The walk back to my room felt longer than it should have.
Aldric's question echoed in my skull with every step.
Are you certain you didn't write them?
I wanted to say yes. I wanted to be certain. But Elena's memories were a fractured thing—sharp shards that cut when I reached for them. I remembered throwing the teacup. I remembered crying until my ribs ached. I remembered the Duke's cold gray eyes and the way he looked through me like I was already a ghost.
But I didn't remember writing those letters.
Did I?
V.
My initial. My handwriting. My paper.
The evidence was damning. And if Aldric—a man who barely knew me—could look at that evidence and doubt my innocence, what would the Duke do when he found out?
What would the king do?
Treason was a hanging offense.
I was already dying in fifty-nine days. But dying of poison in an abandoned wing was a mercy compared to dying on a scaffold with a sack over my head.
---
The door to my room was slightly open.
I stopped.
I knew I'd closed it. I'd pulled it shut until I heard the latch click. Elena's memories had made me paranoid about privacy—servants coming and going without knocking, letters being read, drawers being searched.
Someone was inside.
I pushed the door open slowly.
The Head Maid stood at my writing desk.
Her name was Margret. Elena's memories supplied it with a curl of distaste. Fifty years old. Gray hair pulled into a severe bun. Hands that had never been soft. A face that had forgotten how to smile somewhere around the time Elena threw the first teacup.
She was holding my diary.
Reading it.
My blood went cold.
"That's private," I said.
My voice came out steadier than I felt.
Margret didn't flinch. Didn't startle. She finished reading the page—slowly, deliberately—then closed the diary and set it back on the desk exactly where she'd found it.
Then she turned to face me.
"Your Grace," she said. Flat. Unapologetic. "You're back early."
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. The latch clicked.
"You went through my things."
"I inspect all rooms in the household. It's my duty."
"You were reading my diary."
She didn't deny it.
The silence stretched between us. Two women. One secret. And the weight of everything unspoken.
I should have been angry. Elena would have been furious. She would have screamed, thrown something, demanded Margret be dismissed immediately.
But I wasn't Elena.
And Margret wasn't just a servant who overstepped.
She was the woman who'd ordered Mila to dispose of the tea.
"Why did you want the tea destroyed?" I asked.
Something flickered in Margret's eyes. Surprise, maybe. Or respect. I couldn't tell.
"I don't know what you mean, Your Grace."
"Mila told me. You ordered her to take the tray to the kitchen. To dispose of it. You said I'd refused breakfast. But I was asleep. I hadn't refused anything."
Margret's expression didn't change. But her hands—clasped in front of her—tightened slightly.
"You wanted the tea gone before I could drink it," I continued. "Which means you knew something was wrong with it. Which means you know who's poisoning me."
The silence stretched.
Then Margret did something I didn't expect.
She sat down.
In my chair. At my desk. Like she had every right to be there.
"You're not Lady Elena," she said.
My heart stopped.
"I've served this household for thirty years," Margret continued. "I watched the Duke grow from a boy into a man. I watched his father die. I watched his mother wither. And I watched you arrive two years ago like a storm that never broke."
She looked at me with eyes that had seen too much.
"Lady Elena would have screamed at me for touching her diary. She would have thrown something. She would have threatened to have me beaten. She did, once. Over a wrinkled gown."
I swallowed. "People change."
"No," Margret said quietly. "They don't. Not like this. Not overnight."
She leaned back in the chair.
"So I'll ask you once. Who are you? And what have you done with the real Duchess?"
---
I should have lied.
I should have deflected. Gotten angry. Played the part of the foolish wife who was too self-absorbed to notice anything beyond her own suffering.
But I was tired.
I was so tired.
And Margret knew about the poison.
"I don't know," I said.
It was the same answer I'd given Mila. The same answer I'd given myself in the mirror last night.
"I woke up yesterday and I remembered things. Things I shouldn't know. Things that haven't happened yet." I met her eyes. "I know I die in fifty-nine days. Fever. Abandoned in the West Wing. The Duke doesn't attend the funeral."
Margret's expression didn't change. But her hands tightened again.
"And the tea?" she asked.
"Poisoned. I don't know by whom. I don't know why. But I can taste it. Something bitter under the chamomile."
She was quiet for a long moment.
Then she said: "I ordered the tea destroyed because I saw who prepared it."
My breath caught.
"Who?"
Margret reached into her apron and withdrew a folded piece of paper. She held it out to me.
I took it. Unfolded it.
It was a letter.
The same cheap market paper. The same sharp, slanted handwriting.
Elena's handwriting.
But I hadn't written this one either.
M—
The Duchess suspects nothing. She drinks the tea every morning without question. The dosage is slow. By winter, she'll be too weak to leave her bed. By spring, she won't leave it at all.
Burn this after reading.
—V
I looked up at Margret.
"Where did you get this?"
"I found it in the kitchen. Under a loose stone near the hearth. Two days ago." She paused. "I've been watching ever since. Yesterday morning, I saw Lady Rose's personal maid deliver a packet to our kitchen boy. He brewed your tea. She paid him in silver."
Lady Rose.
The Saintess.
The golden-haired, soft-voiced woman who was supposed to be the heroine of this story.
She was poisoning me.
"Why?" I whispered. "Why would she—"
"Because she wants the Duke," Margret said flatly. "And you're in the way."
I stared at the letter. At my own handwriting describing my own death.
"But I didn't write this. I didn't."
Margret was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, very softly: "I know."
I looked up.
She met my eyes.
"Lady Elena didn't write those letters either," she said. "She couldn't have."
"Why?"
"Because Lady Elena couldn't read."
The world tilted.
"What?"
"She arrived here two years ago. Beautiful. Proud. Loud. But she couldn't read a single word. Not letters. Not menus. Not the marriage contract she signed. The Duke knew. He arranged for tutors. She refused them all. Said reading was for clerks and commoners."
Margret's voice was quiet. Heavy.
"Whoever wrote those letters... they weren't Lady Elena. They were someone who wanted everyone to think they were Lady Elena. Someone who knew her handwriting well enough to forge it. Someone who had access to her rooms, her pens, her paper."
She paused.
"Someone who wanted her dead before she could expose them."
My legs felt weak. I sat down on the edge of the bed.
Elena couldn't read.
The foolish wife. The screaming villainess. The woman everyone dismissed as petty and stupid and less than.
She couldn't read.
And someone had used that against her.
"How do you know?" I asked. "About the reading."
Margret's expression flickered. Something that might have been guilt.
"Because I was the one who was supposed to teach her," she said. "The Duke asked me personally. She threw a book at my head and told me she'd rather die than learn from a servant."
She looked down at her hands.
"I stopped trying after that. I decided she was exactly what everyone said—vain, foolish, a waste of effort."
She met my eyes again.
"I was wrong."
---
The silence stretched.
Somewhere in the castle, a clock chimed the hour.
Fifty-nine days.
"What do we do?" I asked.
Margret stood. Smoothed her apron. Her face settled back into its familiar severe lines.
"We find out who taught Lady Rose to forge handwriting," she said. "And we find out who 'V' really is."
"You'll help me?"
She looked at me for a long moment.
"You're not Lady Elena," she said. "But you're wearing her face. You're drinking her poison. And you're the only person in this castle who's been kind to Mila in two years."
She walked to the door.
"I'll help you. Not because you're the Duchess. Because you're not."
She paused with her hand on the latch.
"One more thing, Your Grace."
"What?"
"The Duke's mother died of a fever. Twenty years ago. In the West Wing. They said it was illness."
She looked back at me.
"They said the same thing about his first betrothed. Died before the wedding. Fever. Very tragic."
My blood went cold.
"Are you saying—"
"I'm saying the Verwood Duchy has a history of convenient fevers. And you're not the first woman to die of one."
She left.
The door clicked shut behind her.
I sat on the bed, staring at the wall, my heart pounding.
Elena couldn't read.
The Saintess was poisoning me.
And I wasn't the first.
Somewhere in this castle, a pattern was repeating. A killer who'd been getting away with it for twenty years.
And I had fifty-nine days to prove it.
---
I crossed to the desk. Opened the diary. Picked up the pen.
Day 2. Evening.
Elena couldn't read.
Everything I thought I knew about her was wrong. She wasn't a spy. She was a scapegoat. Someone forged her handwriting, used her illiteracy against her, and planned to kill her before she could discover the truth.
They almost succeeded.
They don't know I can read.
They don't know I'm not her.
And they don't know that Margret just told me about the other women.
The Duke's mother. His first betrothed. Both dead of "fevers." Both inconvenient.
Someone in this house has been killing women for twenty years.
And I'm next.
I set down the pen.
The fire crackled.
Somewhere in the castle, Lady Rose was smiling her gentle smile. Planning her next move. Waiting for the poison to do its work.
She thought she was the heroine of this story.
She was wrong.