For a long moment, nobody in the chapel moves.
"She's been dead for years," my aunt says again, quieter this time, like repeating it might make it true. "I was there. I saw the body."
"Did you," the Queen says, "or did someone simply tell you what to believe, the same way they told April what to believe about her own mother's fever?"
The question lands like a slap, and my aunt flinches, actually flinches, the first crack of real uncertainty I've seen in her all night.
"If she's alive," Jodan says slowly, working through it out loud, "and she was present the night April's mother died, then whoever's been orchestrating tonight didn't start with the note in the holding cell. They started twenty years ago."
"That's not possible," Lucien says, though his voice has lost its usual polish. "S
