Six Goblets
Esme left Isla’s house with the sun threatening to set on her.
She’d gotten caught up and stayed for a whole hour, just playing with Isla’s snake.
Now, her bag clattered with liars’ nectar and liar-liars’ nectar bottles as she took a carriage back to the castle.
She used the time to devise her plan. It would include a trip to the kitchens, which was at least fun. Maybe Mina would let her eat something…
Two days passed with Esme committed to acting completely normally. Isobel called court and Esme played the toothless, sullen servant. She even let Isobel insult her favorite shirt, all in the name of pulling off her assassination.
When the day finally came, the castle was crawling with servants. It was the first night of Wallain, the summer festival, and that meant everyone was busy doing something and everyone would be watching for any clue of the trial to come.
With an hour to go until the deed, Esme strapped the bottles from Isla under her petticoats and put on a bright orange dress, then glamoured it to be midnight black—the color sacrilegious for the season—and slipped out of her room.
People couldn’t help but notice. It was near treasonous not to wear red and orange on Wallain.
Someone even reared back to spit at her.
Good. They’d remember her.
She snuck to the back of the castle, past the kennels, which stank so high the smell probably wrinkled Valos’s nose, so no one dared to hang around.
There, in the space between one step and the next, she glamoured herself into the blandest girl in all of Amaris, with dirty-blonde hair and five feet and two inches to her name.
She also unglamoured her dress, returning it to its bright orange, now hanging awkwardly from her slight frame.
She entered the bustling kitchens through the back door, scrambling down the steps nearly unnoticed. The thickness of her glamour had a few people scrunching their noses, but they didn’t dare look away from their ovens and pans.
She maneuvered her way through the thicket of cooks and pastries and hams and found Mina laboring over a tray of strawberry tarts.
Esme hadn’t seen her in days because of her planning for tonight, but Mina looked whittled to her last fraying nerve.
Dark circles weighed her eyes. If Esme didn’t have murder to do, she’d have dragged her upstairs to nap in her bed. Instead, she slid in close to her.
“Not now, girl,” Mina said. “Can’t you see we’re—”
“You must have time for me, don’t you?” Esme asked, using a voice far too grown-up for her tiny body.
Mina flinched, then sent a withering gaze to the shrunken Wraith. “It’s against nature that you can do such things,” she chastised, then took in the chaos of the kitchen. It would hide them well. She passed Esme a piping bag. “Make yourself useful or you’ll stick out.”
Esme piped a border on a cupcake, just as Mina had taught her on their first night together. “I’ll need your help,” she said. “Isobel has wines somewhere. I need to access them.”
Mina didn’t halt her frosting as she spoke. “Isobel has two trays in the lowest rooms. Both are wine, both stink. They’re to be delivered up to the banquet hall to two other servants in a few minutes.”
“By who?”
“Servant girl,” Mina said, eyeing Esme. “We thought they weren’t important, but if you’re here…”
“You have no idea,” Esme muttered. “Do you think the head baker would hand them off to me?”
“Perhaps if she wasn’t thinking,” Mina said. “You’re about to do something very big.”
“I’m about to end this competition,” Esme told her.
Mina stiffened, but she nodded slowly. “You’re sure of your choice?” she asked.
“Deadly,” Esme told her.
“And you don’t even die, so you must be serious.” Mina smiled and gave Esme a once-over. “I refuse to kiss you like this, so just be careful, okay?”
“I’ll try my worst,” Esme said with a wink.
Mina rolled her eyes. “Head baker’s the barker.” She nudged her head behind them.
Esme found the head baker, a brown-haired, gray-eyed statue of a woman who would ooze austerity if she dared crack. She shouted orders around the kitchen, some of her remarks so sharp Esme swore they hid the bite of Magic.
Esme blew a kiss to Mina before slipping away. She made herself look truly pathetic before pushing up to the head baker, head low and hands shaking. “I—I was sent to bring wines, miss,” she stuttered.
The head baker surveyed her with a disbelieving eye. “I was told a brunette would be handling the wines.”
Damn it.
Just in time, Mina saved her. “Miss, boy’s spilled the tarts!”
“He’s what?” The baker’s head swiveled to a boy with whipping cream smeared on his cheeks. “You!” Steam practically poured from her ears. She brought her soul-stealing gaze back down to Esme.
“You, get the wines. Queen’s set up her cups in the freezers.
Deliver them to the girls standing outside the banquet hall.
” She leaned down to Esme’s height, snatching her chin.
“Now listen here, and listen damn good. The cups on the right must stay on the right. The cups on the left must stay on the left. You know right from left, yes?”
Esme nodded.
“If I find out you’ve so much as touched those goblets, I’ll take your nails.”
Esme almost shook out of her skin in fake terror before bolting to the coldroom. She lit a torch and found a table in the first aisle holding two trays with golden domes over them—dramatic, but Isobelian.
She didn’t have long, so she holstered her torch and whipped the hoods off the trays quickly. The smell punched her in the gut.
Each tray had three cups. Esme put her nose in the first one on the right tray. Rotted rat. All three cups reeked of it. And, on the second tray, just the same.
Six poisoned goblets.
Except some of them weren’t, because Isobel had commissioned the liar-liars’ nectar from Isla, and it was no doubt in some of these cups.
Isobel was crafty, but she was no mastermind.
Her test would likely be simple. Each heir got three cups, and luck would carry the winner’s hand to the un-poisoned one.
Esme just needed to poison the cups meant for Janos. Not that she knew which was which, but Isobel wouldn’t poison Janos. Which meant that the poisoned tray was for Bal. Now, how to figure out which cups were poisoned…
“Human experimentation.”
Oh, Isla, you horrible, brilliant woman.
Song’s balls, this was stupid. A drop wouldn’t kill her. It would be uncomfortable, but it wouldn’t kill her. She could do this.
Esme chose the first cup on the right-hand tray and dipped her tongue in it.
Wrong cup.
Esme bit down on her tongue until it bled to keep from screaming, but that only gave the poison more places to seep into her flesh. The drop of liquid ate through the inside of her mouth, threatening to corrode her from the inside out. She slumped onto the floor in a shivering pile of pain.
It wouldn’t kill her, she’d said. But it would make her wish she could die.
Esme grabbed the table to heave herself up from the floor. She didn’t have time to wish for death.
Next tongue-dip: rancid—fucking rancid. But un-poisoned.
And the third cup, the same.
Esme sighed. Okay. Only one poisoned cup. Good. She couldn’t take another.
She moved to the first cup on the left-hand tray, on the left and dipped the very tip of her tongue in the liquid. Nothing. She gagged because of the smell, but at least she wasn’t dying.
The next cup, in the middle, was the same: un-poisoned.
That had to mean the bad cup was the one on the right. Surely it would be poisoned, yes? Or, no…but it definitely could be. Esme weighed her self-destructive need for knowledge with the threat of her looming doom.
The need for knowledge won. She shut her eyes and prayed the tiniest of prayers before trying the cup and—
Nothing.
She gagged and laughed and hiccupped all at once. Song’s balls, Ojalla still loved her.
She straightened and smoothed her dress. One tray had three un-poisoned drinks, and one had one poisoned drink. So Isobel’s plan wasn’t to outright murder Bal but to leave it to chance. Janos would be in the clear no matter what he chose.
Esme left the tray with all un-poisoned glasses as it was and focused on the one meant for Bal.
This one would be Janos’s, now. She downed the two un-poisoned glasses, praying to every god she’d ever known not to vomit.
Then, she pulled out the bottle of poisonous liars’ nectar and split the small bottle between the two cups.
Slight problem: it didn’t fill them.
Each was about halfway full—enough to kill, but Isobel would notice the cups had been tampered with if they didn’t all have the same amounts.
Esme pulled out the bottle of liars-liars’ nectar. It would taste the same. But what if the two liquids had some kind of reaction that would tip off Isobel?
She didn’t have time to come up with a better plan. She topped off the poisoned cups with the fake poison. Each gave a bubbly, gassy cough.
That couldn’t be good.
“You’re late!” a feral growl boomed from upstairs, and Esme realized she’d been downstairs for far too long. She threw the domes back over the trays and loaded the tray now meant for Bal in her right hand, the doomed tray in her left, and hauled ass to the steps.
It would have been easier to eat rocks and shit rubies than walk up the steps in her dress with the trays in her arms. Her legs were too short, her arms were flimsy, and her stupid limp hair wouldn’t stay out of her eyes and if Esme spent one more second in this pre-pubescent nightmare of a body, she would drink every single goblet her-bloody-fucking-self!
Somehow, she made it to the kitchen.
“You slow cow, get upstairs!” the head baker screamed as Esme bolted past her then shot up to the banquet hall. More stairs, more torment. With the sounds of the festivities bleeding out from the shut doors, Esme found two young girls chittering about all the pretty dresses and handsome lords.