He’d done them the kindness of meeting with them before his meeting with the Dukes and Earls later that evening. Princess Trianna should have been grateful for that, but she knew that he’d already made up his mind and that the decision was the wrong one.

There was nothing that said he had to meet with his wife and daughters to explain the grave news to them. Oh, he tried to put a brave face on it. “This will avoid the war we’ve been building toward for some time,” he assured them as he gestured to the scroll he’d just explained to them. She wouldn’t have the chance to read it, of course, but she didn’t want to. She might not have the sight, but she could feel the evil radiating from that hateful treaty. “Tens of thousands of lives will be saved, and—”

“And thousands of souls will be damned!” her mother blurted out, unable to suppress the outrage anymore. “Honestly, Henry, if you try to round up the beggars, they’ll burn the whole city down beneath us! Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”

Her father, King Borum, was used to these sorts of interruptions and only sighed. Though her mother never said anything to embarrass the King in public, in private, they argued frequently about a whole range of issues. Sometimes, she would even succeed in changing his mind, but the Princess could see by the twitching muscles of his clenched jaw that today would not be one of those days.

“There’s an army of death marching toward us, Glorena,” he sighed. “At first, I didn’t believe it, either. Not when my best spies reported it. Not even after the sun shattered, but it’s true. The dead are marching, the Gods have turned their backs on us, and there are precious few fortresses between here and the enemy. What would you have me do?”

“Well, at least you’re being honest about it now,” her mother growled. She hated being lied to, and the King had lied to all of them for months. The first rumors had begun to circulate more than half a year ago, but in each instance, her father had downplayed them.

‘No, there’s not a war coming.’

‘Yes, there’s a war in the west, but there’s no need to raise an army.’

‘Yes, I’m raising an army, but it's only a small one, and we shouldn’t need to field it.’

‘War is unavoidable, but it’s against flesh and blood. We’ll be fighting the men of Harrow and Kellor, not fiends from the pit.’

At every step, he’d lied to them and to the people, admitting as little as he could reasonably expect to get away with while he and his generals had whispered and planned: the dead had risen and were marching across the world, scourging whole kingdoms in their path.

There were some disputes about where this started. Some said they come from a backwater county in the South and that Siddrimar had been the first casualty. Others insisted they came from the West in the low kingdoms. Both options were equally nonsensical, of course; nothing ever happened in the South, and the West was full of fractious feuding lords that warred with each other.

“If we do as they say, and we send them those men, father,” Princess Trianna said finally in a lul in the conversation. “What’s to stop them from asking for more and more after that?”

“The steel of our blades and the strength of our walls,” he said firmly. She knew that was a lie, though. Everyone did. Constantinal had fallen. The Undefeated City had been defeated.

If they fell, then what chance do we have? She wondered to herself. Princess Trianna said nothing, though. She was rarely given the same latitude that her mother was. A wife might criticize a husband if done correctly, but it was a daughter’s role to be dutiful and supportive.

While her father explained why this was the only way to her mother for the third time to try to get a blessing that simply wasn’t going to come, she sat there, growing cold as she realized the truth: a few hundred beggars and criminals might buy peace for a season, or a year, but such a price would have to be paid whenever it was demanded of them. They would starve just as the beggars were now, and when they were too weak to defend themselves, the rest of them that sheltered behind the walls of Rahkin would join the rest of their fellows who had long since been given away in an attempt to secure peace.

She didn’t imagine that anything good would happen to anyone who ended up in the hands of their enemy, be they beggars or kings, and slowly, her heart hardened.

It’s just like my dreams, she told herself as the thought slowly dawned on her.

The Princess might be sitting there smiling blandly and nodding at appropriate moments like her brothers, but in her head, she was a thousand miles away. She could see her father sitting there on his throne, plump and comfortable, as he traded every citizen and every brick for one more day of life and comfort.

It chilled her to the bone and froze her smile in place even more than the evil scroll that sat in her father’s lap. Would he trade them away, too? Would he feed his own wife and daughters to the darkness, hoping that it would sate the darkness?Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

This was a terrifying question that ate at her all afternoon, long after their little family meeting had ended. In the end, it was that, even more than her concern for her subjects, that made her act. Her father said that she got her impetuousness from her mother, but today, Princess Trianna had no complaints about that. She got her sense of right and wrong from her, too, it would seem.

“We’ve gone from ‘there’s no war coming’ to ‘it's only the beggars and the criminals’ in less than a year,” she sighed as she clutched the beat-up old doll on her lap. She would have preferred to have her cat to stroke, but Poppet had gone missing months ago, and though she would love to blame her father for her disappearance as well, it was just as likely that she’d met the wrong man while she’d been out hunting rats. “Where will we be by next year and the year after? It’s only the Garden District? It’s only your sisters?”

Looking around the threadbare thing that her life had become, it was hard to believe that her choice would be more of this. Her clothes were patched, her windows were perpetually shuttered, and there were almost never fresh flowers to brighten the place up. Somehow, in spite of that, though, she would rather live the rest of her life like this than see a return to prosperity if the price was measured in lives.

Paradoxically, that meant that her father was going to have to die by her hand. Her brothers, too.

Does that make me just the same as him? She wondered. She had no answers. She prayed to Lunaris about it but received neither wisdom nor peace as she contemplated murder. So, reluctantly, she pulled the small bottle of liquor she’d hidden under her bed and stared at it.

By all appearances, it was just an amber bottle of plum brandy, but she knew exactly how adulterated and toxic it was. She should. She’d made it herself when things had started to get bad this past summer. Given the growing rat problem in the city, poison was one of the few substances that was still easy to come by. It was certainly easier to gather a few poison fruits from the corners of the dining hall than it was to get deserts or enough cloth to make a new dress.

She’d intended for it to be a peaceful way for her to escape the worst if the rumors of the living dead proved to be true. Now, it was a strychnine-laced death sentence for any who would drink it, and she was sure that in the planned meeting, drinks would flow freely as those men struggled with the terrible things they were about to do.

Just as she struggled with her own terrible deeds, she considered wryly. More than anything, Trianna wanted to put this off for another day or another year, but she couldn’t. Realistically, she only had an hour or two left to act. After that, the die would be cast, and they would find themselves in alliance with the devils of the pit.

“This is what the Gods would want,” she whispered herself. “Siddrim taught us this. All who seek to ally with evil or placate them are evil themselves.”

It was with those words that she finally forced herself to move. The Princess made no attempt to sneak or skulk; that would have only attracted more attention. Instead, she secreted the bottle in a handbag and then began to wander around the castle, saying hello to every guard and servant she came across and asking them about their day.

During all that time, no one noticed her little side trip into her father’s study, and no one was there to see it when she placed that bottle in the top drawer of his desk. She would pray that her brothers were spared the terrible fate she’d just created, but if they were not, she knew they would be casualties in a righteous cause.

“The light is worth dying for,” she whispered to herself that night like a mantra as she lay sleeplessly in bed until the screams started just before dinner.

“Any rumors that my husband planned to ally with these fiends is nothing but pure slander,” her mother said at the funeral. Her face was tear-streaked, but her voice was stronger than it had any right to be. “The evil that we fight knew that he would never bend, and they wormed some agent of darkness into the very heart of our Kingdom, but we shall root it out!”

There was a cheer at that, forcing Queen Borum to stop speaking for a moment as she addressed the masses from the balcony.

“My husband didn’t deserve this end,” she said finally when the crowd died down before she went on to name a long list of honors and achievements that he did.

Her mother went on to lionize her father at length, calling him “A hero who would never bend the knee to the dark,” even though they both knew he wasn’t and that “the army would bring them all the vengeance they craved soon.”

Princess Trianna stood there at her right hand but said nothing. Her mother would never find the culprit because she wasn’t even looking at her daughter. They were questioning the maids and torturing likely suspects, but not one person had so much as asked Trianna if she’d done this terrible thing.

If they had, she might have confessed on the spot. Despite the fact that she was certain it was the right thing to do, the whole ordeal ate at her. Fourteen people were dead, and though the healers had been called swiftly, there was little they’d been able to do. The King, his Lord General, both of her brothers and ten different Dukes and Earls. It had been a horrific discovery, and the entire Kingdom was in mourning.

It was only once all that was done that she announced that she would be assuming the throne and was already searching amongst the nobility for the right man to be the new Lord General. There had been Queens who ruled before, but they knew that would not be a popular move. In time, she would be forced by the gentry to remarry, but for now, during the mourning period, everyone would give her a free hand where vengeance and defense were concerned.

Tears cascaded silently down Princess Trianna’s cheeks as she looked at the blue-skinned bodies that had been laid in state beneath them, just inside the gates of the castle so that the people could see what had become of their King. It was terrible, and she couldn’t stop the tears from coming, even as she reminded herself that it was better than the alternative. Fourteen souls would be interred in peace instead of hundreds that would have been devoured and made to serve the dark.

She would just have to find some way to deal with it because as awful as all this was, it was still better than the deal they’d been offered.