Chapter 8: What the Wolf Knows

The maid was dead by morning.

The captain from the west wing brought the news himself, standing in our doorway with his helmet under his arm.

He was the same tired-looking man who had drawn his sword on me, and he did not meet my eyes.

"They found her in her cell at the second bell," he said. "Hanged by her own apron."

"She was never left alone," I said.

"She was, Highness. The guard on her door was sent to fetch bread."

"By whom?"

He said nothing at all, and I understood he had no intention of saying.

"You didn't chase me last night," I said.

"No."

"Why?"

"Your mother is a hard woman to leave on the floor," he said, and he put his helmet on and went away.

The door closed.

I stood in the middle of the room with my hands shaking.

"Skarn nightshade," I said. "My only witness is dead, and the poison was northern."

"It is not mine."

"It's yours."

"It grows in the north. So does the wolf on my crest."

"Don't be clever."

"Verena."

"You knew it by smell."

"I grew up with it. Half the children in Skarnholt were taught not to eat the red berries."

"You were carrying the antidote."

"I have carried it for ten years, since my brother died of it at my own table."

That stopped me for a moment.

It was the first time he had ever told me how his brother died.

But I was too angry to be sorry, and I knew the shape of his silence, and he was not telling me all of it.

"Who sent the girl with the cup?" I said. "Don't tell me you don't know."

"I know who would do it. My uncle commands the war party in Skarn, and he thinks the peace is a surrender."

"He has agents in your father's court."

"Does he have a girl in cream silk with a child's face?"

His jaw tightened.

"I don't know what Marigold is," he said.

It sounded true.

It sounded like a man standing at the edge of a drop, saying he had never seen the water.

"You looked at her like a ghost."

"I looked at her like a woman who had put a crown on her head that is not hers."

"That's not what I saw."

"Then you saw what you wanted to see."

"Swear it," I said. "Swear on your brother's grave that she is nothing to you."

He opened his mouth, and I watched him look for the words.

They did not come.

"I won't swear," he said at last.

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