I glance over at the Ghost.

“Good,” he says. “Now shoot.”

My hands feel sweaty as I draw out the miniature crossbow, seeking to steady it against my arm. I have grown up in a house of butchery. I have trained for this. My principal childhood memory is of bloodshed. I have killed already tonight. And yet, for a moment, I am not sure I can do it.

You’re no killer.

I take a breath and loose the bolt. My arm spasms from the recoil. The creature topples over, a flailing arm sending a pyramid of golden apples spilling to the dirt. I press myself down against a thick cluster of roots, camouflaging myself as I’ve been taught. Servants scream, looking around for the shooter.

Next to me, the Ghost has a smile on the corner of his mouth. “Was that your first?” he asks me. And then when I look at him blankly, he clarifies. “Have you ever killed anyone before?”

May death be your only companion.

I shake my head, not trusting myself to speak the lie out loud convincingly.

“Sometimes mortals throw up. Or cry,” he says, clearly pleased I am doing neither of those things. “It shouldn’t shame you.”

“I feel fine,” I say, taking a deep breath and fitting a new bolt into the bow.

What I feel is a kind of nervous adrenaline-soaked readiness. I seem to have passed some kind of threshold. Before, I never knew how far I would go. Now I believe I have the answer. I will go as far as there is to go. I will go way too far.

He raises both brows. “You’re good at this. Nice marksmanship and a stomach for violence.”

I am surprised. The Ghost is not given to compliments.

I have vowed to become worse than my rivals. Two murders completed in a single night mark a descent I should be proud of. Madoc could not have been more wrong about me.

“Most of the children of the Gentry don’t have the patience,” he says. “And they’re not used to getting their hands dirty.”

I do not know what to say to that, with Valerian’s curse fresh in my mind. Maybe there’s something broken in me from watching my parents being murdered. Maybe my messed-up life turned me into someone capable of doing messed-up things. But another part of me wonders if I was raised by Madoc in the family business of bloodshed. Am I like this because of what he did to my parents or because he was my parent?

May your hands always be stained with blood.

The Ghost reaches out to grab my wrist, and before I can snatch it back, he points to the pale half moons at the base of my nails. “Speaking of hands, I can see what you’ve been doing in the discoloration of your fingers. The blue cast. I can smell it in your sweat, too. You’ve been poisoning yourself.”

I swallow, and then, because there’s no reason to deny it, I nod.

“Why?” The thing I like about the Ghost is that I can tell he’s not asking to set me up for a lecture. He just seems curious.

I am not sure how to explain it. “Being mortal means I have to try harder.”

The Ghost studies my face. “Someone’s really sold you a bill of goods. Plenty of mortals are better at plenty of stuff than the Folk. Why do you think we steal them away?”

It takes me a moment to realize he’s serious. “So I could be …?” I can’t finish the sentence.

He snorts. “Better than me? Don’t press your luck.”

“That’s not what I was going to say,” I protest, but he only grins. I look down. The body is still lying there. A few knights have gathered around it. As soon as they move the body, we will move, too. “I just need to be able to vanquish my enemies. That’s all.”

He looks surprised. “Do you have a lot of enemies, then?” I am sure he imagines me among the children of the Gentry, with their soft hands and velvet skirts. He thinks of little cruelties, small slights, minor snubs.

“Not many,” I say, thinking of the lazy, hateful look Cardan gave me by torchlight in the hedge maze. “But they’re quality.”

When the knights finally bear the body away and no one is searching for us anymore, the Ghost leads me across the roots again. We slip through corridors until he can get close enough to the messenger bag to light-finger the papers inside. Up close, though, I realize something that chills my blood. The messenger was disguised. The creature is female, and while her tail is fake, her long parsnip nose is entirely real. She’s one of Madoc’s spies.

The Ghost tucks the note into his jacket and doesn’t unroll it until we’re out in the woods, with only moonlight to see by. When he looks, though, his expression turns stony. He’s gripping the paper so hard it’s crinkling in his fingers.

“What does it say?” I ask.

He turns the page toward me. There, six words are scrawled: KILL THE BEARER OF THIS MESSAGE.

“What does that mean?” I ask, feeling sick.

The Ghost shakes his head. “It means that Balekin set us up. Come on. We need to go.”

He pulls me along into the shadows, and together we slink away. I do not tell the Ghost that I thought she worked for Madoc. Instead, I try to puzzle through things myself. But I have too few pieces.

What does the murder of Liriope have to do with the coronation? What does Madoc have to do with any of this? Could his spy have been a double agent, working for Balekin as well as Madoc? If so, does that mean she was stealing information from my household?

“Someone is trying to distract us,” the Ghost says. “While they set their trap. Be alert tomorrow.”

The Ghost doesn’t give me any more specific orders, doesn’t even tell me to stop taking my tiny doses of poison. He doesn’t direct me to do anything differently; he leads me home to catch scraps of sleep just after dawn. As we’re about to part, I want to stop and throw myself on his mercy. I’ve done a terrible thing, I want to say. Help me with the body. Help me.

But we all want stupid things. That doesn’t mean we should have them.

I bury Valerian near the stables, but outside the paddock, so that even the most carnivorous of Madoc’s sharp-toothed horses are unlikely to dig him up and gnaw on his bones.

It’s not easy to bury a body. It’s especially not easy to bury a body without your whole household finding out. I must roll Valerian onto my balcony and hurl him into the brush below. Then, one-handed, I must drag him away from the house. I am straining and sweating by the time I get to a likely plot of dew-covered grass. Newly woken birds call to one another beneath the brightening sky.

For a moment, all I want to do is lie down myself.

But I still have to dig.

The next afternoon is a sleep-deprived blur of being painted and braided, corseted and cinched. Three fat gold earrings run up the side of one of Madoc’s green ears, and he wears long gold claws over his fingers. Oriana looks like a rose in bloom beside him, wearing a massive necklace of rough-cut green emeralds at her throat, large enough to nearly count as armor.

In my room, I unwrap my hand. It looks worse than I had hoped—wet and sticking instead of scabbed over. Swollen. I finally take Dain’s advice and get some moss from the kitchens, wash the wound, and rewrap it with my makeshift button brace. I wasn’t planning to wear gloves to the coronation, but I don’t have much choice. Hunting around in my drawers, I find a set in a dark blue silk and draw them on.