As he’s dragged away, Joseph draws closer to me. “What is happening?” His voice is low.
I raise a small bubble of privacy around us. “I don’t know.”
“Darnley again? With Red Cap weapons like before?”
My face goes slack.
Samsonwas the weapon this time.
“He’s never going to stop, is he?” Joseph asks. “He’ll keep attacking the queen, and he doesn’t care who is killed along the way.”
I nod again, but my mind is racing.
When Darnley used the weapon at Holyrood, it made the men mindless murderers. David threw himself in front of the queen, and the men succumbed to bloodlust.
It was chaotic, but it wasn’t a direct attack.
This time though…
Samson walked through an entire crowd of people. That dagger had been gleaming bright, not stained with blood. When he lifted the blade, he struck with purpose.
He attackedme.
Not the queen.
Darnley used Samson as a weapon because he could give Samson a target. Not Mary.Me.
What did that letter say?
The royal bitch needs to be brought down.
We thought that was about Queen Mary. Of course we thought that. But…
My father is a prince.
I am royalty among the fae, even if a bastard.
I close my eyes, forcing myself to remember that night when David was killed. He was outside my protective bubble, one I threw up around me, the queen, and Lady Argyll. We had all assumed Darnley’s target was the queen…
But it could have been me. Just like the needle in the sewing box could have been passed to me, same as the other weapons I’ve intercepted. Darnley knew I would be the first line of defense to anything sent to the queen.
I have no doubt that Darnley would not mourn Mary’s death if she were caught in the cross fire like David was, but…
He’s a puppet on Cecil’s strings. And while Cecil, as the English spymaster, would have a vested interest in killing Queen Mary, if he really is a Red Cap, he’d also have a vested interest in killing me.
Because if I fall, so does the wall.
30
Samson
I’m underwater, all the world gone muffled and distant and dulled.
Men haul me from the great room. I feel bruises from the rope, from their fingers; I feel pain from being kicked in the stomach, and I think I taste iron. But it’s all obsolete.
There was blood on Alyth’s chest.
The water I’m under fills my lungs. Inch by inch, it rises, saturating my body. That’s what I feel. Not pain, not horror, not guilt.
