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I shook my head. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t damn innocent people. There had to be another way.
“They can stage Feral attacks at existing attack sites,” I said, my voice weak, and once again looked at Hills. “But no new attacks. No new deaths.”
Mother had said I would need to commit fully if this plan were to work, and I was prepared to do it. But I was committed to doing it my way—without throwing away the lives of innocents. I may not have been crowned yet, but I was the queen regent of the Corvo Kingdom, and if I wanted to retain the people’s loyalty through the trying times that lay ahead, my reign needed to be built on a platform of honor and trust from the very beginning. From this moment.
“Very well,” Hills said, her tone flat. “We’ll focus on planting reports of organized Feral attacks for now.” She bowed stiffly, then turned and strode away.
I watched her leave the room. “She doesn’t agree with my decision.”
“She’s not queen,” Garath said, rising only to lower himself down to sit beside me on the window seat.
My attention drifted over Mother, then Garath, and landed on the window. From my vantage point, I could see the entire western portion of the city as well as the wildlands across the strait to the north, beyond the water glittering in the afternoon sunlight. Fin’s wildlands. His people had abandoned their settlement concealed within those coastal woods nearly a decade ago, but part of me still believed that if I stared hard enough, if I searched long enough, I would find him out there.
“I’m not queen, either,” I reminded Garath, glancing at him sidelong. “Not yet.” Not until Mother was gone. Dead. Not until I was crowned.
I drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly, hoping to release some of the dreadful anticipation knotting my gut. It wouldn’t be long now.
“I need to think,” I said, standing abruptly.
Sid stirred on the windowsill, fluffing his feathers to prepare for flight. He hopped closer to me, then spread his wings and flapped once, propelling himself toward me.
I held out my arm so he could land. His talons dug into the bracers on my forearms and caught on the ridges of hard leather sewn into the upper portion of my tunic sleeves as he climbed my arm to take his usual position on my reinforced shoulder.
Garath rose as well. “A walk around the grounds?”
I shook my head and looked at Garath, offering him a pitiful excuse for a smile. “I don’t want to go too far from her,” I said, glancing at Mother’s bed. “Besides, Alastor could return any day now.” I never liked to stray far from Liam when that man was potentially nearby.
“Come with me,” Garath said, starting for the doorway to the sitting room, his leather armor creaking with each step. “I know just the place.”
I stared after Garath, thinking I didn’t deserve him. Not when, for five days, I had been withholding from him the essential rolehewould play in this delicate, complicated plan to save the kingdom.
Garath stopped in the doorway and looked back at me. He cast such an imposing figure that part of me believed he truly could shield me from all harm. I grasped that illusion tightly, holding it close as I followed him out of Mother’s bedroom.
* * *
I peered around Mother’s study from the wingback chair at her desk. Walls of packed bookshelves surrounded me, and beneath the scent of woodsmoke from the fireplace, my nose detected the hint of vanilla that was ever-present in this room. It was the books. Mother explained once when I asked her about the faint but distinctive scent. Many were ancient, from before the Turn, and apparently, as the paper bound within their covers aged, it released the familiar, sweet notes of vanilla.
Garath had taken up a post at the door, positioning himself between me and the most likely source of threats. And Sid dozed on the mantel, his beak tucked against his wing, soaking up the heat drifting up from the fireplace below him.
The surface of Mother’s desk was barren, as usual, the scuffed expanse of oak on full display. How many of the Corvo queens had sat in this exact spot, planning and plotting? How many awful decisions had they made in the name of protecting their kingdom? How many would have ordered the rangers to stage additional Feral attacks?
Was I making a mistake by holding back? Would doing the “right” thing result in disastrous consequences?
I reached for the handle to the desk’s top drawer, unsurprised it didn’t budge when I pulled. Mother had kept her desk locked for as long as I could remember.
I withdrew a pair of decorative hair pins from my low bun and leaned forward, fitting the pins into the lock. It had been ages since I last picked a lock, and I was rusty, taking far longer than I should have. But after a couple of minutes, the lock clicked, releasing the drawer.
I glanced at Garath. He was watching me, the corners of his mouth tensed like he was suppressing his amusement at my unqueen-like behavior.
My attention drifted back down to the drawer as I pulled it open, and my brow furrowed. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but not this. Not an assortment of mundane desk supplies and writing utensils.
Frowning, I pulled the drawer open as far as it would go. It stopped short at roughly the halfway point. I fished out the pens, scissors, and other supplies, setting everything on top of the desk. Then, I felt around the drawer, searching for a false bottom or back panel, but nothing unusual was found. There was no obvious reason why it had been locked. It was just a drawer.
I shut it and moved on. The next drawer down was filled with a half dozen thin, leather-bound books. Ledgers, it turned out. I would need to look through those more closely, but not today. I returned the ledgers to the drawer after briefly skimming through each and moved on to the next drawer.
This one was filled with loose sheets of paper. I leafed through them and found reports on many things relating to the kingdom, from the dangerous to the mundane.
The bottom drawer was filled with manila file folders, each folder labeled in Mother’s slanted hand with the name of a location within the Seven Kingdoms, most within Corvo Kingdom.
