I sobbed myself to sleep. In some ways I’d known this day was coming. Whether open war was upon us or not, the ways I pushed Maram both big and small would have revealed my allegiance to him. Would have revealed the core difference between us: I was not content to sit and watch while the planet slipped into collapse and ruin. We’d both grown up snatching joy and happiness wherever we could, and perhaps he could continue living like that. I could not. Our dream of a future together was always destined for death.

I was roused from slumber violently, with a hand that felt like a claw around my arm, and pulled unceremoniously from the bed. There was no time to understand who pulled me from bed or why. The moment I stood a hand struck me across the face, sharp and hard. Hard enough that I fell again, inches from the fireplace.

Nadine.

My mind was still half-asleep, but it took very little—seeing her silver slippers and the black hem of her gown—to bring it to full wakefulness. Perhaps it was naïve of me to imagine that she would take the severing of her power lying down. Maram, Idris, and I had rooted her power out of the royal household as thoroughly as we were able. And perhaps it was more than naïve to assume that she would not take out her rage on me, the only vulnerable one of the three, when my explicit purpose was to receive the violence and punishment of the masses in Maram’s place.

Nadine seemed to have the same thought. She gripped my arm once again and dragged me to my feet.

“Did you think,” she hissed, “that I would suffer your meddling? Or did you somehow imagine that I would not put the pieces together?”

She shook me as she spoke and when she finished, threw me once again so that I fell back and tumbled over a divan.

“I … I don’t know what you’re talking about, Your Ladyship.”

“You don’t know?” Her voice was dangerously close to a shout, a loss of composure I had not thought her capable of until this moment. “I was closest in Maram’s counsel before her marriage. And now I find that you are deep in counsel with her in the afternoons, that she allows you out among the makhzen, that she trusts you. She’s pushed me out, fired my servants, watches my movements. Whatever poison you’ve spewed—”

Nadine rarely lowered herself to brute violence—droids, birds, Maram—they all struck me in her stead. But as I rose to my feet, her anger spurred her further and she struck me across the face a second time. And when I didn’t fall, she wrapped a hand around my throat.