From her place behind the pyre with the other candidates for the High Priestess’s replacement, Kiri glanced over, blue eyes glinting ice. The slightest bend of a cold smile, then she looked away.
A torch passed. Neve’s part of the plan began now.
Zophia’s possible successors walked in a circle around the pyre, their seventh and final lap ending in a line behind it. As one, they turned to Neve and Isla. The Queen and the First Daughter had the front row to themselves.
Isla looked worse. She’d been on a steady decline in the week since the trade meeting. Today cosmetics made her cheeks less pale and her eyes less listless, but there was no mistaking her thinness, the slump of her shoulders. Her health had been one of the things delaying Neve in trying to change her mind on the High Priestess’s heir. She’d gone to visit her mother nearly every day, but the silence of her sickroom was oppressive, and Isla had usually been asleep, anyway.
Then Zophia died, with Tealia still selected to replace her. But there was a loophole. One Neve would be exploiting as soon as the call went out for the useless, ceremonial vote.
A tiny prayer, murmured in her mind, the scrap of faith she’d unexpectedly found in all her heresy. Make her listen.
A warm hand landed on Neve’s shoulder, there and then gone, and she almost jumped out of her skin. A quick glance back— just Raffe. He gave her a fleeting smile, squeezed her shoulder once.
It should’ve been comforting. Instead, Neve’s heartbeat sped.
The red rose petal in her hand was limp and crumpled, creased with sweat. The other courtiers in the room made great shows of looking from their petals to the gathered priestesses, as if this vote actually counted for something.
Next to Raffe, Arick’s brows drew low, his petal turning between his fingers. Dark circles marked the skin under his eyes. The meeting in the Shrine last night had run late. He had a new bandage on his hand, unbloodied, though a speck of black still marked the center of his palm. She’d been concerned the first time she saw him bleed from it, but no one else seemed to be, so she kept quiet.
According to Kiri, it was working. The Wilderwood was weakening, loosening its hold on Red. That was what mattered. Everything else, they could figure out later.
She darted another glance at Raffe. The sunlight through the windows made his eyes glow honey-colored, reflected gold along the edge of his mouth. She hadn’t told Raffe anything. Not because she didn’t want to— it was a constant struggle not to let the whole thing spill over— but because he wouldn’t understand. The strange, dark ideas of Kiri and her followers might scare him off.
They even scared Neve a bit, though she was sure most of them were nonsense. Skirting the line between heresy and piety, practicality and fanaticism. An interpretation of the Five Kings that made them both more and less human.
Here they all were, partners in half-measure blasphemy, and Neve was about to lay the final brick in the wall.
Isla rose, and the court followed. The priestesses stood behind the pyre with ramrod spines, hands tucked into wide white sleeves, eyes fixed forward. Kiri’s hair shone almost the same color as the bright-red petal in Neve’s hand.
“One passes, and another takes her place.” Isla’s words were calm, solemn. She held her petal aloft. “Tealia, in the names of our lost Kings and the magic of bygone eras, I ask that you take up this task.”
Tealia didn’t have the guile to look surprised. Mouth a pleased grin, she inclined her head. “As you ask.”
According to ceremony, other nominations should be heard here. Neve pulled in a deep breath, waiting.
But Isla turned to the assembly, the matter seemingly concluded. “By our—”
“I have a nomination.”
Neve expected her voice to sound quiet and thin, a match for her quaking fingers. Instead it rang clear as she held her petal aloft. She stepped forward, eyes on Kiri, not looking at her mother. “Kiri, I ask that you take up this task.”
Kiri didn’t feign surprise. She nodded, eyes straight ahead, stone-solemn. “As you ask.”
Isla’s face blanched, but she didn’t let her petal drop. “What is the meaning of this, Neverah?”
An accusation, not a question. She’d expected as much, and it had kept her awake once she realized this was the course she’d have to take. An answer her mother would deem acceptable, something weighty enough to give her pause.
Red would’ve known what to say. Red always knew how to spar with their mother, how to shape words into daggers and let them fly, or use silence as a blade in itself.