one way and then another.
My addled mind made me think I’d killed him. For so long, I’d known our tale: He was to die, by my hand, and if not, it was because I’d been arrested by his.
But everything had changed.
Fate made it easy for me.
It had killed him, so I no longer needed to. I should stand and leave the theater. Return home with Radix’s independence secured and lose myself in the garden so I might forget I’d ever left and that there ever was a young king I’d married. Doing anything else was preposterous, especially when Aeric knew of my treachery.
If he died, the knowledge would pass with him.
“Madalina.” Father coughed, and blood speckled his lips. “Listen, girl. Once I breathe my last, you will be queen of Radix. You shall returnto an angry kingdom. Whatever you do, you must maintain the Sinet rule. You mustn’t let it slip through your fingers. Madalina!Look at me!”
I turned to Father. Distantly, I saw his individual features rather than his face in its entirety. The evils he wore upon it suddenly seemed distinct—from his nose, which had been broken and reset several times in fistfights, to his eyes, which had the glossy, lifeless stare of a dead fish. He raged against the world, and it raged back and left its marks in every line and crease of his face. Despite all his rage, all his pacing, all his deceit and determination, he was dying. It was the most human thing I’d ever seen him do.
I looked back at Aeric.
“You gaze upon him in his death instead of me, your father?” Father snarled. “Fickle, stupid girl. I tell you of your future, of your coming reign, and you turn to a boy. Prove your worth. Slice his throat and quicken his end. Let me see one last enemy die before I go.”
Father’s words rattled through the theater, asinine and frightening, the depths of his darkness rising as he dwindled.
Slowly, as though I might be burned, I touched Aeric’s hand. Words crept into my mind. The invocation from Inessa’s journal, the one Mother had tried to say in the hour of her death.
