But in the end, I vetoed them both. I wanted to see the damage. I needed to.

And for that, I had to get up.

That turned out to be easier said than done. I tried twice the usual way, only to end up back on the floor, dizzy and angry and shocked that I couldn’t even do this, couldn’t walk across the room. Only I could; I would. Whether my body liked it or not.

That was a not, but I finally managed to pull myself to my feet using the bedpost, and then just stood there, clutching it and wondering if my legs would hold. It honestly didn’t feel like it. Maybe I should have crawled—

Fuck that! A sudden wave of anger overtook me at the very idea, I didn’t know why. I’d done plenty of crawling through the years, literally as well as figuratively, scurrying into whatever bolt hole I could find, pride be damned. Survival was more important.

But it didn’t feel that way right now.

It didn’t feel that way at all.

I was sick of crawling.

So, slowly, unsteadily, I put one foot in front of the other, and felt a ridiculous surge of pride when they held. I swayed like an old drunk, like a sailor on the high seas, like… like a woman who had battled a god and somehow lived to tell the tale. And walked across the room on my own two feet.

The dressing table wedged in between the washstand and the wall boasted a large, square mirror, but the old, age spotted surface wasn’t great even in full light, having lost a third of its reflective coating to time. It was even less helpful in near darkness, showing me back only a pale, hazy figure, swaying back and forth in my gray dressing gown like some restless shade. I couldn’t make out much even when I bent closer, which… might be better, all things considered.

But I needed to know how bad this was, and how much of a lie I was going to have to concoct for my court. I moved to the much smaller mirror on the washstand, and grabbed Rhea’s candle before peering at my face. And got a shock.

I didn’t look that bad.

Well, okay, that was a lie; I looked like crap. Limp blond hair, which had been drenched in Thames water and allowed to dry in clumps, straggled around my face. My eyes were shadowed with dark circles, ones I didn’t have the makeup to conceal, assuming it would have worked on those things. And there were strange hollows in my cheeks, as if I’d lost twenty pounds in the fight.

But it could have been worse.

It could have been much worse.

So why wasn’t it?