Malice

you stole. My gold. My way out of Briar. How long were you and your father planning it? I want to know.” Her brow rumples. What a clever, talented actress she is. Fury gallops through my veins. “Was it amusing? A romp—trick the Dark Grace into trusting you and then take everything she has?”
“I don’t understand you, Alyce.”
“You lie so well.” My power thrums, spurring me to act. Her mortal magic would be so easy to destroy. It would feel like one of Rose’s glass baubles shattering under my heel. “Did your father teach you? Your mother, perhaps. Was it after your birthday masque that they bade you visit me? Or after the duke—when they realized how much of a Vila I really am?”
She gapes at me like I’m speaking a different language. “You…you think I’ve been spying on you?”
“Why shouldn’t I? My gold is gone. Conveniently after you saw where I stored it. After you knew I was planning to leave.”
“You think I told on you?” She launches to her feet, setting the candle wobbling. Shadows dance over the walls, as they do in the black tower. “Even after the trial? When I knew what my father would do to you—that’s what you think of me?”
Doubt cracks like a rotten egg and trickles down my spine. I shake it away.
“Don’t look at me that way. What else was I supposed to think? Spoiled princess. You were done playing with your Dark Grace and so you threw me away.”
I don’t let myself feel guilty for the way she winces when the words hit her.
“Stop it, Alyce.”
“Does it hurt you to hear the truth? It should. I hope you feel a fraction of what I felt when my whole world was ripped into pieces. My one escape blocked. Now I’m chained to the role of Dark Grace forever.”
The argument is a living, wild thing between us. Aurora’s chest rises and falls in an uneven, painful rhythm. “Do you really want to leave me?”
No, my heart answers. I roundly tell it to be silent. “There’s nothing for me here. I’m tired of being a villain.”
“You were never a villain to me.”
It is enough to break me. I want to lean into her, feel her arms around me. Smell the appleblossom of her skin.
No.
I’ve let myself be reeled in by her charms too many times. All it takes is a kind word, a soft look, and I’m eating out of her hand again. Like the pet I am.
“You’re part of this,” I insist, stoking up the flames of my greedy wrath. “I don’t know how, but you are.”
“I’m not.”
“But you stopped coming. Discarded me once you were bored.”
“Is that what you think?” She reaches for me. But I will not let her near. “That isn’t true, Alyce. I had no time. I was trapped here—as trapped as you.”
“It’s more than that.” Every ill thought I harbor piles together until it is a wall of stone. “You wrote to Prince Elias. You never did with the others. Never even spoke of them.” I barrel on when she opens her mouth to argue. “And tonight you looked…you looked—” It scores my heart to say it. “You wanted his kiss to work.”
The accusation lands at her feet and quivers in the air. She pales in the quicksilver moonlight. “Is it so terrible? To want my curse to be broken?”
“We were trying to break it! The two of us, together. That’s what you promised. And to see you looking at— at him like that.” The air is too thin. There is not enough of it.
Aurora continues, so even and cool that it sends a shiver down my spine. “If I seemed happy to meet my newest suitor, it is because I knew he would be the last.”
“Because you thought he would break the curse and you would—”
“Because I mean to refuse all others.”
I have to repeat her words in my head before they make any sense. “You mean to…refuse?”
“I mean to refuse,” she says, as smoothly as if discussing a choice of gown. “Queens of Briar are not technically obligated to marry their cursebreakers. And it turns out that Prince Elias wanted to marry me as much as I wanted to marry him—not at all.”
My whirling mind cannot keep up with her. “Not at all…but—”
“It’s something we discovered when we were writing to each other.” Aurora crosses her arms and gives me a pointed look. “He agreed to come to Briar. If his kiss worked, we would not be married, but we would work closely together during my reign. As a younger son of Ryna, he likely wouldn’t be king in his own right. But he could be an ambassador of sorts here. We could share ideas, strengthen relations with all realms, create a better world for both peoples. All without marriage.”
The fight goes out of me in a single breath, leaving my limbs like rubber.
“You never told me.”
“You never let me! Any time I mentioned Elias you did nothing but argue and bait me. You hated him as soon as I spoke his name.”
I focus on the Briar roses stitched on the rug, ashamed. Dragon’s teeth, I’d been so wrapped up in jealousy that I didn’t believe in her.
“It doesn’t matter now.” She kneads her thumb over her thorned curse mark. “I decided before he arrived that I will have some control over my own life in these last months. Regardless of the outcome, Elias would be the last man I kiss.”
“But…” My chin trembles, imagining Aurora’s lifeless form laid out on a funeral pyre, her face waxy and body stiff. “Briar. You’re the last heir.”
“Yes, and I’ve been the last heir for some time now. My mother must have some arrangement with the Etherians. They have to start including me in those negotiations. I will do everything I can to help them establish the next ruler. I have a few months. We’ll find a solution. Think of it this way”—she picks up a bottle on