I don’t know what happens next, only that the rest of the world gets blurry and I wake up in a stiff bed and it’s early morning and my head is an absolute, pounding mess and my mouth is filled with cotton. The light outside has streamed through the blinds in stripes of blue light. It’s early. I wrap my arms around my head, fighting against the rolling nausea. I’d had alcohol before, certainly, but I’d never drunk to excess before. The sensation was… horrific. I didn’t want to repeat it. I roll my feet onto the floor and push myself into a seated position. I should be more tired, I realize. I’d been in a wagon cooking under the hot sun for two weeks, and before then I spent months in a prison cell. This was the first time I’d slept in a bed. As stiff as it was, it felt more luxurious than the feather beds with down pillows back in the castle.

I push myself to stand, I need to find some water. I get to the door and turn the knob and turn. My heart sinks. It’s locked. Fury rises in me. Did they lie to just me or did they lie to all of us? Was it because I was the missing tyrant of the kingdom? Was it because I wanted to raise an army against my brother? Maybe I’d said too much, revealed too much of my hand.

There’s nothing to do about it right this moment, I tell myself. Someone will be along sometime to fill me in on what went wrong–send me to my death, if necessary. In the meantime, I need to find some water. I take in my surroundings. The little bed is pushed up against the wall opposite a window that looks down into the street below. It’s a single pane of glass that doesn’t appear to open. The sheets on the bed are a light blue cotton. There’s a small nightstand by the bed with a candle holder and a stack of books. My eyes greedily eat them, in spite of my thirst. I hadn’t held a book in so long. There’s a vanity in the corner, with a dirty, rusted mirror. It’s obviously been well-loved over many years, repainted and the metal of the drawer handles oiled fairly recently. I’m most interested in the carafe and mug that sits on it, though. I pour a mug of clear liquid and smell it. Judging it clear, I take a tentative sip. Just water, I gather, and down the remainder of the carafe of cool water. It helps a little with the pounding in my head, and my tongue seems to move a little better in my mouth. I’ll need some more water soon enough, but it’s still early in the morning. It will be awhile before anyone comes to see me.

I pick up one of the books on the nightstand, eyeing the cover, but the title is too faded for me to read. I shrug and open it, climbing back into the bed and pulling the blankets over my legs. I’ll just read until I get tired, I decide. If they don’t come before then, at least I’ll be able to sleep some of the time away.

It’s when the door slams downstairs an hour later that I realize I dozed off. “Where is Maggie?” I hear a feminine voice grumble loudly.

I don’t hear the response, only making out the cadence of an unfamiliar male voice.

She lowers her voice, so I can’t hear what’s said, and they go back and forth for a little while. Finally, she sighs and stomps up the stairs. I hear some footsteps creep out from another room down the hall and meet her on the landing outside my room. “You called?” The woman, who sounds more familiar now that she’s closer, demands.

“We needed to talk,” I hear Maggie’s voice. “He’s probably still asleep.”

“I was still asleep,” Sybil Whitman sighs.

“I’m glad you were still in town.”

There’s a pause, and I imagine some intense stare down. When Sybil speaks again, it’s tired. “Why did you send Via?”

“I had to be here,” Maggie says, an apologetic tone threading through her voice. “I needed to be here, make sure he didn’t make a run for it.”

“Who? Haven’t they been freed, one way or the other? Isn’t that what we agreed on?”

“Slow down, Syb. There’s a whole lot to catch you up on, can we take this downstairs?”

“Are they or are they not free?”

“They’re free.”

“Then why was I woken up at dawn?”

Maggie sighs. “Stop it, Sybil. Let’s go downstairs, get you some breakfast to cure whatever this is, and then I’ll fill you in on why exactly one of your prisoners is up for debate.”

Sybil sighed. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I haven’t spent the night with Haven in awhile, what with all of the…” her voice drifts off.

“I know, I wouldn’t have sent for you if it wasn’t important. Can I get you something to eat? The sooner we get this sorted out, the better. He’s probably still dead asleep.”

“Alright. Thank you, Mags. I’m sorry for the attitude, I do appreciate what you did for me yesterday.”

Maggie chuckles. “I owe you for the work you’re going to put them to. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Their feet retreat down the stairs and I set the book on my face. That answered my question as to whether or not the others were still free to roam. I feel relieved. As much as I’d like to be able to tell my story on my own terms, truth serum or not, I had already done the best I could. Now that I had put my best foot forward, there was very little left to do but wait. My stomach rumbles, and my mind drifts to the thought of the pair of them eating dinner downstairs. I hope they finish quickly and offer me something to eat. What I wouldn’t give for a stale heel of bread and moldy cheese.

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I cross my hands over my stomach, letting my thoughts drift from food to the elaborately decorated hallways of home. Of my brother, Herman, and my father, and the task ahead of me. I’d fortified the capital far better than it had been when I’d claimed the throne, and I doubted that Herman had changed much since I had ruled a few months ago, but I also didn’t know how long I would need to prove myself here in Reisau.

I must have drifted back to sleep again, because when the knock comes at the door, the sun is higher in the sky, as if I had only blinked.

I groan and sit up, my head throbbing with the extra sleep and the hang over from the truth serum. “Come in?” I ask, because I don’t know if it’s even within my power to allow anyone into a room that I’ve obviously been confined in. I appreciate the effort, though.

The door knob turns, sticks, and a half-grumbled: “Oh. Right.” Sounds through the door. I hear a key enter the lock, and now the handle turns and the pale woman I’d searched for years for steps into the room, looking around blearily. Her raven hair is messy and falls around her in a waterfall of purple-black. “Hi,” she says awkwardly.

There’s a feeling in my chest at the sight of her: an inadequacy compared to what I expected I would feel when I met her. Years ago, I would have been filled with a righteous fury, a proud success. Now, there is the ghost of that feeling, coupled with a deep, sinking sensation of loss. She represents everything I thought I knew being crushed under the weight of the reality that I had been misguided. She was the personification of all of my wrongdoings, all of my missteps, all of my failings. “Whitman.”

Her lips quirk at this, but her dark eyes still look through me, face unreadable. “De Cardenas.”

“I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” I admit, trying to push down the uneasiness under lighthearted humor.

“I’ve been hiding from you for a long time,” she tilts her head. “You’re shorter than I imagined, actually.”

I blink, my brain falling blank. I don’t know how to respond to that. Had she never seen me? I suppose there weren’t many opportunities for my portrait to make the rounds. Had I even been painted since the wars?

She waves her hand through the air and gestures to the chair at the vanity. “May I?”

“Please.” I scoot to the end of the bed, running my hand over my ruffled hair. I’m in desperate need of a haircut. And a shave. I probably stink to high heaven. She watches me perched sideways on the chair, fist pressed against her temple with her elbow looped over the back of the chair. I wonder what I look like from her eyes. I hook my fingers together over my knees and cough, opening my mouth to speak, but she beats me to it.

“You want an army.”

I close my mouth. She’s direct. “Yes,” I admit. “But I need to prove myself to you first.”

She nods, “You’re a smart kid, when you’re not inciting genocide.”

Ashamed, I look at my palms. “More than anything,” I add, “I want to redeem myself. I want to fix the damage I did.”

She shakes her head. “You did do a lot of that. The damage thing.” She sighs. “Look, I made a deal. I won’t go into the details of that deal, but I can’t be talking to you.”

I frown, not understanding. “You can’t talk to me?”

She shakes her head. “You’re too important. Time and space. Something or another,” she waves her hand around randomly. “So you need to not be important.”

I squint. “What?”

“No army,” she tells me. “No taking back your throne. No ideas of grandeur. No trying to change the world. Leave it the way it is, and I’ll let you work for me.”

I stare at her. “You don’t want me to fix what I did?”

She waves this away. “You’ll do it somewhere else if not here. I won’t be involved.”

I don’t understand. “Your friend, she’s a zombie–”

“Oh, I have more than her,” she gives me a cold smile that is all teeth and I feel a shiver run down my spine. Simon said that necromancers were harmless–reverent even. In this moment, I’m not sure if I believe him.

I swallow down the bite of fear and continue: “Aren’t you worried that they will be hauled away from you? That you will be executed?”

“Will you tell anyone where I am?”

I hesitate, searching deep into myself for the answer. I’d made a promise to myself that I would be honest from here on out, and I don’t see the point of lying, “No,” I say finally.

She shrugs. “Then I have nothing to worry about.” She stands. “It was nice meeting you, Antonio. Good luck.”

Anxiety bubbles up in me as she makes her way to the door. “Wait,” I stand. “I have nowhere to go where I won’t be…” killed? Arrested?

She pauses, waiting to hear the rest of it. “Okay,” I tell her. “No armies.”

She turns to me, hands on her hips. “What makes you think I believe that?” She shakes her head. “That kind of ambition, it’s rooted in your soul, Antonio. And it’s righteous, it’s justified, and it’s correct. With me, you would need to kill it, at the detriment of the rest of Led.” Her dark eyes scrutinize me.

I drop my eyes to my lap. I don’t have an answer for her.

“Besides,” she continues. “Why would I want to follow a regent that cannot commit to something so pivotal as fixing his own mistakes?” She shakes her head. “Why would I want that?”

I chew on my bottom lip. “I’m desperate,” I tell her, point-blank. “I don’t know who I can trust, I don’t know where I can go where I am safe.”

She nods. “Sounds like something you should sort out.” She opens the door.

“I’ll leave.”

Her eyebrow quirks up, questioning.

“I’ll leave,” I explain, “When I’ve built my confidence. I won’t tell anyone. I won’t ask anyone to join me, I will sneak away in the middle of the night when I’m ready and find my army somewhere else. Will that satisfy your terms?”

She considers it for a moment. “You’re really that desperate, aren’t you?” she mutters.

“I am.”

Her head whips around and my gaze is dragged into the depths of her eyes. I can’t tell if they’re dark brown or black, but I suddenly feel like I am falling: like she can see the very core of me. My hair raises on my neck, and I feel like I can’t breathe.

Her eyebrows drop into a frown, breaking the spell. “We’ll see.”

She closes the door behind her without another word, and I am left to sit, stunned, in the cold silence she leaves behind.

I don’t understand.

I stare at the space she’s vacated in bewilderment. I hear the distant twitter of birds, and people talking down the street. Children giggle in the street and I hear Sybil’s voice talking to a woman outside and the sound disappears. Time moves around me, but I feel like I am stuck in a time bubble.

It takes me a long time to realize she didn’t lock the door behind her.