Page 125 of The Court of Venus

His eyes flashed as he told me. And I knew he was truly psychotic, mad, insane, once I understood the gravity of what he’d done.

“I see the guilt in you,” I whispered. “The regret. The self-hatred. That’s why you have been desperate to recover what you so easily threw away. Prospero failed. You are not immortal. You are not young, or beautiful, or good—all of the things your son was.”

I leaned the knife into his throat. But it would not cut. The air shimmered with the oath, the quicksilver words falling before my eyes. I was sworn to protect the king, had sealed my promise with my own lips.

“Aha,” he said, laughing as he convulsed. He tumbled off the bed, his black tongue flickering in his mouth as he cackled.

So I knelt before him and slid the knife into his hands. My grip on his mind tightened as I led him down the endless corridor of his guilt, opening the doors to his own evil.

I showed him how he reveled in using people. The gleam in his body when they hurt. The numbness when they cried. The inability to question how they felt. I guided his ghosts to him. Gertrude, who pleaded with him for her life, grasping at his heels as he dragged her down a hallway. Eleanor, flinching from his slap, after she told him another child had been lost. Alice Seton, Alice most of all, who haunted him more than his own son did. I saw that when her head hit the hay, he ordered it sent to his rooms, and he stared into her dead eyes for hours, stroking her dark hair.

Now the king was wrecked on the floor, clutching the knife to his chest.

When he drove it into himself, I looked away. I closed my eyes.

The blood spouted across my face. His body twitched, then stilled. I clenched and unclenched my fists, then curled up beside him on the floor and wept.

I lay in the pool of the king’s blood, heart pounding, trembling with the weight of what I had done. He was always meant to die today. He was always meant to die because of me.

The bells rang for high noon and the beginning of Roland’s council meeting. He would wonder where I was.

I thought of what to do. Paced and paced. Washed the blood from my hands and face in the basin.

It may have been minutes or hours later when the stone wall behind the king’s body disappeared. The candles snuffed out, the tapestries billowed.

A Saturn doorway had opened.

Thirty

When shapeshifting, a Moonborn cannot contort their own voice. Transformations are limited to the body alone.

—PROSPERO THE ALL-KNOWING, THE CELESTIAL BODIES

Insults flew across the council room.

Roland had his ankles crossed on the table. He fiddled with his pearl earring, head tipped back. Oliver sat by his side, a quill tucked behind his ear again.

When I pushed through the door, the councilors fell silent. Roland’s earring swung back and forth, strummed by his finger, but all else in the room was still.

Roland noticed my expression. “Out,” he said with all his authority. “Everyone out.”

“Your Grace, we’ve only just begun,” Wyatt Francis protested.

A sigh, a hand tugged through his hair. “I do not care, Wyatt.”

The councilors grumbled as they collected their pens and papers and cases, bowing as they backed away. Only a few tipped their caps to me. Most eyes glittered with suspicion. Oliver whispered something in Roland’s ear, then winked at me as he passed.

Roland pushed his chair back, rushing over to me. I gasped into his mouth as he kissed me hungrily. “I woke up and you were gone.”

Denying him another kiss, I tugged on his arm. “Come. Quickly.”

He followed me to the king’s apartments. It was not far, only separated from the council room by two staircases and the gallery of queens. “Has it happened?”

“Yes,” I said over my shoulder.

“Where are the guards?”

“Just one. In here. Sleeping.” We stepped across the body, and then he saw the aftermath of what I had done. The king, the pool of blood. The spray from his chest. The knife and the portal in the stone.