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I lurched forward with a choked gasp as Melanthe seized the Queen by the corset and dragged her close, and in that split second, I felt everything she felt all over again. But it was not the clean, aching grief I had felt in the barn.

This was something uglier.

Something that turned my stomach. Jealousy, black and bottomless, and a rage that had nowhere left in all the world to go, and so turned, at the last second, upon the only soul who had offered her nothing but kindness.

A flash of metal caught the sun and was gone, driven hard through the boning of the corset and deep into the soft flesh of the Queen’s side. Just once.

Ianthe’s breath left her in a soft, startled rush, her eyes flying wide, her lips parting on a soundless plea. But Melanthe did not wrench the blade free, and she didn’t strike again. She held it there, buried to the hilt in the Queen’s side, drew her close, and let the darkness do the rest.

Because that was when I saw it.

Shadows leaking from every pore of her, sliding down her arm and along the length of the blade. Now pouring into that single wound like ink poured into clear water. Not blood. Something far worse than blood. Something that drank the warmth out of the very air and left a cold so deep it ached in my own bones to watch it.

And then it reached Ianthe’s eyes.

I watched the blackness bloom there, swallowing the white, swallowing the colour, until for one terrible heartbeat the Queen’s eyes were nothing but pools of pure, depthless dark. As though something had reached down inside her and seized hold of the very heart of her.

Melanthe slid the blade free at last, slow and almost tender, and let the Queen fold down onto the stones at her feet. We watched the darkness still wreathing her like smoke, watching those black-drowned eyes. I was certain to my very soul that I had just seen a woman die. That whatever the witch had poured into that single wound had snuffed her out as surely as a pinched candle.

The witch bent low over the woman crumpled at her feet and hissed the words against her ear.

“You will all regret this. The King most of all!”

As the pale stone beneath us drank down the last crimson drops of royalty, the scene began to fade. Darkness closed in from every side, and for one blessed moment, I thought, surely, that the vision was finally done with me.

Then the stench hit.

Urine. Decay. Damp, rotting stone. It flooded my senses all at once, so thick and sudden that I gagged on it, and the dark resolved into something worse than nothing at all.

The air sat heavy in my chest, close and starved, as though there wasn’t enough of it to go round. I reached out blindly, and my fingers met cold, slick stone, weeping with moisture, and from somewhere in the black around me came the sounds of others. Coughing. Weeping. The small, hopeless noises of people who had long since stopped expecting to be heard.

A dungeon.

The creak of a heavy door drove a triangle of torchlight across the floor, and guards filed in with flames held high, the light leaping and guttering off the wet walls until I could see again.

And I wished, immediately, that I couldn’t.

I jolted back with a strangled sound, because there, right beside me, was the cause of all of this darkness…

Melanthe.

Melanthe…

So, close our arms passed through one another, though neither of us felt it. Like two ghosts sharing the same cell across years that had already burned. She stood very straight, her blood-stained hands clasped over the front of her ragged dress, the wool stiff and dark where the Queen’s blood had dried into it. She hadn’t washed it from her skin as though she wore it on purpose. It was as though it were the only thing she had left.

And then he came.

The King, Hyperion.

Older now, so much older than the smitten young man in the workroom, his face carved deep with new lines of grief and fury. Carrying an unspeakable secret had gouged into him. He looked, I thought, like a man being eaten alive from the inside.

“Where is our son?” Melanthe asked.

There was a terrible, glassy calm in it that raised every hair on my body as though she already knew and had nothing left in all the world to fear.

Hyperion crossed the cell in three strides and slammed his palm flat against the bars.

“You heartless bitch!” His voice cracked down the middle. “How could you do this to me?” And then the tears came, pouring down that ravaged face like rivers, and I pressed both hands to my chest, sick with the horror and the grief and the sheer, suffocating cruelty of it all.