Page 131 of A War of Crowns

The duchess was always good at ignoring the things Olivia didn’t want to talk about. Aside from Tristan Dacre.

“What happened?” Olivia repeated through clenched teeth. Finally, Duke Percy and Sir Arkwright both looked her way. The former stood silent, though. Pale and silent.

He looked as if he had aged another twenty years in the span of a single moment.

It was the latter who finally answered her with a crisp, “An assassin entered the room by way of the balcony. He was dead before we arrived, dispatched by His Highness. Her Majesty is wounded, though not gravely. Physician Bonage assures us she will be fully healed within two weeks’ time.” After a pause, the knight added, "We left everything like we found it, so you could have the first look."

“His Highness?” Olivia repeated with a frown. “What was the prince doing here?”

“I stabbed him,” the queen murmured in a small voice, sending Olivia’s attention snapping back that way.

“You did?” she asked. A small trace of pride flared to life within her at the notion that Her Majesty had attacked her would-be assailant. Though Seraphina should have simply used the poison ring to incapacitate the man for further questioning.

But stabbing him had been the next best course of action.

Duchess Edith, her cheeks wan and tear-streaked, shook her head from her place sitting at the queen’s side. “You didn’t tell us you stabbed the assassin yourself.”

“No,” Seraphina softly corrected. “Not the assassin. I stabbed the Cr—the prince. I stabbed the prince.”

“What?” Olivia and Duke Percy asked in unison.

But then their shared curiosity diverged, blazing along separate paths of interest when Olivia herself asked, “Why was he not held for questioning?”

In contrast, Percy was more interested in asking, “Why was that man in your bedroom in the first place?”

No one seemed to have an answer for Duke Percy.

But Sir Arkwright frowned at her when he explained, “The man was bleeding all over the place, Mistress Olivia. And he had a dagger in his leg. We released him into the care of his own physician.”

Olivia frowned right back.

But when she suddenly realized she had lost track of her wildly careening pulse some moments ago, she turned her attention to the business of rifling through the medical bag slung over her shoulder. At the sound of clattering glass vials, Physician Bonage shot her a look over the rim of his spectacles. Olivia was all too happy to ignore thequack in favor of fishing out her tiny vial of harlequin viper antidote.

She quaffed it all in one go.

“He protected me,” Seraphina eventually murmured, though that assertion did little more than lure another frown onto Olivia’s lips. “He was the one who killed the assassin,” her friend reiterated.

Something about that waswrong, but Olivia couldn’t immediately riddle it out as all the usual Pain from her mangled left leg mingled with a sudden sense of vertigo. The antidote was working—a cool, albeit woozy reprieve from the fire of the viper venom.

She didn’t have time to pull out her mortar and pestle and grind up her usual buffet of pain-relieving herbs for the day. But she couldn’t think with her leg throbbing like that.

So Olivia compromised. She hobbled her way about the room with the use of her cane, inspecting the space with as much attention as she could spare, while fishing about in her satchel for a couple sprigs of dream petal and bitter root.

But a sudden thought nagged at her, stopping her in her tracks. “How’s your pain?” Olivia called back to Seraphina over her shoulder.

The question earned a fresh scowl from Physician Bonage. “I have already treated and dosed Her Majesty with all she needs,” the older man sneered.

But Olivia ignored him in favor of looking directly at the queen and waiting for her thoughts on the matter. Olivia wouldn’t trust Physician Bonage to extract a splinter. Not after some of the questionable tactics she'd witnessed him employ during the wasting sickness.

Seraphina offered some weak approximation of a smile and murmured, “It just stings a little, but I’m…” The queen winced. “…I’m fine.”

Olivia grunted, unconvinced.

But she went back to her hunt for clues all the same.

Blood spattered the once fine rugs framing the queen’s four-poster bed. She traced the spray of droplets from that point to the balcony and then back again, where the body of the would-be assassin still lay on the floor, covered by a sheet.

The very thought of crouching down to inspect the corpse sent her leg and hip to screaming all the more, but she swiftly stuffed the handful of raw herbs into her mouth and started chewing.

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