for the door.
Sophie ducked out of view, scuttling after Kei.
What is in that bank? she wondered. What are they hiding?
But there was no more time to think, for Kei was already walking through the doors of the Throne Room.
Sophie hesitated as she entered, dark shadows crisscrossing the long, vast hall. For a moment, it was so dark she couldn’t see anything, the thick carpet rustling beneath her slippers.
A ray of light cut through the shadows.
Sophie looked up.
A boy stood at the window, his back to her, a crown nestled in his coppery hair. Sun haloed him as two seamstresses cinched a belt of gilded Lion heads around his high-collared white fur cape.
A wedding cape.
As if in response, Sophie’s dress began to morph on her skin. She flung up her arms in shock as the dress tightened around her ribs, the fabric hardening from lace to crepe and sealing her chest in a creamy-boned bodice. The sleeves spouted wings and ruffled cuffs while the hem unraveled to the floor, pooling behind her in a rich, white train. Along the edges of the bodice, gold thread wove a pattern of Lion heads, matching the boy’s belt. The back of Sophie’s neck tickled as the collar extended up her nape, higher, higher, then pulled down over her face in diaphanous silk, like a hood or a mask or a . . .
Veil.
Sophie started shaking.
A wedding dress.
She was trapped in her own wedding dress.
The boy turned from the window.
Rhian smiled, his face battered and bruised.
“Yes, Mother,” he said, blue-green eyes twinkling. “I think that’ll do nicely.”
“YOUR MOTHER IS inside the dress?” Sophie asked, morning dew dripping off a rosebush onto her white lace, restored to its prim, ruffled form.
“A piece of her, perhaps,” said Rhian, walking with her through the royal gardens. Clad in his blue-and-gold suit, he limped gingerly, Excalibur on his belt. In the sunlight, Sophie could see the mess of welts on his tan face and neck, still healing. As he bent to inspect a tulip, she glimpsed a scar at the top of his skull, jagged and faded. A scar from long ago.
“My mother left that dress to us when she died,” he went on. “It’s shown signs of life. Even given my brother and me answers. But fashioning you a wedding dress . . . ? That was a surprise.” He peered at Sophie. “Has it done anything else?”
Sophie tightened. “No,” she lied. “What do you mean it gave you and your brother ‘answers’? How can a dress give answers?”
“How can two girls magically appear in a king’s bedroom? Each of us has questions, it seems,” said Rhian dryly. “Want to see the Orangerie?” He moved towards a short staircase ahead. “It’s almost finished.”
Workers clustered on the level below, tending to perfectly square plots of orange trees, planted in the pattern of a giant chessboard, a titanic stone fountain of a Lion at its center, occasionally shooting jets of mist over the grove. Rhian struggled down the steps and Sophie took his arm, feeling his muscles resist hers, then slowly soften. At the bottom she let go, and they walked in silence between the squares of trees, the mist from the fountain lacquering their faces.
“The crystal . . . the one that let Agatha break into my dungeons,” said the king, a low branch brushing his crown. “That’s how you broke into my bedroom too, isn’t it?”
“Why don’t you ask my dress?” Sophie cooed.
Rhian chuckled. “They don’t make girls like you in Foxwood. At least not the ones I met when I was in school.”
“Because girls like me go to the school you want to tear down,” Sophie remarked. “I’m sure you had your share of girls anyway.”
“I had other priorities.”
“Like trying to convince your classmates you were King Arthur’s son, when even your own brother didn’t believe you?”
Rhian side-eyed his princess. “And here I thought Kei was impenetrable to a girl’s wiles. I’ll have to have a talk with him.”
“Do it tomorrow,” Sophie smiled.
There would be no tomorrow, of course.
She plucked an orange from a tree and peeled open its skin, extracting a slice and holding it out to the king.
“Is it poisoned?” Rhian asked.
“Naturally,” said Sophie.
She slipped it into his mouth and he bit into it, the juice dripping off his gashed lips. Their eyes locked. Sophie thought about how, in just a short while, the boy standing in front of her would plunge his sword into his own brother’s heart. And how she would rise from