The candle guttered in its holder, sending shadows crawling across the green baize of the card table like desperate fingers. Cordelia Ashworth watched them move and understood, with the particular clarity that comes at the edge of ruin, that she was about to lose everything her grandmother had spent a lifetime building.
Across from her, Lord Marcus Sterling smiled. The expression was a work of art, all warmth and ease, the smile of a man who had already counted his winnings. The candlelight caught the silver threading his temples and made his dark eyes gleam with something that looked, if one were charitable, like satisfaction.
"Your house, Lady Cordelia." Sterling laid down his cards with a whisper of cardstock on felt. A king and queen of hearts, mirrored. "I believe that settles our little game."
Cordelia did not touch her own cards. She had not needed to look. She had felt the turn of fortune three hands ago, when Sterling had leaned forward with that particular tilt of his head that suggested interest, and she had ignored the warning because her pride would not let her fold.
The Ashworth estate. Twelve hundred acres of rolling pasture and ancient woodland. The stone manor with its vaulted library where three generations of Ashworth women had hidden books from censuring husbands. The orchards, the mill, the village of two hundred souls who called themselves Ashworth folk and meant it.
She had wagered it all on a single hand.
"Lady Cordelia." Sterling's voice carried a note of something almost like concern. Almost. "The terms of our wager are quite clear. You cannot be unaware of what this loss signifies."
"I am perfectly aware, my lord." Her voice emerged steady. She was proud of that. "I am aware that my father's ancestral home now belongs to you, along with all its holdings, its debts, and its people."
"And yet you do not weep. You do not swoon." He tilted his head, studying her the way one might study a curious insect. "I confess, I expected more drama from the occasion."
"I imagine you did."
The other players had retreated to the edges of the room, gathering their coats and their dignity with equal haste. They would not want to be remembered as witnesses to Lady Cordelia Ashworth's downfall. They would not want Sterling to remember them at all, unless it was as useful men in useful places.
Cordelia gathered her cards and set them face down on the table. She did not let her hands shake. She had learned, during her years at court, that the appearance of composure was itself a kind of armor, and she intended to wear hers to the last.
"My mother used to say," she said, and her voice was warm despite everything, "that a woman who loses gracefully has won something the winner can never take."
Sterling's smile did not waver. "Your mother was a poet. A lovely one, by all accounts." He rose from his chair with the unhurried grace of a man who owned the world and knew it. "I shall have the papers drawn up by morning. I trust you will sign them without, ah, theatrical protest."
"Without protest of any kind, my lord. I gave my word."
"Indeed you did. Your word is the one thing of yours I have not acquired tonight." He offered a bow, a perfect courtier's bow, and withdrew toward the door. "Good evening, Lady Cordelia. Do give my regards to your father. When last we spoke, he was in somewhat reduced circumstances. I imagine he will be more so now."
The door closed behind him with a soft click that sounded, to Cordelia's ears, like the closing of a tomb.
She sat at the card table for a long time after the candles burned low. The wax pooled on the brass holders and solidified into pale sculptures. The room smelled of old smoke and spilt wine and the particular mustiness of a gaming house at three in the morning. Her maid, Bess, hovered near the servants' entrance, wringing her hands in her apron.
"My lady. My lady, we must go. The carriage is waiting."
"Yes." Cordelia did not move. "Bess, how long have you been with the Ashworth household?"
"Since I was twelve, my lady. Near twenty years."
"And your mother before you?"
"Yes, my lady. She was lady's maid to your grandmother."
"Then you have known Moorhaven Manor longer than I have." Cordelia finally looked up. Her eyes were dry. She had not allowed them to be otherwise. "I have lost it. Tonight. In a card game. To Lord Marcus Sterling."
Bess made a small, wounded sound. "My lady."
"I had to, Bess. I had debts of my own that were about to come due, and I thought, I thought perhaps luck would turn. I thought I understood the game." A breath of something that might have been a laugh escaped her, sharp and joyless. "I thought I understood a great many things."
"What will you do, my lady?"
The question hung in the air between them. What would she do? She had no husband, no brothers to take up the burden. Her father was sunk in his books and his bitterness, her elder sisters married off to men who wanted nothing more to do with the Ashworth fortunes. She had nothing but her name, her education, and the crumbling pile of stones that was Moorhaven Manor itself, the original seat of the family, too poor and too remote to interest a man like Sterling.
Not yet, at any rate.
"I will go home," Cordelia said, rising at last. "I will go home and I will think. And I will find a way out of this, Bess. I swear it."
"Yes, my lady."
The words tasted like ash in her mouth. She had learned, during her years at court, that oaths were easy things to make and impossible things to keep. She had watched clever men and cleverer women promise the moon and deliver nothing but ruin. She had learned that hope was a luxury and trust was a trap, and that the only safe harbor in the world was one's own will and one's own wits.
She would need both now, and more besides.
The carriage rattled through the pre-dawn streets of the capital, past shuttered shopfronts and sleeping beggars and the occasional lurching figure of a night watchman making his rounds. Cordelia watched the city pass through the rain-streaked glass and thought of nothing at all, which was itself a kind of luxury.
When she reached the small townhouse the Ashworths still kept in the city, she found her father waiting in the study. Sir Geoffrey Ashworth sat before a dead fire, a book open on his knee, his white hair wild and uncombed. He had been handsome once, her father, and traces of it remained in the cut of his jaw and the high bridge of his nose. But his eyes were the eyes of a man who had retreated from the world and found no peace in the retreat.
"You have been playing cards," he said without looking up.
"Yes, Father."
"With Sterling."
"Yes."
A long silence. The fire popped and settled. Outside, a dog barked and was answered by another.
"How much?"
"Everything. The estate. The lands. The village." Cordelia kept her voice level. "Everything but the house itself. He did not want Moorhaven Manor. He said it was not worth the paper the deed would be written on."
Sir Geoffrey turned a page of his book. His hands did not shake, and Cordelia wondered if he had simply ceased to feel things, or if he had learned, as she had, to wear the appearance of composure like armor.
"You have ruined us, Cordelia."
"Yes, Father."
"And what do you propose to do about it?"
The question was not cruel. It was the question of a man who had run out of answers of his own and was throwing the problem to whoever would take it. Cordelia had been taking his problems since she was seventeen years old, since her mother had died and her elder sisters had married and left her alone with a grieving man and a dying estate.
"I propose to think, Father. And then I propose to act." She paused at the door. "I will not bring further shame upon the family. You have my word."
Sir Geoffrey said nothing. The fire popped and settled again. Cordelia climbed the stairs to her own room and closed the door behind her and sat on the edge of her bed in the dark, listening to the rain begin against the window, and she did not permit herself the indulgence of weeping.
She had learned, during her years at court, that tears were a currency, and she would not pay them out where they could not be counted.
In the morning, she would write to her elder sister, the Countess of Westmere, and beg what help she could. In the morning, she would go to the family solicitor and learn exactly how deep the ruin went. In the morning, she would begin the work of picking through the wreckage of her life and seeing what might yet be salvaged.
But for now, in the dark, she sat very still and let the rain speak for her, and she thought of nothing at all, which was itself a kind of mercy.
Across the city, in a chamber hung with green velvet and lit by a hundred perfumed candles, Lord Marcus Sterling sat before a mirror and brushed his hair with slow, measured strokes. His valet hovered nearby, anxious to be dismissed.
"My lord. Shall I prepare the bed?"
"In a moment. I have letters to write."
The valet bowed and withdrew. Sterling continued to brush his hair and smiled at his own reflection, a smile that held no warmth at all.
"Twelve hundred acres," he murmured to the empty room. "And the gratitude of a family that will owe me everything for generations to come."
He set down the brush and reached for his quill. There were letters to write, plans to set in motion, threads to pull. The Ashworth girl had been foolish, but her foolishness served his purposes well. A ruined family was a compliant family, and a compliant family could be made to dance to any tune he cared to play.
The candle burned steady and did not gutter. The night was his, as all nights were his, and he intended to use every hour of it.
The bells of St. Cedric's tolled six times as Cordelia Ashworth lifted the latch of her rented room and stepped out into the grey wash of a London morning. She wore the brown wool dress of a country apothecary, her hair bound up beneath a plain linen cap, and across her back hung a worn leather satchel stocked with dried herbs, bandages, and a small mortar and pestle that had belonged to her mother. The disguise was good. She had practiced the stoop in her shoulders, the careful economy of her movements, the downcast eyes of a tradeswoman with no business above her station.
She had walked this path before, years ago, when her father first brought her to court to present her to Queen Margarethe. That Cordelia had worn silk the color of crushed roses and had known, with the unshakeable conviction of a girl not yet seventeen, that the world was a place that bent to those who studied it carefully enough. She remembered the weight of those expectations now only as an ache in the chest, distant and slightly unreal, like a fever dream half-remembered.
The palace rose above the rooftops, its grey stone spires lost in the low cloud that clung to the city. Cordelia kept her eyes forward and let her feet find their own way through the crowded streets, past the costermongers and the link boys and the beggars who crouched in every other doorway with their hands out and their stories ready. She smelled coal smoke and river mud and the sharp, yeasty warmth of the bakehouse on Cheapside, and she kept her mouth set in the patient, unremarkable line of a woman who had somewhere dull to be.
At the palace gates, she joined the queue of tradespeople waiting to present themselves to the steward of the household. A carter with a load of firewood. Two women from the laundry with baskets of mended linen. A man who mended pots and carried his tools in a canvas roll. Cordelia waited her turn and did not look up at the carved lions that flanked the gate, though she felt their stone gaze upon her like a hand pressed to the back of her neck.
"Your business?" The steward was a thin man with a face like a hatchet and ink-stained fingers.
"Herbs and simples, sir. I am told the palace gardens have need of a woman who knows her roots and her tinctures."
"Who told you so?"
"An aunt who keeps a stall in Southwark, sir. She had it from the under-cook, who had it from the head gardener."
The steward grunted, made a mark in his ledger, and waved her through. "Through the bailey, turn left at the fountain, follow the wall to the kitchen court. The head gardener's name is Whitfield. Mind you don't wander."
She did not wander. She walked with her eyes on the ground, the picture of humble purpose, and she counted every doorway she passed and every turning of the corridor, building the palace in her mind as her father had taught her to do, brick by brick and room by room. The fountain in the central court ran with water clear as glass, and for a moment she allowed herself to look up and see the place where she had once believed she belonged.
The kitchen court was a chaos of noise and smell, roasting meat and boiling stock and the constant clatter of pots being moved and set down. Cooks shouted at each other across the heat. A boy turned a spit with the glazed expression of one who has counted the revolutions of ten thousand birds. Cordelia found Whitfield in his shirt sleeves, kneeling beside a bed of winter cabbages and pulling weeds with the fury of a man who had taken their neglect as a personal affront.
"You the new woman?" he said without looking up.
"Yes, sir."
"Can you tell a foxglove from a comfrey?"
"Yes, sir."
"Can you keep your mouth shut when the fine folk pass through?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then you're hired. There's a plot by the south wall that's gone to seed, and the lavender hasn't been cut back in two years. Start there. You eat in the kitchen at noon. Don't steal."
Cordelia set down her satchel and began to work. The soil was cold beneath her fingers and smelled of rot and last year's frost, but she found a comfort in the labor that she had not expected. Her hands remembered this. They had always known what to do in a garden, even when the rest of her had forgotten how to be still.
She worked through the morning, cutting back the lavender, turning the soil, pulling the dead stalks from the herb beds. The sun came and went behind the clouds and came again, pale and thin as watered milk. When the bells of the chapel rang nine, she straightened her back and looked up, and saw that she was not alone.
Two men stood at the edge of the garden, watching her. One was tall and broad and wore the green and gold of a knight of the household, his face weathered to the color of old oak by years in the northern borderlands. The other was younger, slighter, dressed more finely, and stood with the loose-limbed grace of a man who had never been required to labor at anything. The younger man's cheeks were flushed, and there was a brightness in his eyes that Cordelia recognized at once. Prince Edmund Thornwood had been drinking.
"Ah," said Prince Edmund, with the pleased surprise of a man who has discovered a new bauble in a shop he thought he knew. "Who are you?"
Cordelia dropped into the lowest reverence she knew, the kind reserved for the highest in the land. "An apothecary, your Highness. Sent to assist in the gardens."
"An apothecary. How very useful." Edmund smiled at her with the warm, unguarded friendliness that had always been his weakness. "We have been feeling poorly of late. Perhaps you might be of service."
The knight said nothing. He was watching Cordelia with a stillness that had nothing to do with courtesy and everything to do with the long habit of a man who had learned to count threats before he counted breaths. His hand rested on the pommel of his sword, and his eyes, pale and hard as winter sky, did not move from her face.
"Your Highness is kind," Cordelia murmured into the dirt.
"We are kind," Edmund agreed, with a little laugh that was already a little too loud. "Reed, do say something pleasant. You frighten the woman."
The knight, Reed, said nothing. He inclined his head a fraction of an inch and turned his gaze at last toward the path that led back to the palace. "Your Highness has a tasting at noon."
"Ah. Yes. The wine. Do you know, Reed, I believe I have already had a glass or two."
"I am aware, your Highness."
"You are always aware. It is your most tiresome quality."
Reed said nothing to that either, but his mouth moved in a way that might, in a less guarded man, have been called a smile.
Prince Edmund clapped his hands together, delighted with himself. "Very well. We shall go and be tasted at. Apothecary, if you would care to join us, we should be glad of a physician's eye."
Cordelia felt the words land in her stomach like a stone dropped into still water. She had not planned for this. She had planned for beds of lavender and a quiet corner in which to gather intelligence, for the slow patient work of listening and watching. She had not planned for an invitation to sit with a prince at a royal tasting, to be noticed, to be remembered.
But the door had opened, and she had been trained since childhood to walk through every door that opened.
"Your Highness does me too much honor."
"We do ourselves honor, we hope. Come. Reed will fetch you a chair."
Reed looked at her once more, long and measuring, and then turned and walked ahead to open the gate.
The tasting was held in the lesser dining hall, a chamber of pale stone and tall windows that overlooked the river. A long table had been laid with five settings, each bearing a different vintage of wine in a crystal glass, and behind each glass stood a servant in the green and gold of the household. At the head of the table sat a man Cordelia did not need to be told was Lord Marcus Sterling. He wore black velvet, and his face was the kind of face that poets would later describe as carved from marble by a sculptor who had studied only triumph. He was already drinking.
"Ah, the prince," Sterling said, rising with a grace that was almost theatrical. "And our good Sir Geoffrey. And a new face. How delightful."
"This is the apothecary, my lord," Edmund said, taking his seat with the loose ease of a man who has not yet learned to fear his own glass. "She has come to tend the gardens."
Sterling's gaze moved to Cordelia, and she felt the weight of it like a hand at her throat. His eyes were pale grey and perfectly still, and he smiled at her as a man smiles at a card he had not expected to be dealt but intends to play nonetheless.
"An apothecary," he repeated. "How very useful. We have all manner of ailments in this court. Do sit, my dear. You look as though you have been standing in cold soil all morning."
Cordelia sat. The chair was higher than she expected, and her feet dangled above the rushes on the floor. She folded her hands in her lap and kept her face still and her eyes lowered and felt, with the keen instinct of a woman raised in a house where every conversation was a kind of war, that she had walked into the wrong room at exactly the right time.
Edmund reached for the first glass and drank half of it in a single motion. "Good," he pronounced, smacking his lips with the satisfaction of a child presented with a sweet. "What is it, Sterling?"
"A Margaux, your Highness. Forty years in the bottle."
"Ah. Then we must have another."
Sterling inclined his head, and a servant refilled the glass. Reed, who had taken a seat at the far end of the table, watched the servant's hand with the unblinking attention of a hawk watching a field.
The second glass was a Beaune. Edmund drank it more slowly, rolling the wine on his tongue with the air of a connoisseur who had read about connoception but never quite achieved it. He pronounced it excellent, and Sterling smiled, and a third glass was poured.
The third glass was a deep red from the southern hills, and the moment it touched Edmund's lips, Cordelia saw the change.
It came quickly. One moment Edmund was smiling at something Sterling had said; the next, his hand had gone to his throat, and his face had lost all its color. The glass slipped from his fingers and shattered on the stone floor, and the wine spread across the rushes like a stain of dark blood.
"Your Highness," Reed was on his feet before the glass had finished breaking. "Your Highness."
Edmund tried to speak. No sound came. His eyes rolled up into his head, and he slumped forward in his chair, and Sir Geoffrey caught him before he could strike the table. The knight lowered the prince to the floor with the practiced ease of a man who had carried wounded men from many fields, and his hand went to Edmund's throat, feeling for the pulse.
Sterling had not moved. He sat at the head of the table with his glass still in his hand and his face perfectly composed, and he watched the prince's body with the patient interest of a man observing an experiment whose outcome he had already calculated.
"Fetch the physician," Reed said, without looking up. His voice was low and tight and utterly under control. "And the king. Now."
The room erupted into noise. Servants ran. Sterling set down his glass with a soft click and rose, smoothing the front of his doublet with hands that did not tremble at all.
"A tragedy," he said softly, to no one in particular. "How very sad."
Cordelia was on her knees beside the prince before she knew she had moved. Her hands found his wrist, and her fingers found the pulse, and the pulse was there but it was wrong. It beat in a rhythm she did not recognize, fast and then slow and then fast again, like a bird trapped in a closed room.
She looked up at Reed, and their eyes met across the body of the prince, and in that moment she understood two things at once. The first was that the prince had been poisoned. The second was that the knight knew it too, and that he was looking at her not as a stranger but as the only other person in the room who had seen what she had seen.
And in the corner of her vision, she saw Lord Marcus Sterling smile.
The physician arrived within minutes, a stooped man named Aldous with ink-stained fingers and the harried expression of someone accustomed to being summoned for the wrong reasons. He knelt beside Edmund, his hands quick and practiced, his eyes flickering to the goblet on the floor and then away.
"How much did he drink?" Aldous asked, his voice professionally neutral.
"Perhaps half," Reed said. "I took it from him as soon as he fell."
Aldous nodded, but his hands were already reaching for Edmund's eyes, lifting the lids with thumb and forefinger to examine the pupils. Whatever he saw there made his mouth thin into a line.
"Clear the room," Aldous said quietly. "All of you. I need air and I need quiet."
Reed stood. The movement brought him to his full height, broad-shouldered and battle-worn, and for the first time Cordelia saw him as he must appear on a field, a man who had learned to make difficult decisions in the space between one breath and the next. He looked at Sterling. He looked at her. He made his choice.
"Not him," Reed said, and his hand gestured toward the chancellor without looking at him. "The rest of you, out. Lady Ashworth stays."
Sterling's composure flickered. It was the smallest thing, a tightening around the eyes that might have been surprise or might have been something colder, but Cordelia saw it, and she understood that Reed Thornwood had just made a very dangerous enemy.
"As you wish, Your Highness," Sterling said smoothly, and he bowed with perfect grace and walked toward the door. At the threshold he paused, and he looked back, and his gaze found Cordelia's across the length of the chamber. "I do hope the young prince recovers swiftly. He is so very precious to her majesty."
The door closed behind him with a soft click.
Cordelia's hands were still on Edmund's wrist. The pulse had steadied somewhat under her fingers, but it remained wrong, beating in a pattern she did not recognize, a rhythm that belonged to no illness she had ever read about in her books.
"Milk of the poppy," she said, the words coming out before she knew she had spoken them. "It binds the heart. If he has been given milk of the poppy, you must keep him still and keep him warm and give him nothing by mouth. The effects will pass in time, but the heart must not be startled."
Aldous looked up at her sharply. His eyebrows rose.
"And you know this how, my lady?"
"I read," Cordelia said.
Reed was watching her. She felt the weight of his attention like a hand on her shoulder, and she did not look up from Edmund's face.
"What else do you read?" Reed asked quietly.
"Poison," Cordelia said. "Among other things."
There was a silence, and in that silence the candles guttered and the fire cracked and Edmund Thornwood lay still on the floor with his breath shallow and his eyes closed and his young face slack and peaceful in a way it never had been in life.
Aldous began issuing orders. Reed knelt beside her again, and his presence was a solid thing, warm and grounded, and she was aware of him in a way that had nothing to do with the prince on the floor between them.
"Who?" Reed asked, his voice low enough that only she could hear. "Who would do this?"
Cordelia thought of the smile on Sterling's face. She thought of her own expulsion from court, of the charges that had been brought against her family, of the slow tightening of a noose she had not understood until it was already around her throat. She thought of the queen's cold, appraising gaze, and of the rumors that followed the king's declining health, and of the way Sterling had spoken of Edmund as though Edmund were a piece on a game board to be moved or sacrificed as the game required.
"I don't know," Cordelia said. It was not quite a lie. It was not quite the truth.
Reed's hand found hers on the floor beside Edmund's body. His fingers were rough with sword calluses and his grip was steady and his touch was warm, and for a moment, just a moment, she allowed herself to feel it.
"Stay," he said. It was not a question. "Stay and help him. I will make it worth your while."
"Your Highness," Aldous said urgently from across the room, "the king is asking for you."
Reed looked toward the door. He looked back at Cordelia. His hand tightened on hers once, briefly, and then released.
"Stay," he said again, and he rose and went to meet his father.
Cordelia remained on the floor beside the prince. She thought about running. She thought about the moonflower garden and the dark passage through the temple and the life she had been building for herself in the years since her expulsion, the careful, quiet life of a scholar who asked no questions and drew no attention and wanted nothing more than to be left alone with her books and her thoughts.
She thought about the smile on Sterling's face.
She stayed.
The night deepened. Cordelia sat beside Edmund's bed in a small antechamber off the great hall, watching the rise and fall of his chest and listening to the rhythm of his breathing. Aldous had given her a candle and a cup of bitter tea and instructions to keep the prince warm and to call if anything changed. Reed had not returned. The sounds of the court filtered through the walls, footsteps and murmurs and the occasional distant clang of steel, and Cordelia sat very still and watched the shadows move on the wall and thought about the man who had smiled while a boy lay dying on the floor.
Edmund stirred. His eyelids fluttered and his breath caught and his hand twitched against the coverlet, and Cordelia leaned forward, her own breath held, waiting to see if he would wake.
He did not wake. His eyes moved beneath closed lids, tracking some dream or some memory, and his lips parted, and he spoke a single word, soft and slurred and almost inaudible.
"Mother."
Cordelia's chest tightened. She had not thought about Edmund Thornwood as a person until this moment. He had been a figure in the background of her thoughts about the queen, a lever to be moved, a weakness to be exploited, a name on a list of targets. She had not thought about the fact that he was young, and frightened, and loved his mother, and had probably never in his life done anything to deserve what had been done to him tonight.
She reached out and took his hand. His fingers were cold and limp and she held them anyway, and she sat with him through the long hours until the candle guttered low and the first grey light of dawn crept through the window and painted the floor with the color of old ash.
She must have slept. She did not remember sleeping, but she woke with a start to the sound of the door opening, and Reed Thornwood stood in the doorway with his face grey with exhaustion and his hand still on the latch and his eyes finding hers across the dim room.
"He's alive," Cordelia said.
Reed crossed the room in three strides. He did not kneel. He stood beside the bed and looked down at his brother's face, and his expression was something she could not read, something between relief and grief and a fury so tightly controlled it was invisible to anyone who did not know to look for it.
"The king is dying," Reed said quietly. "Not tonight, not this week, but soon. The physicians agree. And when he dies, Edmund inherits a throne he cannot hold, surrounded by enemies he cannot see, protected by a mother who would sooner see him dead than see him fail."
Cordelia said nothing. There was nothing to say.
"The chancellor came to me in the night," Reed continued. "He offered me an alliance. He said that if I would support his claim to the regency, he would see to it that Edmund was kept safe. Kept comfortable. Kept out of the way."
Cordelia's hand tightened on Edmund's.
"What did you tell him?" she asked.
"I told him to go to hell," Reed said. "In slightly more diplomatic terms."
A laugh escaped her before she could stop it. It was a small, surprised sound, and Reed's mouth twitched in what might have been the beginning of a smile, and for a moment, just a moment, the weight of the night lifted and they were simply two tired people in a small room, watching over a sleeping boy and trying to decide what to do next.
"You cannot fight him alone," Cordelia said. "You know that."
"No," Reed agreed. "I cannot."
He looked at her. She looked back.
"I need someone I can trust," he said. "Someone who understands poison, and politics, and the way the court works. Someone who has nothing to lose and everything to gain and no particular fondness for Lord Marcus Sterling."
Cordelia thought of her family's ruined name. She thought of her own expulsion from court, the charges that had been brought against her, the slow grinding humiliation of being erased from the rolls of respectable society. She thought of her father's face when he had told her that the only way to save the rest of the family was for her to disappear, to go quietly into the provinces and live as a scholar and never come back.
She thought of the moonflower garden and the dark passage through the temple and the life she had been building for herself in the years since, the careful quiet life of a woman who asked no questions and wanted nothing more than to be left alone.
"You would make me a lady of the court again," she said. It was not a question.
"I would make you indispensable," Reed said. "I would give you a place in Edmund's household, access to his food and his wine and his medicines. I would give you a reason to watch and a way to act if you see what you saw tonight."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then you go back to your temple and your herbs and your quiet life," Reed said. "And Edmund dies within the month. Probably within the week. And I fight a war I cannot win with no allies I can trust, and the kingdom falls to a man who smiles while children suffer."
Cordelia looked at Edmund's sleeping face. She looked at Reed's tired, steady one.
"You are asking me to give up everything I have built," she said.
"I am asking you to help me save my brother's life," Reed said. "The rest is yours to decide."
The dawn light strengthened. Somewhere in the palace a bell began to toll, slow and solemn, and Cordelia thought about the smell of moonflower in the dark garden and the weight of a prince's hand in hers and the smile on a chancellor's face as he watched a boy fall.
She thought about her father, and her sisters, and the long years of disgrace that had followed her from the court.
She thought about the moonflower and what it could do.
"I'll need access to the kitchens," she said. "And the cellars. And a list of everyone who handles Edmund's food before it reaches his plate."
Reed's hand found hers again. His grip was steady and his palm was warm and his rough fingers closed around hers with a pressure that said, clearly and without words, that he understood what she was risking and that he would not forget it.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't thank me yet," Cordelia said. "I haven't saved anyone."
Edmund stirred. His eyes opened, and for a moment they were unfocused and bewildered, the eyes of a child waking from a nightmare. Then they found Cordelia's face, and they found Reed's, and something in them cleared.
"Reed?" he said. His voice was a thread. "What happened?"
Reed sat on the edge of the bed. He took his brother's hand in his own.
"You fainted," Reed said. "You must be more careful with the wine at dinner."
Edmund's brow furrowed. He looked at Cordelia, and he looked at his own hand in Reed's, and something in his young face shifted toward a suspicion he was not yet clever enough to name.
"I don't remember fainting," he said slowly.
"You never do," Reed said. "It's the worst part."
Edmund's mouth twitched. The suspicion faded, replaced by the trusting confusion of a young man who had been told, all his life, that his older brother knew best.
"Will you stay?" Edmund asked. "While I rest?"
Reed glanced at Cordelia. She gave the smallest nod.
"For a while," Reed said. "For as long as you need."
Edmund settled back against the pillows. His eyes closed again, and his breathing evened out, and Cordelia sat in the grey morning light and watched the two brothers and thought about the long game she had just committed herself to playing, and the high cost of losing, and the thin and uncertain chance of winning.
Reed did not leave. He sat with his hand around his brother's and his face turned toward the window, and the dawn came up over the palace and painted the floor with gold, and somewhere in the cellars below, the kitchens began the long work of preparing another day's meals.
Cordelia watched. She waited. She listened for the first false note in the song that Sterling would play next.
The game had begun.