Page 104 of The Queen's Box

Wrenna closed the distance between them. She placed her hands on Orrin’s chest, then slid them to his shoulders. “For me?” she whispered, rising to her toes so that her lips were a hairsbreadth from his. “Just once?”

And he did. He stepped into the box and lay back inside it.

“Well, yep, feels like a coffin,” he said, trying to make a joke where there was none. He made to rise, but Wrenna closed the lid.

Bumps and rustlings came from inside.

“I don’t like this, Wrenna.” Orrin’s grunts grew strained and his efforts more labored. A grown man trapped in a box with only a woman—and a slight one at that—applying pressure to the lid? Willow was horror-struck by its warped logic. She didn’t want to watch, but she was the eye frozen wide. The vision held her in its grip as tightly as Wrenna held Orrin in the beautiful, terrible box.

Her fingers curled around its edges. Her face went rapt.

Orrin thrashed, a rabbit in a pot. “Wrenna!”

The box rattled. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, a devil’s dance and a fiddler who couldn’t stop fiddling. Wrennajuddered, and Willow saw her skull beneath her flesh. There was a deep, guttural sound—a swallow—followed by silence.

When Wrenna lifted the lid, Orrin was gone.

Not the pastor. Never the pastor.

Orrin.

From the back room of the cabin, a baby wailed.

The noise sent Willow hurling back into herself, and a terrible sorrow pierced her heart. How had she gotten so many things so terribly wrong?

She looked around her palace room one last time. It hadn’t been all bad. But the good parts... the best parts...

Willow tugged on her boots, crying for Jace, for Poppy, for Maeve. Crying for Orrin, still lost in the cracks. Then she got to her feet. She kept Jace’s spoon, shoving it into the pocket of her jeans. She grabbed the gray blanket, woven with its treacherous tale and therefore a piece of living history, and strode from the room.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

SHE FOUND MAEVE in the servants’ quarters, her back to Willow, curled on her side in the pathetic cot away from all the other beds. No one else was in the room. They were reliving the shock of the ceremony, no doubt.It wasn’t her!they’d cry.Did you see? Serrin, the prince—he’s fated to someone else!

Maeve didn’t care about that nonsense.

Maeve, like Willow, was grieving Jace.

Willow gently shook Maeve’s shoulder. Maeve responded violently, springing up to sitting as if her muscles had been pulled back and released.

“Just a small rest. That’s all,” she blurted. “But I’ll still tend to the—”

She made out Willow’s form in the shadows. Willow watched the realization sweep slowly over Maeve’s face. Willow wasn’t one of Maeve’s superiors or tormentors or one of the hundreds of court fae who humiliated her daily. Willow was the reason her friend was dead. Willow was the reason that Aesra had unsheathed her sword, swung it through the air, and sliced off Jace’s head—her red curls, her irreverent smile—right off her body.

It had landed heavily on the floor of the Great Hall, bounced once, and listed sideways, Jace’s blue eyes open and staring.

“Get out,” Maeve spat. Her crooked spine gave her the look of a cobra preparing to strike. She rose to her feet and put her faceright up in front of Willow’s. “Get. Out,” she spat again, so close Willow felt the heat of her breath.

“I’m leaving. Don’t worry,” Willow said. Her heart gave a horrible lurch, and she wanted to beg for this girl’s forgiveness. Tell her how sorry she was, how she hadn’t for a single instant expected Jace to be punished with death... but what good was a single one of Willow’s words? Maeve did not want them, and Willow would not spill them just to satisfy her own selfish needs.

“Come with me,” she said.

Maeve’s eyes widened. Willow had surprised her.

“I can get you out of the court. I know a hidden way. You can still tell that Brody guy all about Severine.”

“She’s a woman,” Maeve said.

“What?”

---