Page 82 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers
“It’s so small,” one of the noble daughters to my left muses. Aisling? Neve? I can’t tell. “There can’t be as much poison in the smallest one, right? It must be safer.”
“You don’t know that,” a voice I recognize as Oona’s whispers back.
Apparently, there’s no rule that we can’t talk during this test—not that any of them would talk to me.
“Like you know any better,” the first voice bites back. I’m pretty sure now that’s Neve. “You always think you’re smarter than everyone else.”
There’s a faint sound, like the rattle of jeweled rings on porcelain, and a loud swallow.
I close my eyes, heart hammering in my ears, and hear a gasp roll off the crowd.
Wood creaks, like hundreds of people are leaning forward all at once. The moment hangs suspended around us, tension sharpening in the chilled air.
Time passes in slow heartbeats.
Old Ones, we only have five minutes. I have to pick one, but…
The noble daughter to my left coughs.
A hush quivers on a knife’s edge through the crowd, and she coughs again, a sputter that builds and builds into a fit of choking.
“No.”The plea is a broken whisper, and her shadow shifts behind the screen immediately to my left, closest to me in the row of us lined up along the table.
She spasms, stumbling backward, so she’s far enough behind the table that the screen no longer hides her from me.Neve.Blood spills between neat teeth as one hand claws at her throat.
Neve’s chest seizes, stiffening in heaving shudders, and the thumb-sized porcelain vial falls to the sand at her feet.
She looks out at the crowd, up at the dais—at the High Queen.
“Help.”Neve chokes on the desperate plea.
No one does. No one moves a single step toward her.
Her knees give out, and she collapses in the sand. Her limbs twitch. Blood foams at her lips in a reddish-pink froth. Spasms rock through her, and even as she jerks helplessly on the ground, no one says a word. Not as she stops breathing. Not even as her eyes glaze over.
Silence builds, and Oona breaks it with a sneer, too soft for anyone but us girls around the table to hear. “I think it, because it’s true.”
No one comes to get Neve from the sand. Her graying body lies there, just a few feet away from me. No mourners keen from the stands. If her family is here, every one of them is silent.
And even though everything in me screams not to, I draw my gaze up to the dais.
Tohim.
Prince Cashel stands as still as a statue bathed in the silver glow of ice sparkling like diamonds in the hazy sunlight. His midnight-blue tunic is snug over his shoulders, tight and tense, and he holds one ringed hand locked on the hilt of the sword at his side. And while everyone else stares at Neve, dead in the sand, his eyes stay locked on me.
Slowly—as if he wants me to see—he looks from the cups laid out in front of me to the shimmering bowl of ice on the table before him, then raises his own glass to his lips without actually taking a sip.
The sides of the glass are slick with condensation, but the ice inside has barely melted.
My hands brush the rims of the cups I haven’t figured out yet on the table before me. One glass is a lighter red wine, aromatic and tart. The other is full of clear liquid, with a single square cube of ice floating in the middle.
Neither has any obvious signs of poison, so I lean in closer again.
There are still no strange smells, like the bitter almond or mustiness that so often cling to Keeva’s stall. I run a finger along the rim of the wineglass to check for powder or stickiness before swirling it, catching a tiny fragment of what could be mandrake leaf—a powerful hallucinogen—in the very bottom.
Then I pick up the glass with the ice.
There.
