1. I’m sorry, my lord.

2. I miss the sound of your voice, deep enough to shake the mountain fortress’s stones. I miss feeling it rumble in the soles of my feet. I miss the glow of your eyes while you paced the Chamber of Mysteries, lava burning in the pools below and the pointed arc of your throne at your back. When you would say, with a confidence that once traveled up my spine, that our victory was assured. The world would soon be ours, a blue-green gem in the palm of your hand.

I miss the way you would nod to me—when the weekend’s crop of would-be heroes had been bound and fed to the slicer-beasts, or when the construction of the Armageddon Weapon was nearing completion—and tell me, in that voice, that I had done well for you. That you were proud.

3. The conditions in Good Queen Frida’s dungeon are strangely adequate. I sit on a tiny cot between clean stone walls by torchlight. The guards come by with wholesome day-old bread and pure water. They ask if I am comfortable. I do not know if all the Good Queen’s prisoners are treated so well. If she really is as kind and fair as she makes herself out to be. Or if it is because they have found out, through some means, what happened at the very end. A kindness done for me in particular, when in truth I wished for no such thing.

I tell you all this—as if you could hear it; as if it was possible for this letter to reach you—because I imagine you would want to know. You used to ask after me sometimes. When there were no more pressing matters, you used to ask idly about the family I left, back in the Village of the Shade-Tree, and about what I did to amuse myself when not occupied with my orders, and about how this whole arrangement felt to me.

I am not sure if I ever told you this, or thanked you, but I liked to believe that there was a real interest in your eyes. That you, the one who razed villages and salted the queen’s earth, still possessed a secret heart that could take ordinary interest in human things, for a human who’d earned it. I have always been aware what a privilege it was to be looked at in that way, with a gaze such as yours. How easily it could be taken away again.

In truth, I wish I were more uncomfortable. I miss the spiked irons you used to clap me in when I had failed at my work. I miss the lightning you would send coursing through my body. I do not say this to the Good Queen’s guards, who would laugh at me, but at least when I screamed to you for mercy, I knew that what I did mattered. That when I pleased you it was good, and that when I failed you, it was worth punishing. It meant the loss of something you had genuinely wanted.

I wonder what the Good Queen thinks of me; she has never deigned to visit this dungeon cell in person. I like to think that she hates me, and that this cell is the most devious punishment her meek, pure heart can devise.

4. Although the war is over, I am being interrogated. Not that I didn’t expect to be: When the Good Queen’s guards dragged me howling from your body and brought me here, I imagined they would brandish screws and hot irons. I imagined they would ask me about the hoarded treasures of the Fortress of Mysteries, the slicer-beasts and other foul creatures who lived there, or the would-be heroes who breached its walls and met their demise. I imagined they would want to know if you had created any means of surviving your own death, returning to haunt them even now. Alas, you had no such thing. But they have no screws or hot irons, and have yet to ask me any of this.

Instead, they ask me what I thought of you. As a person.

They have no technique for this except persistence. At first, I ignored them. Lately—out of exhaustion or boredom—I have answered on occasion. I told them good things, of course. Your greatest victories. The villages you left in smoking ruins. The cut of your jaw; the noble curve of your brow. The way I labored to perfect your Blood Armor, every foul sigil on its surface, every spike on its edge.

When I tell them these things, they do not look especially convinced. I wonder why it worries me.

5. Come back, my lord. Find some way. If anyone could return from death victorious, it surely would be you.

6. The guards have switched to questions about the nature of our arrangement, which vexes me.

What did he pay you to work for him? they ask. What did he threaten? What do you fear?

I tell them that service to the greatest dark power of our generation is its own reward. Also, I had room and board in an impressively large and well-kept fortress. Better than laboring in a manor-lord’s fields, starving and dying of disease, even if that lord does pay fealty to the Good Queen. I’ve seen that life, as you know. I have no wish to return.

How did he treat you? they ask.

When they returned after asking this last question, it was with a stack of parchments. Primly hand-illuminated ones describing spells of loyalty, spells of obedience. I understood what they meant: They had seen how I spoke of you, and they had decided it didn’t make sense unless I was somehow enthralled. As if I didn’t choose of my own free will to leave my razed, burned village and my plague-ridden family and follow you. As if that choice meant nothing. I snarled at them until they gave up and left.

Is it really so difficult to understand? You were not unfair to me, in your idiom, and I did not want to be parted from you. Surely you know this. Surely you knew, even at the end, even though—

My lord, I am sorry. I am sorry.

I am so sorry.

7. We were supposed to rule the world. It was all perfect, or about to be perfect, and then I ruined it, didn’t I? I can write you all the useless, obsequious letters I want, but you will not read them. You are dead. You are dead and it is all because—

8. I can deny it all I like, but you are dead because of me.

Do you remember what you said, that last day, when the Armageddon Weapon was complete? You said, now I will rule the world. I miss the way you used to talk like that. I miss the thrum of your voice and the thrill of your confidence in your power. Even then, I closed my eyes and enjoyed the sound.

But it had always been we, before, not I.

Once the Good Queen is vanquished, you said, I’ll release you from service, of course.

I said, That is not necessary, my lord.

Of course it is, you said. I will be all-powerful, and therefore I will not require assistance. Who wants servants, needing things the way servants do at all hours of the day? Needing to talk about their precious families in the Village of whatever Tree it was and to double-check so many times about exactly which sigils ought to go where on the stupid Blood Armor? Hasn’t that always been as tiresome to you as it has to me?

It has not been, I said.

But you looked at me then with the expression you always wore when I’d irritated you. And I knew that if I said one more word, it would be the irons. And the lightning. And the lava again.

You said, I have other matters to attend to.

To which I said, Yes, my lord.

I scurried out. And I thought about the life of a villager, toiling away on a tenant farm, starving and dying of disease. Whether the manor-lords were loyal to you or to the Good Queen, the result for the peasants was the same. You massacred peasants more often, I suppose. I thought about how I could have failed you so badly and noticed no sign.

It is only happenstance that the Good Queen’s champion crept into the Fortress of Mysteries that day, as would-be heroes do. It is only happenstance that I stumbled across him.

I looked at him, there in the shadows of the corridor. He was a young man, like most of them, tall and blond and shallowly beautiful. He had a sword at his hip. He had not yet seen me.

It was far from the first time I had seen such a trespasser in our domain. But I was distressed. And so I did not do what I would normally have done for you. I did not summon the horde of slicer-beasts. I did not rush to the next room to press the lever that would tumble the hero into the lava pools. I did not draw my own sword and attack, laying down my measly life for you.

I reasoned, instead, that if you were so ready to rule alone, you could handle this yourself. And I slipped away silently, into one of those side rooms where you keep the slicer-beasts’ fodder, until he had passed.

I did not expect him to kill you. In my heart, I thought nothing could kill you. I thought it would irritate you, having to dispose of the hero without my assistance, and then you’d punish me, but when the punishment was over, you’d realize that you needed me after all. Everything would work out, if it went that way.

But now you are dead. I didn’t see until it was already done. The hero and the Good Queen’s guards had to pull me, screaming, from the side of your cooling body, with the hero’s sword stuck in one of the joints of your Blood Armor. I didn’t mean it, do you understand? It wasn’t what I meant to do. But now you are dead, and I sit imprisoned in this clean gray cell which isn’t even torturous enough to be interesting, and it is what we both deserve.

9. I miss you. Do you know, they even took me outdoors today, chained and under supervision. A whole courtyard, lined with plain, clean stone, under the open sky. I have never much cared for the sky. I liked the dark and cavernous domes of the Fortress of Mysteries, far below ground. But the smell of the sky, the green hint of life somewhere outside these dungeon walls, struck me more deeply than I had expected.

They allowed me to pace the yard and stretch my limbs, and then to sit on a stone bench next to another prisoner, a man my age who’d also been brought there for exercise, who shut his eyes as he breathed in the warm outside air.

We got talking, that other prisoner and I. He wasn’t one of yours—he’d belonged to some criminal faction that never interested you or me. But he’d read the Good Queen’s parchments. He wanted to know what I thought of them.

“When they talk about spells of obedience,” he explained, “they mostly don’t mean literal spells. You can come under someone’s thrall without any magic. You can feel desperate in any number of ways, and you can convince yourself . . .”

I wonder if he was even really another prisoner. I wonder if it was a trick. Some magician of the Good Queen’s in disguise, pretending to open up about his own petty criminal masters and how it had felt for him to serve them.

Oh, why am I bothering? Why am I writing these letters to you at all? When you can’t read them? You wouldn’t deign to, even if you were alive. You aren’t even here to be angry with me. I can blame myself or I can blame you, or the hero, or the Good Queen, but either way I end up back here in my cell, scratching out these words to myself, alone.

10. I am so sorry, my lord. I am adrift without you. These bland, good guards will never understand. They want me to transfer my loyalties, in some way, to the Good Queen. They want me to understand that she is your opposite in every way—good and pure, generous and forgiving and kind; they imagine that, if I understood this, I would follow her gladly. That no one in their mind would prefer anyone else. But what they cannot grasp is that I loved you because of your darkness. The fact that you lived grandly and cruelly and wickedly is a point in your favor, not hers. You had power, along with everything worth desiring. I wanted to share it with you.

There’s only one more thing I keep thinking, now that I’ve dared to put into words how I betrayed you. It’s that I miss you and long for you and will for the rest of my miserable life. But were our positions reversed—had I died, and you had gone on to victory, imprisonment or some other fate—then I somehow think you would not miss me at all.

The next time the Good Queen’s guards come, perhaps I will remember this. And perhaps I will, with the greatest of regrets, take a look at their parchments.