Revenge by Fiona McIntosh

folded cloak, was Queen Nyria. She was very still. Her skin looked waxen and a trickle of blood ran from behind her ear and soaked into the pale velvet of her cloak. The King was kneeling beside her, his face contorted with grief.
    He looked up and stretched out his arms. ‘Won’t someone help her?’ he pleaded.
    The King’s most loyal servant, Koryn, put his mottled, bony fingers on the King’s shoulders and squeezed gently. He whispered directly into the griefstricken man’s ear. ‘My liege, she has gone to the Light.’
    Lorys roared aloud in his agony. He picked up the Queen’s limp body and pulled it to his chest. Now all in the yard could see just how drenched with blood her cloak was.
    The Queen of Tallinor was surely dead.
    No one moved. All were too shocked to speak. Then a lone voice called out and a woman pushed through the crowd. Saxon immediately recognised Alyssa’s voice and Gyl moved towards her just as she broke through and froze, taking in the ugly scene.
    Weeping, she kneeled beside her King and her Queen, close enough to hear what the sovereign was mumbling over and over into Nyria’s bloodied ear.
    ‘I am punished for my sins,’ he wept.

8
Shrouded in Violet
    Tal was in mourning. As they had done for centuries when a royal passed into the Light, the Tallinese shrouded their city in violet; the colour reserved for death. As a sign of respect, shopkeepers draped violet over their doorways, most of the houses had pennants of violet hanging from their windows and people stitched a patch of the colour onto their garments. Little girls even put the fresh flowers in their hair. The city, indeed the Kingdom, would wear the violet for two moon cycles.
    The palace itself had descended into a frigid silence. Only essential duties were carried out and the kitchen prepared traditional mourning fare: bland and meagre. The palace occupants would eat this basic diet until the Queen’s body was cremated.
    For three days and nights she would lie in state, laid out on a cold bed of stone in the chapel whereher subjects could bid their final farewells. Word of Nyria’s death had spread like fire and people descended in their hundreds on the capital. The King had released money to provide food for the many who had come from so far on so little to see their Queen for the last time.
    And this was where Alyssa found herself, praying, watching, weeping with the Tallinese. She had tried to keep up the school hours but none of her pupils could concentrate. By the second morning she had given up, dismissed the two classes and sent the children back to their quarters. With Lorys shut up in his chambers, receiving no visitors, speaking to no one, she had nothing to do.
    Gyl escaped the bleak days by volunteering to go into the hills with Herek and some of the King’s Guard for drills and training.
    Saxon had left the city altogether. He had remained with her longer than he had wanted to and finally Alyssa had told him to be on his way. He could do nothing to help and she knew that the loss of Cloot cut him far deeper than the loss of a Queen. He had left yesterday and she had cried bitterly, wondering whether she would lose him too.
    Only Sallementro remained close but he was so involved in preparing the music for her majesty’s funeral service that Alyssa could not count on his companionship right now. And so she sat alone in the shadows of the chapel and grieved, wondering what would happen to palace life now that it had lost its jewel.
    She watched a young couple grieve at the sight of their dead Queen and she was reminded of the depth of grief she had felt at losing Tor. Alyssa had never thought she would fall in love again or feel the desire to hold her body close against a man and enjoy his touch. But Lorys had reawakened those feelings and she wept as she remembered, just a few moons ago, wishing the Queen did not exist and Lorys was hers.
    And now the Queen was dead. That wish had been answered.
    Alyssa hated