If it were possible to hate someone enough to kill them simply by wishing for it, Isoeld Severine would already be dead. But since her stepmother was still out there walking around, Phryne assumed she needed to find another way.

She spent hours mourning for her father. The images of his final moments were burned into her memory, and days after she had been seized and locked away she could still see the shock and anguish in his face as his assassin had stabbed him again and again with that knife. She could hear him cry out, could recall the way his head had turned and looked at her while Isoeld held her pinned to the floor, recognition of what was happening reflected sharp and clear in his eyes. He knew his wife had betrayed him. She could feel his pain as the dagger sheathed in his body withdrew, and his lifeblood drained away.

Phryne could see it all, even when she didn’t want to.

The Home Guard had appeared shortly after, and they had hauled her away in spite of her protestations. The weapon that had killed the King was lying next to her. The real assassin was gone. Both Isoeld and First Minister Teonette pointed fingers at her, claiming to have witnessed the consummation of her vengeance, to have heard her cry out that her father would never mistreat her again, that she had endured enough. It must have had something to do with the terrible argument they had engaged in only days earlier, the one that everyone in the city had been talking about. Phryne had screamed at him even as she drove the knife home that he had humiliated her and could not be allowed to live. She had even accused him of letting her mother die all those years ago.

It got worse. Her accusers quickly suggested that she was suffering from delusions and other mental disorders, that her ability to reason and act rationally had been adversely affected. Isoeld had witnessed this behavior herself in the presence of the King, but had chosen to keep quiet about it and let her husband handle the matter. Phryne was not her daughter, after all—even though she loved her dearly—so it was left to her father. But she had always worried that sooner or later the girl would do something terrible, that her illness would overcome her in a way that would prove disastrous.

So they locked Phryne Amarantyne away in that storeroom and left her there to await her fate. She already knew what that fate would be. They would try her for her father’s murder, convict her, and sentence her to death in the Elven Way. Everyone knew about that. It was an old punishment, seldom employed, reserved for the most heinous of crimes and criminals. She couldn’t remember when it had last been used. Not in her lifetime, certainly. It was considered barbaric, monstrous.