My grip on the potion tightens with yearning and dread. He’s right: if we could kill the Theyn, it would be almost as strong of a blow to the Kaiser as killing Søren. And besides, the Theyn haunts my nightmares as often as the Kaiser does. He’s the man who killed my mother, who beat me and terrorized me and felt no guilt over any of it. I won’t feel any guilt over him.

Cress, though…Despite what Blaise thinks, she’s been a genuine friend to me, even when she shouldn’t have been. She has shielded me time and time again, lifted me up when I couldn’t stand on my own. She gave me a reason to get out of bed in the morning when I wanted so badly to die. Without Cress, there would have been nothing left of me by the time Blaise appeared. How can I possibly kill her?

I knew it would come to this, to betraying her for my country. But I never imagined it would go this far. I think of the way the light left my mother’s eyes, the way her grip on my hand went slack. I think of the sword slicing through Ampelio’s back, the way he shuddered out one last breath before going still. Cress replaces them in my mind. I see her eyes, feel her hand, watch her soul get wrenched from her body.

More than once, she’s called me her heart’s sister, a Kalovaxian expression for a friendship that goes deeper than family, so deep that two people share one heart. I used to think it silly, considering Cress’s father was the reason I didn’t have a family anymore, but now it feels painfully accurate. Losing Cress, killing her, would carve a rotting hole in my heart that would never heal.

It’s Thora’s weakness, I tell myself, but it isn’t. Not completely.

“Theo,” Blaise says, his voice a warning I don’t need. Don’t want. My grip on the poison tightens and I’m tempted to hurl it at the wall Blaise sits behind.

He gave me hope when I had none and he is my lifeline in this storm, but right now I wish he had never come back. I wish I were alone in this room, surrounded by my real Shadows and blissfully ignorant of everything outside the palace. I wish I were Thora again, because Thora never had choices to make.

But I don’t have a choice now either. Not really. That’s what hurts the worst.

“I’m tired, I’m going to sleep,” I say, shoving the poison and the blade back under my pillow.

“Theo.” His voice snaps like a sail in the wind.

“I heard you,” I say, matching his tone. “I can hardly do it tonight, can I? Striking out at the Theyn is risky and we need a plan if we’re going to do it.”

His silence hangs heavy for a long moment. “But you will do it,” he says. I hate the doubt there, how clear it is that he still doesn’t fully trust me. But then, I can’t really blame him. I’m not sure I trust myself either.

I don’t answer and he doesn’t press me, but I know his patience won’t last. He’ll want an answer soon, and I don’t know if I can give him one.

THE THEYN RETURNS FROM THE mines the day after Søren leaves, but the poison stays stuffed in my mattress, along with the ruined nightgown from when I first met Blaise. Even so, I feel its weight constantly, pressing in on all sides.

Killing the Theyn is right; it is necessary, I have no doubts about that. Even from a distance, I can almost smell fresh blood on him. Astrean blood. If it were only him, I wouldn’t hesitate. I could pour the poison down his throat without a scrap of guilt. I could watch the light leave his eyes and smile. Maybe it would even bring me a measure of peace to kill him.

But the longer I think about it, the more certain I am: I can’t kill Cress any more than I could cut out my own heart.

A week passes and my Shadows must notice my hesitation to strike. They make no comment, but I hear their judgments all the same, lingering in every conversation, hiding in each beat of silence. They are waiting, and each day I hesitate costs me a bit more of their respect.

She’s not your friend, I tell myself again and again, but I know it isn’t true. I remember the girl who saved me from bullies, who turned the shame of the ash crown into war paint when she knew she would be punished for it, who distracted me from the pain of my welts by reading to me from her favorite books. The girl who has been my friend even when she’s had a thousand reasons to shun me.

She is your enemy. But she isn’t. Crescentia might be a lot of things—selfish and calculating among them—but she isn’t cruel. She has no blood on her hands and has committed no crime but being born to the wrong country, to the wrong man. Is that something worth killing her for? Wouldn’t that make me the same as the Kaiser?

More than once over the past several days, I’ve woken up drenched in cold sweat, though now it isn’t the Theyn’s scarred face haunting me, or even the Kaiser’s cruel eyes, but Crescentia’s smile. She holds a hand out toward me like she did all those years ago. “We’re friends now,” she says, only in my dreams her rosy skin turns gray as her mouth gapes open in a silent scream. Her eyes, blood-red around gray irises, are locked on mine, accusing, frightened, betrayed. I want to help her, but I’m frozen in place, and all I can do is watch while the life leaves her eyes, just as it left my mother’s.

When my screams wake up my Shadows, I feed them lies that are all too easy to believe: that I dreamt of the Theyn killing my mother, or of the Kaiser’s punishments. They don’t believe me.

Even though I can’t see his face, I can hear doubt in the way Blaise breathes, warnings in the idle shuffle of his feet. It’s the pinching game all over again—which one of us will acknowledge it first? For once, I’m glad for the wall that keeps us apart, because I know that if he looked me in the eye and asked what was wrong, I would turn into a mess. Over one Kalovaxian girl.

They might leave me for that, declare me a lost cause and walk away. They could let the Kaiser have the broken parts of me and wage their war elsewhere. I don’t know that I would blame them if they did. What kind of queen am I if I put my enemy before my people?

I try to avoid Cress as well. The morning Søren left, I woke up to her melodic knocking at my door.

“You look awful,” she chirped playfully when she flounced in before breakfast. She didn’t mean it cruelly and I couldn’t deny the truth in her words. I felt awful. I’d gotten in from my meeting with Søren only five hours before, and most of those hours I’d spent tossing and turning in bed, thoughts of the poison and Blaise’s words weighing heavily on my mind.

“I’m not feeling well,” I told her, which was true enough. “I don’t think I can join you for breakfast this morning.”

Her smile faltered. “Then I’ll have breakfast brought to you,” she insisted. “And I’ll stay to keep you company. My father brought me a new book of Astrean folklore that I’m sure you’ll love, and—”