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Shoulders slumped in relief, Gabe finally took his dagger from Anton’s throat. He stepped back, letting the Priest Exalted stand on his own.

Bastian’s hand moved, twisting in a graceful motion that looked near impossible. Golden swirls carved through the air, coalescing around his fingers, threads spun from the sun itself.

Then Bastian thrust his handful of gold toward Anton.

The strands attached to the ground around the Priest Exalted, and it erupted. Thick green vines grew rapidly through the stone, thorn-studded, the ends opening in blood-red rose blooms identical to the ones burning near the path. They wound around his legs, his middle. They entered his mouth before he could so much as scream. His eye rolled as the empty socket of the other was filled with green, then red, a rose unfurling in the scarred orbital, petals brushing his flame-ravaged brow.

It was over in an instant. Anton Arceneaux was encased in roses and blood, one more statue in the garden.

And Bastian had done it so easily, as if it was second nature.

Gabe made a small, hoarse noise, stumbling back. “You said you wouldn’t kill him.” His voice went ragged at the end. “You said you wouldn’t!”

“I said he would live.” Bastian stepped forward to the remains of his uncle and wrenched the bloody crown from his hand. The Priest had held on to it all this time. “And he does.”

The smallest rise and fall of Anton’s chest. The thinnest whistle of breath. Bastian was right; in all those roses, Anton was still alive.

Gods, it was worse.

Gabe’s eyes went from his Priest to his King, shock curdling to hatred, hot and vitriolic. “You’re no better,” he said again, an echo. The flames of the burning roses in the garden seemed to bend toward him, as if drawn to his rage. “Is this how it’s going to be, then? You as a magic tyrant, worse than August could ever be?”

Bastian didn’t answer. Instead, he placed the crown on his head. It crossed the bloodied line on his brow. “Long live the Sainted King.”

EPILOGUE

Her chair was uncomfortable.

It wasn’t just the chair itself—being here at all was uncomfortable, up on the dais in the throne room, seated next to Bastian. Her chair was silver, taken from one of the countless storage rooms in the Citadel when Bastian went through them for things to sell off, give away, or melt down. It was a haphazard way of trying to help those living outside the wall, but it was something. Centuries of hoarded wealth were hard to liquidate all at once.

But this chair he’d taken to put on the throne’s dais. For her. So she could sit next to him in a show of equality.

Almost like a Queen.

Some of them called her that. She’d heard it whispered—the poison queen, the hemlock queen, the deathwitch queen. The court loved a nickname, apparently.

Lore didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to be this visible, this vulnerable. But by now, the story of what she was—what August and Anton had been trying to do—had spread through the Citadel and beyond. Her anonymity was lost; the safety Bastian offered was all she had left.

Especially as news of her power trickled beyond Auverraine. To Kirythea.

It was only midmorning, but already there’d been a stream of business to take care of. Petitions to hear out, prisoners to pardon. All of them were courtiers who’d been at the eclipse ball.

The one that stuck in Lore’s mind was Dani. Her whole family was sent to the Burnt Isles, other than Amelia, the older sister who’d been hastily wed a week before to Lord Demonde, who didn’t care about the scandal attached to his new wife’s old name. Dani had glared at Lore the entire time, even as the manacles were fastened around her wrists.

Bastian kept Lore beside him because it was safer for them to stick together, but she wished he’d let her hide behind the throne or something.

Now, on the marble floor before her, Mari and Val bowed, their new contract clutched in Val’s hand. All pardons had to be reconsidered by the new King; Val and Mari’s privateering had been high on Bastian’s list of things to renew. He’d sweetened the pot for them, put them and all their crew on the Citadel’s payroll. His next step, he’d told Lore, was legalizing poison’s use for the terminally ill, those who might need to extend their lives a bit longer to make sure their families were taken care of, or to dull pain. He was pushing through pardons for arrested poison runners with no other charges as quickly as his pen could sign his name.

All things that were good for Dellaire. Still, Mari’s dark eyes were apprehensive as they flickered to Lore. Worry lived in the line of her full mouth.

She and Val didn’t speak as they left the throne room, their business concluded. But they both looked back at Lore one more time before the door closed.

Lore desperately wished she could follow them.

“One more.” Bastian shifted in his throne, lifted up a hand to readjust his sun-rayed crown. It looked good on him, better than it had ever looked on August. “Then we can get something to eat, and we won’t have to look at this fucking room for a few days.”

“Who is it?” Lore asked. She hadn’t studied the docket of pardons today. She’d been too tired.

Sleeping scared her, now. She did it as little as possible.