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Chapter two

Olivia

“ H ow much longer do you want me shadowing that insufferable peacock?” Sir Tristan Dacre asked while Olivia hunched over her mortar and pestle, grinding the medley of dried herbs within.

She was in no mood for the complaints of nobility this morning. She had bigger problems.

But the knight had wandered into her "workshop" positioned in the bowels of the palace of his own accord. No doubt he thought that just because he was friends with the queen and she was friends with the queen, that meant they were now friends. Which gave him leave to bother her in her private quarters.

But that was an incredibly false assumption.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” Olivia drawled. “Which peacock? ”

Pain laced its way through almost the entirety of Olivia’s left side—a familiar spiderweb of agonizing flames, which burned all the way up her withered left leg, through her hip, and along to the small of her back.

The day was already shaping up to be one of her bad ones. She could tell it was going to rain on the morrow because her constant companion, Pain , was doing its utmost to lay her low. She had missed a meeting of the War Council.

And now she was having to deal with… Dacre . Again.

“The Baron of Crestley, of course.”

Olivia made a face. “I dunno.” A shrug rolled off her shoulders. She continued grinding her herbs. “Until he dies, probably?”

“And, um…is that going to be…soon?” Sir Dacre asked, his voice soft, as though they were childhood friends sharing secrets.

Olivia’s pestle scraped to a pause.

“Eh?” She squinted at the man through the dim stillness of that underground space. The single lantern illuminating her workshop cast odd shadows upon the knight, hollowing his cheeks into a skeletal display that Olivia thought rather improved his entirely too pretty appearance.

She would not fault him for his lovely eyes, though. They were soft. And a curious shade of sea-green.

“…What?” Olivia asked. She glanced into the depths of her mortar and twisted her lips to the side. “This?” Anyone with half a mind and a passing knowledge of herbs would have recognized the bitter root and dream petal mixture she was busily working on —the perfect blend for swift pain relief and not toxic in the slightest except in absurdly large doses.

But Sir Dacre had neither half a mind nor a passing knowledge of herbs, clearly.

“No. I just—” Again, Olivia shrugged, as if trying to shake off a fly. “I have a bit of a stomachache is all,” she lied without missing a beat.

She had kept the truth of her weakness a secret from almost all the palace’s inhabitants all these years, and she wasn’t about to reveal it now.

Especially not to Tristan Dacre.

“Oh.”

In the wake of that single word, an excruciatingly uncomfortable silence fell between the two of them. At least, she imagined it was excruciating for Sir Dacre.

But not for her. Never for her. She basked in the discomfort of the rest of the queen’s court on a daily basis.

It was one of her many hobbies.

But, still. She was a busy woman. The Spymaster and all. She had things to do. Secrets to uncover. A Lord Chancellor to track down and annoy.

And yet here she was, trapped.

For a time, the sound of her pestle scraping the bottom of the mortar was the only one filling the shadowed confines of that underground room. On the periphery of her vision, she watched Sir Dacre shift his weight from foot to foot. He oozed with a palpable discomfort .

And yet the knight still made no move to leave.

Impatience finally won out over her wicked desire to see just how long she could keep the knight squirming. “Was there anything else, then?” Olivia snapped as she finally ceased grinding her herbs.

Sir Dacre jerked to attention as if the Lord Constable himself was in the room with them and had started barking orders as Sir Easome was wont to do.

“No,” the pretty man admitted. “I just thought, ah…well. Since I was about to go find Her Majesty…would you perhaps like to walk with me?”

Olivia frowned and fished about for her flask of wine and a funnel amidst the snarl of medicinal and alchemical instruments arranged atop her work table. “Didn’t we just decide you’d be watching Crestley until the day he died?”

“Oh, well, I didn’t know you meant right now —”

“Of course I meant right now .” Olivia rolled her eyes and fixed the funnel into the mouth of her flask so she could pour the not-quite-as-fine-as-it-could-be powder within. A swirling of liquid later, she took an experimental sip and grimaced.

As ever, bitter root certainly proved its name accurate.

“That bad?” Sir Dacre asked.

Olivia shot him a flat look in reply.

“You can’t honestly prefer my company to the ladies of the court,” she observed. She was tall. She was gangly. She wasn’t the least bit polished or perfumed. No man in his right mind would ever prefer her company to one of the queen’s many ladies-in- waiting.

When Sir Dacre but cleared his throat rather than offer a proper answer, Olivia asked more directly, “What are you loitering around down here for anyway?”

“I was…ah…” Sir Dacre shifted his weight yet again. “I mean…your company isn’t that terrible.”

Olivia blinked the once before throwing back her head and cackling openly. It wasn’t that funny, honestly. Sir Tristan Dacre, the most desirable young man in all of Goldreach, thinking her company wasn’t that terrible.

But Olivia couldn’t help herself.

It was one of the stranger and more unfortunate side effects of the dream petal she had just ingested. Already, that cordial was taking the edge off of the Pain coursing through her left side. It didn’t erase it completely, of course; she was still aware of it. As she ever was.

But it was decidedly and blessedly less , and a good deal easier to ignore.

In addition, everything began to glow with a rosy haze about the edges, which brought a level of cheer to her otherwise dark and dank surroundings, with which Olivia was unfortunately all too familiar.

She preferred it that way, after all.

The dark and dank. Not the medicated haze from the dream petal.

When her cackling subsided, Olivia hacked up a single, wet cough and unlocked the middle drawer of her apothecary table. She procured a small purse of coins .

It softly chinked when she settled it into the center of Sir Dacre’s palm.

“Here,” she said, fighting against another titter. Everything was simply more amusing on dream petal. “Your payment for the week.”

The knight blinked at her and protested, “This isn’t really necessary, you know—”

Olivia waved him off, though. “You’re my spy. I’m the Spymaster. There’s your payment. You’re free to go.” She was already running late. So terribly late. Ol’ Percy was going to have an earful for her. “Hurry off now. There are skirts to chase. Rumors to collect. Tidbits of information to sniff out.” She sniffed the air in illustration, just in case Sir Dacre needed a picture painted for him.

The knight slowly backed out of the room. “I’ll, ah…see you later, then,” he offered by way of farewell.

Olivia nodded and made a few agreeable noises until the man finally shut the door to her workshop behind him.

“All right, darling,” she called out to her pet Elmorian harlequin viper, Minerva, who was curled up within her cage just next to the narrow slab Olivia liked to call a bed. “Mommy’s off to work now. You behave.”

People thought her mad for keeping the most poisonous snake in the entirety of Avirel for a pet. But that was simply because harlequin vipers were also the most misunderstood snakes in all the world.

In the wild, one never encountered a harlequin viper on their own. One always encountered a nest. And therein lay the true danger. With so much viper venom coursing through one’s veins, they would be dead in seconds. But to be bitten by only one viper? A person had at least a good half hour before their heart exploded.

Which was more than enough time to grab the antidote.

It was easy enough locating the queen and her entourage a short time later. Seraphina—bless her—had always been a terribly predictable creature.

Nibbling on a piece of bacon she'd nicked from the kitchens for a late breakfast, Olivia limped along through the darkness of a hidden passageway and tracked her oldest friend through the stone walls.

The walls of the palace were riddled with such passageways, and yet so few people knew it.

A shame for them. A boon for her.

It was her preferred mode of navigating the palace when she didn’t want to bother with people. Which was a near-daily occurrence.

But bother with people she still must.

Drawing in a deep breath and masking her limp as best she could, Olivia expertly slipped through the sliding wall of her current passage and stepped out into the brightness of the marble corridor beyond. She joined the queen’s entourage without missing a single beat .

On any other day, Olivia would have delighted in walking along with them in silence, waiting to see how long it would take anyone at all to notice her presence. She might have even tried to convince the one who finally spotted her she had been there all along.

But she was already late and didn’t have time for such nonsense.

Positioning herself just behind Percy Umberly, the Duke of Varoa, she whispered down to the elderly man, “Hello, Father,” in hushed greeting.

The man let loose with an alarmed shout, which sent the queen’s entire entourage screeching to a halt. “Olivia! By the Light, I wish you would stop doing that.”

Of course, Percival Umberly wasn’t her true father. But it never ceased to amuse her to claim he was.

Whirling on a heel, the Lord Chancellor scowled up at her and vehemently denied, “I did not sire you, woman.” To the entourage at large, he added, “I do not claim this child!”

Olivia happily reminded ol’ Percy, “I’m thirty-five, you know. Hardly a child these days.”

Duchess Edith chuckled and shook her head at the two of them. “You do not need to be blood to be family,” the queen’s godmother chided her husband before she looked her way and warmly declared, “ I will always claim you, Olivia dear.”

At that, the Lord Chancellor’s scowl deepened. “You were always fond of your stray cats.”

“Olivia?” Seraphina softly prompted.

Olivia cleared her throat and looked toward the queen at last. Her oldest friend frowned at her. But, of course, she would be frowning.

She was so terribly, terribly late.

“Apologies, Your Majesty,” Olivia offered while sketching a bow. “I have those reports, of course. Though”—she flashed a look about the corridor they currently occupied—“perhaps it’s a conversation best saved for once we reach your quarters.”

Seraphina’s gaze pinched with clear worry when she asked, “But, are you all right? It’s not like you to miss a meeting.”

Ah. Right.

Olivia waved a hand, trying to brush aside the queen’s concerns as if they were little more than tendrils of smoke. “I’m perfectly fine. Nothing to worry about.”

Seraphina narrowed her eyes, clearly not convinced.

Olivia made a face at the other woman. “More importantly, I have reports! Updates on the war and all that. Very important news.”

Duchess Edith stepped in close and kissed her cheek in belated greeting. “More like bad news, it sounds like.”

Olivia confirmed without pause, “Well, it’s certainly not good news.”

Duke Percy sighed audibly the moment their party shifted back into motion, making for the queen’s apartments.

While they walked, Olivia sneaked what was left of her bacon into Rogue the varhound’s waiting maw. She would have brought a treat for Alyx the usuru as well, but she didn’t particularly fancy walking around with dead mice stuffed into her pockets.

Duke Percy grumbled to her in an aside, “You were missed at the meeting, you know,” over the sound of his cane clacking against the floor. “I thought Coreto and Easome were going to come to blows there for a moment.”

Olivia’s lips curved into a grin at the thought. That certainly would have made for a less dry meeting than usual. “Well, what would you have expected me to do about it?” she asked, ruffling her fingers through Rogue’s sleek fur. “Take bets on who would win?” Without pausing for a single moment to consider, she announced, “My money would have been on Coreto.”

Suddenly shooting her a look, Seraphina presented another frown. Apropos of nothing, the queen asked, “How many ships do we currently have in Goldreach, Mistress Olivia?”

Olivia screwed up her lips at the odd question. “That’s probably a better question for Sir Easome, Your Majesty.”

“We both know you know the answer,” Seraphina countered without pause. “And besides, I am not referring to the navy.”

Duke Percy interjected, “Most of the navy is already deployed to Arath to hold the blockade, at any rate.”

The queen sighed. “Which is why I’m curious about what ships we have that are not already deployed.”

Olivia ran her tongue against the back of her teeth and considered. It took her a few moments longer than she would have liked to swim through her currently murky thoughts. “ Well…there are a few merchant vessels docked in the harbor. And, ah…some confiscated pirate ships.”

“Pirate ships?” Seraphina echoed, clearly confused.

Olivia couldn’t help it. She chuckled. “Yes, the gaol is hosting quite a few pirates at the moment while they wait for their sentencing.”

Seraphina weathered that sudden bit of laughter without so much as blinking.

Ol’ Percy scowled at her again, though.

But it was Duchess Edith who quietly asked, “And why are we speaking about pirates?”

Percy grumped, “The question of the day, I suppose.”

“I was just considering,” Seraphina explained under her breath, “what if the worst were to happen? What if Mysai were to fall? Would we have enough ships to evacuate the city?”

“No,” Olivia answered with all her usual bluntness. “Not unless you’re willing to break the blockade. Or you could start handing out letters of marque and make some poor little pirates waiting to be hanged quite happy.”

After a few moments of consideration, the queen suggested, “There is also the Beaumont Trading Company.”

Duke Percy contradicted her at once. “The Baron of Crestley wouldn’t part with his precious trading ships—not for the world.”

“He would,” Seraphina argued. “He would if I asked.”

To that, Olivia could only slant the other woman a look .

Seraphina had spent most of their childhood mooning over the Baron of Crestley. And now the entire world thought him to be her lover because of it.

Olivia didn’t like him. Never had. Never would. He was far too arrogant for a man just as common-born as she was.

But Seraphina was right. Tiberius Beaumont would give her his precious trading ships if she but asked. For a price.

A Beaumont always had a price.