Chapter 9: The Flower Girl

Ximena's POV

Inés Lorca came to the kitchen door at dawn, alone, with her hood up.

I knew she would.

I had not slept.

I sat at the long scrubbed table in my gown with a loaf and a crock of butter.

There was a dish of honey too.

I waved her to the stool across from me.

"Sit," I said. "Eat."

"I can't."

"Then watch me."

I tore the loaf in half and buttered it thickly.

Inés sat down on the very edge of the stool, with her hands knotted in her lap.

She was small and slight, with light brown curls under the hood and freckles across her nose.

She looked about twelve.

She was twenty.

"The cake was for you," she said.

"I know."

"No. I mean, I knew," she said. "The day before the tea, the Queen's maid told me to say you had sent it."

"I was to say I saw you give the baker the powder." She swallowed. "I said I couldn't."

"What did the Queen say?" I asked.

"She said I was an ungrateful girl who had been sold flowers on a corner until she took me in."

Her voice shook.

"She said she could put me back on the corner."

I put the bread down.

"Tell me the rest," I said.

She told me, in a low fast whisper, with the honey going stiff in the dish.

The gown had been mine. She said it plainly, and I nodded, because I had admitted it.

But the push on the orchard stair, she said, had been the Queen's maid, in a gray cloak, behind her.

The poison for the dog had been the maid's.

The nightshade in the Prince's cup at the hunt had been the maid's too.

Inés had been ordered to say it was mine.

"I signed the page," Inés said. "The one you were charged on."

"The Queen's clerk put it in front of me, and I signed it."

She lifted her face.

It was wet, and she did nothing about it.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I thought, if I do what she says, I'll be safe."

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Wrote Me Fat and Doomed, So the Judge Paid My Fine from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.