Page 65 of The Last Heir of Elsewhere

I glanced down, horror washing over me and rising the skin on my neck. That did sound like me. Perhaps he was right, then, but if so was it somehow my fault that my sister got involved? Could I blame myself for something I’d never even done, but only could have?

“Fine.” I said quietly. “I suppose it’s possible I could’ve joined your rebellion.”

“It’s more than possible,” he replied. “It was likely. Such a strong possibility, in fact, that your sister saw it time and time again. For the year before she sought me out she saw dozens of visions of you in the rebellion, until finally, she saw one that prompted her to go out and stop you.”

“Which was what?”

He took a deep breath. “She watched herself die, and thought it was you.”

My mouth fell open. Suddenly, as if it were happening all over again, all I could see was the cold madness in King Penvalle’s eyes as he raised his sword and sliced once, twice, three times through my sister’s body.

All I could hear was the rushing in my ears, the screaming filling the clearing, when, as if in slow motion, Rosey’s body fell, her head tumbling onto the ground beside her.

Somehow, I could feel it, as the white-hot, all-consuming fire overtook my entire body, and all I could think of was murdering the male in front of me. Of raising the crown high, and bringing it down again into his smirking, too arrogant face.

“Are you with me, love?”

I heard the voice from too far away, and still couldn’t seem to see the room in front of me as I replied. “I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

I shook my head to clear it of the screaming. “Why was she there in the first place? Perhaps I believe that Rosey would seek you out looking for me, but once she realized I was not there, why would she stay?”

“For the same reason you would have. She wanted to see your mother again, and I could do that for her.”

I gasped, and my heart somehow beat impossibly faster, like I was running for my life rather than sitting on the bed. “Are you telling me that my sister saw my mother before she died?”

He shook his head. “No, Rhiannon was in Aftermath until quite recently, but I knew where to find her and if Rosey had lived I would have made good on my promise to reintroduce them. The problem was, that by the time your sister arrived on my doorstep she was already sick.”

I sucked in slow, even breaths, only half listening as I tried to keep myself from breaking open and letting the pain leak out across the floor. “Sick in what way?”

“She’d been fighting a cough for some time.”

“I thought she was faking the cough. Those trees that she was claiming to make tea from are poisonous.”

“They are,” he agreed. “Never hide in a moondust tree at noon.”

I glanced up, frowning at the sound of the familiar expression. “My mother used to use that phrase a lot.”

“I know. Where do you think I heard it? It’s some idiom from the court of Nightshade she must have picked up as a child.”

I shook my head. “So what?”

“That expression only makes sense because moondust leaves bloom at dusk and fall to dust by the morning. It was your mother who gave me the idea to use the moondust trees to pass messages throughout my army. The leaves are the perfect place to write a message you want to be sure will be destroyed within a few hours of writing it.”

“And Rosey knew that?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “After your sister had been with the rebellion for a few months, I asked her to share information with us about the palace. She saw a lot as one of the servants who was permitted on the upper floors, and always knew what courts were visiting, and how often my grandmother ventured out of her room. She would write her reports on the moondust leaves every night for one of us to collect.”

“So she wasn’t making tea?”

He shook his head. “She was truly ill, that much was true, but I assume she told you she was making tea to cover her frequent trips outside.”

I could only stare at him. He’d been right—I would have been happier never to know this. I felt not a shred of closure, only as if I’d been torn open again to bleed anew.

Part of me wished to tell him to stop, that we would pick up this conversation again another time, but I knew deep down that if he didn’t finish telling me now, I’d never broach the subject again.

“So she was ill,” I reiterated, “and spied for you, but how did that turn into her charging into an unwinnable fight? Why would she try to kill the king for you?”

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