There were, Regina swiftly realized, several problems with realizing your supposedly-loving fiance was your potential murderer while you were living with him before your wedding.


    For one, there was the problem of avoiding said fiance when she had been spending the last few months with him all but crawling under her skin. Previously, Regina had actually been reassured by Artem’s intense desire to hover around her for nearly every hour they could spend together. After all, it was hard for her to miss a vision of her death when Artem, the lens to her future, was always around her.


    However, now that Regina had glimpsed the seething mass of darkness that lay under Artem’s smiles and realized he might be the cause of her death threats, she felt differently.


    Unfortunately, Regina found it hard to avoid a man who literally showed up at her door every hour, on the hour, to take her to tea or to a social gathering or even to see the latest duck he had procured for her.


    (Currently, he was up to duck #43, who he had named Reginata and who had a habit of flying at Regina’s head in a way that suggested an assassination attempt in the making).


    Thus, Regina ended up seeking support from the one person she knew she could rely on and who had no reason to murder her.


    The only problem was that seeking that support meant eating heaping helpings of humble pie.


    “I told you so,” was Henrietta’s less-than-helpful reply when Regina had raced from that horrifying moment with Artem into Henrietta’s protective embrace. “I knew that little whey-faced princeling was too good to be true. By the blood, he looked a little too much like something that crawled out of a bad romance novel.”


    “I thought,” Regina said, stung despite her own fear, “that you liked those bad romance novels!”


    “I only read them,” Henrietta murmured, “to confirm the horrors of men and the superiority of my preferences.”


    At Regina’s baffled look, Henrietta just shrugged and said, “Should we not get back to the topic at hand? Frankly, I still want to know more about why you think your prince, who has spent the last few months waiting on you hand and foot, wants to murder you.”


    Since that was the one topic that was guaranteed to sway Regina’s attention away from Henrietta’s cryptic words, Regina began to lay out her case.


    “I should have known,” Regina said, “something was wrong with Artem from our very first meeting.”


    “Obviously,” Henrietta replied. “Any man who pretends to fall in love with you after one meeting is either the greatest idiot in Carcosa, which admittedly fits Prince Artem, or a conniving twit trying to bamboozle you with flattery.”


    “That is true,” Regina said, trying not to feel deflated. “It was absurd to believe Artem thought I was lovely from the moment we met. That could only happen if he wanted something from me.”


    Then Regina cleared her throat, pretended her eyes were not stinging, and said, “Anyway, he did more than flatter me at our first meeting. Artem is far more dangerous than I thought he was. When we first met, I thought I was rescuing him from other Alpins attempting to harass him. Yet there was a moment – a very strange moment – when…”


    Regina closed her eyes, summoning her memory of that first night spent hiding in the bushes with her once-beloved.


    “I will not be held back by you fools,” said the wild-eyed face above her, so close that Regina knew he would notice her within seconds. “We have spent months looking for an opportunity and I will not let you destroy it.”


    As he started to reach into the bush, Regina braced herself –


    Only to be shocked when there was a brief flash of light and the man above her stiffened and fell backwards.


    “Another brooch,” said the sneering watery-eyed blond. “You cannot even make your own, so your greed meant that you could not hide your treachery. Now, you even pretend to have fainted, you traitor. You just spared us the effort of trying to determine how to sneak you out of the party. We will just tell them that you were in your cups… Let us see if you ever get out of them again!”


    “When,” Regina quietly finished, “one of Artem’s harassers suddenly “fainted” out of nowhere… after a metal brooch that Artem made appeared on his person.”


    Henrietta paused before slowly saying, “That is quite the coincidence, is it not? I had no idea Alpins were fragile enough to faint when a bit of metal landed on them… unless that metal was tainted already.”


    “It certainly is a damning coincidence,” Regina glumly agreed.


    “Prince Artem,” Henrietta quietly pointed out, “is also startlingly good at getting ahold of anti-toxin that you somehow only need to use on him. Is he procuring that anti-toxin from others… or manufacturing it based on his own knowledge of poison?”


    Regina quietly reflected on how many times she had died through poisons in her visions and said nothing.


    “I also thought,” Henrietta murmured after a while, “that Prince Artem is a little too powerful for his position. He is not only able to whip out metal artifacts out of thin air - he is also able to break into our heavily guarded townhouse as though it were a commoner’s shack in the middle of the woods. His skills certainly do not seem to belong to a prince best known for prancing about making jewelry.”


    “No,” Regina quietly agreed. “No, they certainly seem quite incongruous – until you remember that his mother is a foreign noble whose own skill set seems…”


    -the way the Queen had moved, had spun the assassin as if he were a leaf as if she was as fast as the air itself, the way she had seemed as if she could tear him apart with just her hair pieces-Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    “Uncanny,” Regina finally concluded, though she knew the word was inadequate to describe the eerie ease with which the Queen had dispatched the assassin who had the nerve to interrupt her tea party.


    “So Prince Artem obviously has the skills to murder you,” Henrietta concluded, “as well as the ability to access you at all hours. Do you think he might have been behind the past murder attempts that you dodged?”


    Regina wavered for a long time before she said, “I… I do not know. Yet out of everyone around me, he would be the person best positioned to murder me.”


    It was, horrifyingly enough, true. After all, when Regina recalled so many of the assasination attempts against her, Artem was always there… and always so close to her.


    In the scene where Artem had serenaded her dead body, he could have worked with an accomplice to set up the scene. Perhaps he could have even used his serenade to provide himself some sort of alibi after double-crossing that hapless accomplice.


    In the scene where Artem had discovered her dead body in his family’s vaults… Who would be better placed to put her there than Artem himself?


    In the scene where Artem had led all the important Carcosan nobles to her room while she had thrown out the engagement gifts… again, how had he known to bring all those nobles to a place where she would either be poisoned or potentially disgraced for disposing of the gifts given to her?


    Indeed, every time Regina thought of a moment of her impending death, Artem had always been there. In every one of those scenes, he could have used his knowledge of metallurgic magic and poisons to murder her.


    From the frown on Henrietta’s face, she had clearly come to the same realization.


    “Still,” Henrietta muttered, “you have seen visions of futures where Prince Artem was slain by assassins himself. Surely he did not participate in those attempts.”


    “No,” Regina quietly said. “Yet I do not doubt that Artem’s knowledge that my growing popularity imperiled his life through other assassins gives him even more reason to destroy me.”


    For a moment, it felt as though Regina’s heart was gripped by a vise, one that left it barely able to beat.


    “So all of Artem’s sweet words about loving me,” Regina cried, “could just have been his attempt to create an alibi to explain why he did not murder me even though he was the one closest to me. His affection seems so all-encompassing that even I did not question it! Yet all this time, he could have been trying to destroy me!”


    From the look on Henrietta’s face, Regina realized that she could very well be right. If so, Artem was indeed the canniest and cruelest opponent that Regina could imagine.


    “Even so,” Henrietta quietly said after putting her hand on Regina’s shoulder, “Prince Artem would have to be a true fool to want to destroy you. You have been the greatest boon that insipid prancing prince could ever receive. You tolerate his stupid face and ridiculous personality with far more kindness than he deserves and are elevating him from clown to king. Why would he not want the life that you are offering?”


    At that, Regina laughed, the sound so shocking and sharp that Henrietta flinched.


    “Perhaps he is too much like me,” Regina finally said, her voice sounding bitter even to herself. “Perhaps, like me, he wishes for my death because he knows he cannot be king without a queen.”


    At Henrietta’s puzzled look, Regina continued, pushing back the misery beneath her words.


    “When Artem was born,” Regina quietly said, “his name declared that his parents were willing to let him be king. By Alpin tradition, a boy’s name that begins with A shows that he is seen as a possible contender to the throne… and a challenger for any of his other relatives.”


    “Yet no one took Prince Artem seriously for many years,” Henrietta said, clearly realizing what Regina had already recognized, “even though he has more than enough magical power to contend for the throne. Even if we discount his knowledge of poisons, he is powerful enough to decimate a foreign legion. Thus, if he was seen as a clown rather than future king by others…”


    “It is because Artem willed it to be so,” Regina finished, feeling defeated. “He obviously hid his abilities for many years, acting more foolish than he was so no one besides his ridiculous cousins would drag him into battles over succession. Only then, I came long. I would have seemed like an insipid daughter of a nouveau riche marquess family, so easy to flatter and fool. He must have thought that I would be a safe bet to secure a life of obscurity, as compared to an ambitious Duke’s daughter. Unfortunately…”


    “Unfortunately, you became so popular that if you two marry in the end, he will have to be king despite despising the role,” Henrietta concluded. “By the blood, if I were him, I would kill you as well. You really are too much for a weak man to handle.”


    Regina immediately burst into tears.


    Their conversation then concluded with Henrietta promising to avenge Regina’s broken heart by murdering Artem with a vase during their next encounter.


    Though tempted by that offer, Regina asked Henrietta to leave Artem intact. After all, no one as subtle as Henrietta could hide the body well enough to avoid being caught. Then, after Henrietta begrudgingly agreed not to show Artem the full power of her vases, Regina spent the week before her wedding refusing to leave her rooms. To try to prevent murder of either Regina’s body or her heart, Henrietta kept Artem away with a variety of increasingly outlandish excuses.


    (Henrietta’s favorite seemed to be where she told Artem that Regina was currently suffering from a metaphysical crisis over how ducks could possibly exist.)


    (It was also the excuse that was the most effective.)


    Thus, Regina spent the week before her wedding confined to her rooms, seeing no one but Henrietta and her oddly worried parents while eating nothing but tasteless food that Henrietta made herself. In lieu of seeing the future through Artem, who no longer even granted her visions unless they included her, Regina surrounded herself with vases and watched the future through Henrietta’s visions.


    “You shall survive this week,” Henrietta reassured her wryly, “though I unfortunately do know know what happens after you leave to perform the Alpin’s horrid wedding ritual. There are very few vases around the dead.”


    “I feel more reassured already,” Regina returned.


    So the week stretched on, the days feeling unending. With Henrietta’s invaluable help, Regina made all the preparations for the wedding ritual to come in case all her attempts to sabotage the ceremony did not work. Yet after all she could do was done, Regina had no energy for anything further.


    All she felt capable of doing was lying in her bed and sleeping.


    Unfortunately, no matter how much she slept, she never felt capable of outrunning her waking dreams.


    For when she was not in the midst of dreamless sleep, all she could think of was Artem’s eyes and Artem’s smile and the warmth of Artem’s body.


    All she could think of was the promises they had made to one another, and the ducks he had given her, and the gentle feel of his lips as he moved them against hers.


    ‘Was he lying to me all this time?’ she asked herself time and again, combing through her memories. ‘Is he the gentle man I wanted to spend my life with – or yet another assassin out for my blood?’


    Yet no matter how much she revisited her memories, she had no idea which Artem was real and which was fantasy.


    If he lied to her about his abilities, what else could he lie to her about?


    What else might he do if he realized his own dream of living a quiet and peaceful life would be shattered by their wedding?


    Regina felt as if misunderstanding Artem was just another piece in the horror that was her life, even as she tried to find hope for her future.


    Then, the night before the wedding, Regina discovered that as bad as her life currently was, things could, in fact, get so much worse.