Chapter 19
Maddox
Six days go just like this one. Coffee and breakfast wine. Share just enough about myself to let the king believe I’m genuine but not enough to damn me. Repeat.
No daggers pulled. No blood drawn. No pact won.
Just coffee and wine and a grim reaper guard.
Every day Castor shows up to Magesté with a carafe of coffee.
Every day I bring out a bottle of wine and whatever pastries I can find in the kitchen.
Every morning I strap my dagger to my thigh, and every night I take it off, hiding it once again beneath my mattress, shiny and unstained.
Sometimes Castor leaves and returns late in the night.
Some days he stays from sunup ’til well past sundown.
Either way, we talk and drink and flirt while his guard looks on. An ever-present nuisance.
I try to use the time to my advantage, to learn how the king ticks.
To catch his tells, uncover his weaknesses.
He has many, it seems, but not the kind I’d expect.
He’s casually self-deprecating and terrible at hiding his feelings.
They flicker across his face like a theater marquee.
Despite his kingly status, he pulls out my chair, pours my coffee before his wine, and waits for me to take a sip before drinking his own.
When I’m talking, he locks in so intensely that he appears to forget his surroundings entirely.
I told him about the time I ran away from my second foster home and tried to hide out on what I thought was an empty sleeper boat in the harbor only to find myself at sea with an old fisherman.
Castor listened with such focus that he spilled his wine all over the table when Fern popped around the corner to tell me it was time for Magesté lunch.
The worst part is that I’m actually enjoying this.
Castor is regrettably funny, his clever words laced with the dryly dark humor I appreciate most. Some days our witty quips bounce back and forth like Ping-Pong balls, each trying to outwit the other.
It’s rare that a man is able to keep up with me in that way.
In the mortal world, my dates are filled with long, awkward silences, mansplaining, or lewd comments about how much they like to fuck redheads.
But I’m not here for riveting conversations. I’m wasting time. I only have six days left.
Less than one fucking week.
I keep telling myself this is preparation for the big event.
The best hunters are those with the most patience.
Castor has to trust me in order for me to get close to him—away from Tamarind.
Which has proven rather difficult when his guard trusts me only as far as I can throw him. Which is…not far at all.
I wonder if my dad had this much trouble fulfilling his side of the bargain with the Myrtle Queen.
Was it effortless for him? He was forever tied to her, and a week of this is already doing me in.
If she ordered him to murder the Redwood King, what else had she made him do?
And why didn’t he write about it? Every night after my shift at Magesté, I stay up an extra hour or two combing through his journal, trying to find something I might have missed, trying to find a map or directions or guidance through this murderous plan.
Dark circles stain the delicate skin beneath my eyes, and blisters cover my feet.
Bruises decorate my ribs from the nightly corsets, and my hips are chafed from the tight jeweled costumes.
Working at Magesté is no fucking joke, and I’ve worked dozens of jobs.
Among the worst was my brief stint as a birthday clown.
There was also the movie theater attendant job where I was in charge of scolding people for being on their phones.
And a hundred waitress gigs where old men would make disgusting comments and teenagers would not tip at all.
Somehow, at Magesté, even though I am a loathsome mortal, I hold more power than I ever did at any of my mortal jobs, even the corporate dream job that threw me away like an overripe banana.
Last night Fern and I put out a thousand tiny fires—from calming an angry visitor who underpaid to catching a pair of dryad tweens sneaking in through a window.
Castor never showed up this morning. The twinge of disappointment I felt was surely due to my lack of coffee and not because I missed the time spent with him.
Though, the break from his tumor of a guard was a welcome one.
If Castor shows up tonight, I’ll have to find a way to get him alone. For fucking once.
No one warned me how hard homicide could be.
Distracted by my murderous thoughts, I take my nightly dose of insulin and venture up to the backstage costuming station.
A pair of orchids descend on me, swapping my clothes for a boned corset made of pine-colored satin and a matching skirt so heavy it feels like stones have been sewn into the fabric.
Images of acorns and pine needles are stitched down the sides and explode into a forest scene along the bottom.
My hair is waved and pinned, eyes covered in dark emerald shadow and a cat eye sharp enough to kill, then I’m pushed toward the exit so the next orchid or dancer can be done up.
The only thing I add to my ensemble is my golden dagger, hidden beneath the heavy skirt.
“That color looks sensational on you!” Fern exclaims when I take my place behind the front desk. “You look like a tree on fire with your red hair.”
I tilt my head. “Don’t know if that’s a good thing.”
“I suppose not…but sometimes bad things can be beautiful.”
Fern keeps looking at me, bursting with poorly concealed glee.
I arch an eyebrow at her. “What…?”
She holds out a scroll of paper with a grand flourish of her hand. “I was instructed to give this to you once you were ready.”
I unfurl the scroll, reading the dark ink scrawled in the lightest possible touch.
Meet me downstairs once the front doors open —Castor
Fern perches her folded hands beneath her chin, beaming as she swivels her shoulders back and forth. “The king doesn’t ever do things like this. He must really like you.”
“What is he doing exactly, planning my murder?”
Her eyes widen. “Of course not!” Then she frowns. “I mean, I don’t…think?”
“I’m joking.” A little twinge of guilt flutters in my chest when I think of how Fern will react to what I’m planning to do to her king.
Would she understand or empathize? After all, she knows what it’s like to be an orphan of sorts, to have a found family.
What she’s found in the orchids is what I have in Javen.
There comes the briefest desire to tell her my story, to explain myself, but I swallow it.
My father’s lumber company was likely the reason she became an orphan in the first place.
When Magesté’s front doors open, chaos follows.
“Go meet Castor!” Fern urges me while dryads and arborfae are ushered into the theater to await the show. “I’ll be fine up here. Honest.”
I don’t argue. I have a king to kill. But, as I push through the theater doors, weaving through the gathering crowd, a sudden tremor settles deep beneath my skin and numbness spreads across my tongue and lips.
Fuck.
My blood sugar was like 130 earlier. How is it dropping like this? I didn’t even take fast-acting insulin.
A sudden wave of dizziness hits. I reach out to grab the back of a theater chair.
This is not good.
I stumble forward. Low blood sugars can feel like all the worst parts of being drunk. The disorientation, the inability to focus on a single thing or to walk in a straight line. There’s a reason so many diabetics get pulled over for driving with a low blood sugar.
The preshow music begins with a rolling cymbal crash. Applause explodes to my right as Evodia sashays onto the stage. Grasping the railing, I nearly trip down the stairs to the door leading to the bottom floor.
Castor waits for me—alone—at the end of the nearest dining table.
His clothes are tidier than usual, his hair less disheveled.
Through my haze, I make out candles, two glasses of wine, and a pile of sugarberry tarts on a silver plate.
“I thought we could—” His sentence drops away when another wave of vertigo hits me at the bottom of the stairs.
The king sweeps to my side, pressing a steadying hand at my back.
“Are you okay? You look like you’re about to collapse. ”
I push him away. “I’m fine. I’m just— I need food.”
“Are you…drunk?”
“No.” I move to the table to swipe up two of the same sugary pastries he offered me the night of the treetop masquerade, stuffing them in my mouth as he watches. These have plenty of carbs, but they aren’t fast enough. I need straight-up sugar.
Escaping to the kitchen, I rummage through the food pantry.
Dryads don’t exactly keep Skittles and fruit snacks around.
It reminds me of my foster placement with a woman who had only raw, vegan everything.
I had to treat my lows with bananas because she didn’t believe in processed food, and “fruit has plenty of natural sugar in it.” For a while, she was under the impression that she could cure me if I followed her lifestyle.
I ended up in the hospital with diabetic ketoacidosis and got taken away from her soon after that.
My hand knocks into a jar of sugar crystals that look like shattered fragments of rock candy. I pull down the container, prying open the lid. Grabbing a handful, I pop them into my mouth, crunching down on the saccharine shards.
Castor is quiet a long moment, watching me. “You seem drunk.”
“Be right back.” Shambling to my bedroom, I shut the door behind me. The insulin I took earlier is still on the small table beside my bed. My stomach swoops like I’ve just missed a step.