My eyebrows rose.
“The road you rode in on—the Queen’s Road, they call it—runs near the village I grew up in. I often watched horses and carriages go by and wondered what it might be like to pass through the trellis gate into the castle.”
A lie? Could be, but it didn’t feel like one. I took another bite of the bread pudding and pictured the longing child she’d once been. Liora went silent, and I wondered at the queen who sat before me now. Intimate, vulnerable, her voice different. Not as high, melodic, as fairy-tale benevolent.
Not like Rhiannon. Nothing like Rhiannon.
I trusted that less.
When I didn’t speak, Liora said, “I imagine you’re wondering how I knew where to place the invitation.”
The invitation—? She meant the one I’d found tucked into the mirror. My gaze sharpened on her. A faint smile curled her pink lips.
“A mirror is irresistible to the lowborn,” she said. “In my village, we didn’t have mirrors. Glass was far too expensive, too fragile a thing.”
I might have been insulted. Mostly, I was awed. This queen perceived. Maybe too much—definitely too much. If she was six hundred years old, she had the wisdom of both lowborn and royal, of real coronations and shadow coronations, of a tapestry of court politics so long it rolled into the distance in my mind’s eye.
I lowered my spoon. Faun’s and Mirek’s advice floated forward; I tamped it down. I knew the kind of person I sat before. “I was attacked last night, through that same mirror.”
Liora had just pressed her spoon into her dish. She paused. Her gaze rose to me, and I saw genuine interest there.
“A mirror wraith,” I said.
“Really.” She took a bite, swallowed.She knows. She already knows.“Curious of you to bring a root system to light, especially to your host queen.”
A root system?—?
She read my face. “A scheme. A plot. Was it your dark-eyedveyrewho stopped it?”
So she was surprised not by the wraith, but by the fact I’d brought it up. I nodded.
She sat back, breaking her perfect posture for the first time. “I suppose you think it was me.”
“Actually, I don’t.” For the first time, I was certain I didn’t. Liora’s gaze had been unmistakable, unless she was a master performer. And while I believed she was very good at masks, I didn’t think that had been one.
Her eyebrows arched. “And why not?”
Better to be honest with a six-hundred-year-old queen. “Theway you’re sitting right now. The lowborn—it’s written all over you.”
She stared at me for a beat, two. Then she burst into a laugh. It was one of the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard, low and guttural. “The absolute cheek of you.”
I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say.
“In you come like a skittish mouse, not knowing which way is forward or back, which chair to take, which spoon to hold.” She gestured up and down at me. “And within five minutes here you are, assessing me.”
I set my hands in my lap. “Your Grace?—”
“No, no. We’ve passed that. You’re a lippy bitch, and you’ve spoken true. I can only imagine how Rhiannon felt. The only thing more frightening to a ruthless cunt like her is an even more ruthless cunt.”
I stared. Something rose in my chest, though I didn’t know whether it was fear or thrill.
Her head cocked to the side. “I heard you killed her with acid.”
I hesitated, then nodded. Though the acid had hardly felt like a part of me.
“Heard you slit her throat.”
I closed my eyes, shook my head. Put like that, I did sound like a ruthless cunt. “Yes, but not like that.”