She waved for Arthus and Finn to move ahead and arrest the Trish and Edrick. Edrick shot up in a sudden panic, but Trish did not even flinch. She remained leant across the painted table, expressionless.
“Take another step and the bitch dies,” Trish warned.
Arthus and Finn froze mid-step. No one wanted an innocent victim to die. Too much blood had already been shed.
“Tell me where she is, now!”
Trish ignored Katryna, reaching down to her waist and pulling a unique dual-bladed dagger from her belt. The ornate weapon had a bright red stone in its grip. Katryna was sure she had never seen it before; she would have remembered such an eye-catching dagger.
Trish stabbed the dagger down into the table, picking out little pieces of wood from its surface like a fiddling child.
“Why, Trish?” Katryna asked, looking straight into the face of the woman she had once trusted so deeply.
She thought she did not care, she thought that it did not matter… but the thirst for answers was eating away at her. None of it made sense.
“Why did you do this?”
Trish snickered. “I’m surprised you had to ask, I assumed you would have had it all figured out by now. After all the things your parents did to you? After everything your family put you through? The years of spite and trauma and ostracism, and you ask me why I did this for you?”
Katryna shook her head. “I never wanted this!”
“You don’t know what you want! You’ve never known what you wanted!”
“So, you thought that you would just murder my family then as a way for me to figure it all out, did you?!”
“Your father, the great and illustrious King Giliam Bower, took me from my home as a small girl! I lost my father; I will never see him again. I lost everyone I ever knew. He forced me to work as your fucking servant, like a good little show dog for the perfect princess Katryna. And your spiteful bitch of a mother… where to even begin with the mad Mira Bower.”
Trish shook her head, rubbing the side of her face where she had once been scarred by the late queen.
“The things my mother did to you were inexcusable,” Katryna said solemnly.
Trish stabbed the dagger down into the table again.
“Everything I have done has been all for you, Kat. I got you home, I avenged the things that were done to you, to us, and I pinned it all on your unworthy brother.”
“Rowan was innocent this whole time,” Finn said, surprised.
“Where is Rowan?” Katryna said.
Trish shrugged. “To be honest, I have no idea. He left before I had the chance to properly deal with him.”
Katryna looked to Finn, both acknowledging to one-another with an expression of despair of how wrong they had been.
“I wanted you to be the woman I know you can be. The queen I know you can be! This kingdom needs your rule,” Trish said excitedly.
“You’re a liar,” Katryna hissed, slamming her fist on the table. “You lie even now. You did this all for yourself, all to get some petty revenge against those who hurt you in the past. Don’t try and make it sound like you had altruistic intentions by murdering three defenceless people.”
“I won’t deny I enjoyed every second of it.”
Katryna clenched her fist, her eyes remaining locked on Trish. Any anxiety she had once harboured was quickly transforming into rage.
“We are all here because of you, Kat,” Trish said. “The fallout of your choices over the years. Running and hiding all this time when you should have been fighting all along.”
Katryna could hear the stark words echo in her memories from a deep pit of horror.
“Katryna, what have you done?!”
Suddenly she could smell of the summer flowers and the cool bliss of the creek’s waters.
She could feel her mother’s strike on her cheek, the day she had marked Trish for life with her letter opener.
She could feel the water filling her lungs as her mother held her head beneath the water in her bathtub, hear her father’s shouting.
Katryna closed her eyes, remembering the night she had left Ravenrock with Trish by her side, a bag full of gold marks and personal belongings, the night air flowing through her hair, and the fear of what was to come next. Two young women, all alone but for each other.
She felt the compression of the guilt on her chest, as if being crushed to death. The pain she still clung to for Willem, for her father, for Aunt Rashel. Even for her mother.
Katryna took in a long, deep breath, before exhaling away all of the things she need not cling to any longer. She refused to feel sorry for herself anymore. She refused to allow herself to be the victim any longer.
“My lady, let me arrest these killers,” Arthus insisted, pulling her back into the present.
“Take them alive if you can. We need to find out where they took Sniff’s mother. And I want them tried for their crimes before our people,” Katryna said.
Ser Arthus and Finn both drew their swords in unison, each taking one side of the enormous painted war table so that Trish and Edrick would have nowhere to go.
Trish snapped. She ripped her ornate dagger from the wood with a sudden scream, the blade between the fingertips of her thumb and first two fingers, before tossing it directly at Katryna, standing directly across the table from her.
Katryna could not even react to what was happening before the dual-bladed dagger came spinning through the air, impaling her in the shoulder.
Her arm exploded with a searing, burning pain, and Katryna was knocked back from the blow. She let out a pained scream, clutching at the dagger sticking
