Chapter 11: Sister

"Say what you mean," I said.

Marigold smiled at me in the mirror, small and thin.

"I mean you've been asking everyone the wrong questions."

"Who are you?"

"Your sister."

"Who are you?"

"You'd have to ask the one man in this palace who can answer that, and you won't, because you're afraid of the answer."

She rose from the stool and came around the dressing table, quite slowly.

She was a full head shorter than me, and she looked up without any fear at all.

"Here is what will happen," she said. "On Midwinter Eve you will not stand in the great hall."

"You will be on the north road in your husband's carriage."

"You will go quietly, and your mother will be given a pleasant house in the south, and she will live to be an old, shouting woman."

"And if I don't?"

"Then she'll have a very bad winter."

She said it softly, sweetly, and her eyes did not leave my face.

"The physician is mine," she added. "He is rather fond of me. He'll tell you this tonic is harmless, and so it is."

"The spoon, however, is entirely up to me."

My hands had gone cold, and my heart was knocking at my ribs.

I thought of my mother in the grey chair, spitting syrup into a dying fern.

"You wrote my death," I said.

"Did I?"

"The green wax. The report from the border. You wrote it."

She tipped her head to one side.

"I have a very fine hand," she said. "Better than the Chancellor's. He gave me the words, and I made them pretty."

"I wrote 'she died quietly, with no pain, thinking of home.'"

"Do you know I cried while I wrote it?"

"I did truly cry."

"You were my sister."

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