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She keeps her gaze forward. “When my parents died, I wasn’t sure how I would survive. It was all I could do to remember to eat. Sometimes I think that meeting you for . . . ?for this . . . was the only thing that forced me out of bed.” She pauses. “I can’t imagine having to run a country.”
“The consuls worried Harristan was too young, and they tried to make a claim for ruling in his stead, but he was nineteen and they had no legal right. And after Consul Barnard was outed as being behind the plot to kill them, we didn’t trust any of them. At every meeting, every interaction, they looked for weakness. They waited for us to fail. We had no one.” My throat is tight, and I wish this conversation weren’t summoning memories I try to keep buried. “We only had each other.”
“Barnard wasn’t working with any of the others?”
“We could never find evidence of it.” I shrug. “And then the fevers began to spread more widely, and . . . ?well, you know how Kandala has fared.”
“The morning I met with Harristan, he said that it’s easy to love your king when everyone is healthy and well fed, but a bit harder when everyone isn’t.” She sighs. “And I know what Consul Sallister would do if he were in charge. He talked about the prisoners like . . . ?like they weren’t even people.”
“His father was no better. Lissa Marpetta is greedy, but she’s never been like Allisander. She’s content to follow his lead when it comes to maintaining control, however. A bit of a silent partner.”
“It’s all so . . . so cold.”
“I know.”
She glances up at me. “You said you and Harristan used to sneak out when you were children, but no one was sick then. Why did you start bringing medicine into the Wilds?”
“I didn’t start with medicine.” I study her in the darkness, the way the shadows trace her features. “That came later.”
“Then how did it start?”
I shrug a little, but it’s more to cover my own discomfort. None of these memories are good. The early ones strike the hardest, like the day my parents were killed.
“When Harristan first named me as King’s Justice,” I say quietly, “I was fifteen. I knew what the role required, of course, but in the beginning, the people weren’t very sick. No one was stealing Moonflower petals. I was never forced to do anything truly terrible. I thought I could skip being cruel by being creative, like sentencing people to chisel a thousand bricks from the side of a mountain. I never had to order an execution. I never wanted to order an execution.” I snort at my naivete. “I remember thinking that maybe we’d get lucky, that no one would ever do anything truly bad.”
We walk in silence for a moment. She’s patient, waiting for the rest of my story.
But she knows where I ended up. Maybe that’s what’s making all of this harder to say.
“More and more people began to get sick,” I say, “and the Moonflower was found to cure the illness. Suddenly, it was a commodity.” I draw a long breath, remembering the fights that would break out in the street over rumor of a few petals. “The entire country was falling apart. Homes were being raided, false cures were being spread, Moonflower was being stolen. We were getting reports from consuls daily, about violence in their sectors as people fought to get access to a cure.” I shake my head, remembering one of the letters had a streak of blood down the side by the time it made its way to the palace. “It was . . . ?horrible.”
“I remember,” she whispers.
Of course she does. She was in the thick of it.
“Harristan had to take a stand,” I say.
“Which means you had to take a stand.”
Inod. I want to leave it there, but I still haven’t answered her question. “The first—” I hesitate. “The first . . . was a man who’d killed a child. His name was Jarrod Kannoly.” I don’t remember all their names, but his will be forever etched into my memories. “He said he didn’t mean to, that it was an accident, but . . .” I shrug and run a hand across the back of my neck. “Everyone says they didn’t mean to. But a woman had bought enough Moonflower for her family, and the man heard about it. He grabbed the little girl and said he’d cut her throat if the woman didn’t give him half.”
Tessa is staring at me. “And he did?”
I nod. “It happened in the Royal Sector, so they brought him right to the Hold. He was coated in blood.”
I still remember Harristan’s voice when he heard about it. Cory. We have to do something. The consuls are demanding action. We have to stop this.
We have to do something.
Meaning I had to do something.
“It was awful,” I whisper. There have been many since then, but the memory of that one is always the hardest. Maybe because it was the first. Maybe because of what he’d done. Maybe because of the knowledge that no matter what I did to him, it wouldn’t bring that little girl back to her mother.
I shake off the emotion. “I snuck out of the palace that night,” I say. “There was a part of me that wanted to run, to lose myself in the Wilds. But I couldn’t leave Harristan. You know.”
“I know.”
“I had silver in my pockets, and I just started leaving it anywhere it seemed it could do a bit of good. On windowsills, in doorways, in the pockets of laundry left out to dry. As many coins as I could carry.” I pause. “It was never enough. And I’d see the elites buying so much, so much more medicine than they needed.”
