My heart ached along with his, knowing full well what it felt like to lose a parent. My mother might have died years ago, but I hadn’t known that until Anushka revealed the truth. The pain had been fresh and horrible, and how much worse would it have been if I’d lost my father, too. Or my gran?

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, then twisted around so that my knees were on either side of him. Wrapping my arms around his neck, I pulled him close, feeling his breath warm against my collarbone. I carefully pulled through the tangles in his hair with my fingers while I waited to see if he wanted to talk, knowing better than to press him. He knew that I felt his hurt, and maybe that was enough.

His hand slipped under the bottom of my shirt, palm hot against the small of my back, his other hand tangling in my hair. Clinging to me as though I were the strong one.

And maybe I was.

“I wanted him dead,” he said, his voice muffled. “I planned for it.”

He had. It seemed like a hundred years ago that we’d stood in the stables in Trollus and I’d blackmailed him into telling me the truth in exchange for the return of the plans for the stone tree. Looking back, he seemed so much younger, so convinced of his emotional fortitude because it had never been tested. Not really. And now, whatever naiveté he might have once possessed was gone, burned away by pain and fear, loss and guilt. No longer a boy and a prince, but a man and, whether he liked it or not, a king.

Which I supposed, whether I liked it or not, made me a queen.

“You didn’t plan for this,” I said. “Angoulême did. And we need to make him pay for what he’s done.” I leaned back so that we were eye to eye. “With Roland controlling Trollus, the Duke will believe we’re on the run. That he’s hunting us. But he’s wrong.”

I felt Tristan’s anger chase away his grief, and he lifted me up and set me back on the cot. “I’ll get the others.”

I retrieved the steaming cup my gran had left for me, and, moments later, Tristan returned with the twins, along with my father and Jérôme.

“You going to live?” my father asked, and when I nodded, he added, “Good. I wouldn’t want you to die before I had the chance to wallop you like the idiot child you are.”

“You should let me do it, Louis,” Victoria said, crossing her arms. “It will hurt more.”

“I–”

“Shut-up, Cécile,” Victoria said. “I’m not interested in hearing your excuses. You took advantage of our trust and ran off without so much as leaving a note to say where you’d gone. We thought Winter had caught you. Or the Duke. Then we tracked your horse to the labyrinth just in time to watch it collapse. Do you know what it was like for us watching the sky for Marc’s signal that Tristan was dead or near to it because you’d gotten yourself killed?”