On the final day of mourning, the wind shifted west, and the third daughter of a third daughter took the throne. Watching from above was the slighted eldest sister, clutching the balcony’s divider with white knuckles as the Chaplain placed a crown atop the maiden-queen’s head.
Elodie was pissed.
Her brother, Rob, placed a hand on her arm in warning. At sixteen, he was only thirteen months her junior and therefore much too perceptive of Elodie’s moods. She smiled placidly, hoping to appease him, but she could feel his gaze burning a hole in her empty expression as she stared down at the Chaplain, who was leading a spirited rendition of “Prayer for the Virgin Maiden.” The choice of hymn was a bit too on the nose for Elodie’s liking.
The Queen of Velle had passed only three days prior, yet her crown was already perched atop the head of another. Elodie’s youngest sister, Brianne, was merely thirteen years old—with bumbling, pitifully earnest energy that made the courtiers titter and her siblings roll their eyes. But Velle had been waiting nearly three hundred years for the New Maiden to return, and now She had: as Brianne Elisabet, the third daughter of third daughter Tera Warnou, the late Queen of Velle.
The Church of the New Maiden had practically fallen over themselves rewriting the laws of inheritance. Before the ink of Brianne’s birth announcement had even dried, the entire country knew that one day she would take the throne and—according to prophecy—clean, revive, and heal the world.
Elodie thought that was quite a lofty promise, all things considered.
“That crown is too big for her head,” Rob laughed good-naturedly as he peered down at Brianne. The slight waif of a girl was dressed in a lavish gown of aubergine, cinched at the waist and fanning out like water falling over the edge of a cliff. The careful gold stitching glimmered in the afternoon light that poured through the church’s northwest window.
“Not for long, the way people keep fawning over her,” Elodie muttered, looking down at her own gown of gray, its subtle silver thread hardly a mark of distinction. In Velle, the queen’s first daughter was supposed to inherit the crown, but Elodie’s role as the heir apparent was short-lived. She’d been only four years old when she was cast aside for the prophesied Third Daughter. Now seventeen, Elodie ought to be used to their altered hierarchy. Yet moments like this one left her smarting.
“Be nice, El,” Cleo piped up from her left. The middle Warnou sister was caught between loyalties. “She looks beautiful.” Tears of joy glimmered in the fifteen-year-old’s eyes as she stared down at Brianne, yet her body was still turned decidedly toward Elodie, as a silent but stalwart supporter.
“I’m never nice,” Elodie snapped. “Only honest.”
But the truth left a sour taste on her tongue. That honesty—a trait that should have confirmed her place beside Brianne as Queen’s Regent—had instead relegated Elodie to the balcony during the most important political event of her lifetime.
The Chaplain banged his scepter against the stone floor three times as the assembly completed their hymn.
“All hail the queen,” he called, his voice sharp as a wasp’s sting. His beard was threaded with silver, his hair carefully combed. His attendants were draped in long white robes, their sashes the same aubergine as Brianne’s dress, a reminder that the new queen was permitted to don Her holy colors.
But then, she wasn’t just the queen.
“Long live the New Maiden,” the crowd answered back.
Elodie held her tongue. As though the Chaplain could hear her silence, he cast a glance upward to the balcony where the royal family sat. His icy blue eyes snagged hers like knees against gravel. His expression was triumphant as he curled his long-nailed fingers protectively around Brianne’s shoulder.
I win, his eyes seemed to say. As though the crown resting atop the head of his daughter wasn’t proof enough of his victory.
“I just can’t decide,” Brianne had admitted to Elodie the afternoon before, as she stirred sugar into her tea. The sisters had taken lunch in the queen’s chambers. “You’re so clever, of course,” Brianne continued, the knot in Elodie’s stomach tightening with every clink of her sister’s spoon, “but my father said—”
Elodie had held up a hand. “Bri, your father is the head of the Church. What he says stands to serve only his allegiances, not ours.”
Brianne had frowned. “But isn’t everyone’s allegiance to the New Maiden? The crown only exists to serve the Church.”
Elodie had gritted her teeth. Of course her sister would think that. Brianne had been educated by the clergy folk, immersed in the Church of the New Maiden’s word since birth. She had not been given the chance to develop the nuance required to rule a country. Velle demanded an unbiased regent, someone grounded who could see beyond prophecies and false loyalties.
After watching the Church indoctrinate her youngest daughter, Queen Tera had committed herself to untangling the interests of Church and crown. It was an effort Brianne and her father had not been privy to.
An effort that would disappear like hot breath on cold glass now that Elodie’s dearly departed mother lay buried in the ground—unless her eldest daughter was chosen as Queen’s Regent and finished what her mother had begun.
“Your father is lying to you, Brianne,” Elodie had said, frustration loosening her tongue. “You’re a pretty pawn in his game and nothing more.” It wasn’t until her sister’s face fell that Elodie realized her mistake.
The crowd rose to their feet as Brianne led the procession down the aisle, the train of her dress slithering across the marble as fluidly as a serpent. The Chaplain followed close behind, his gaze fixed on the church’s front doors, flung open to let in the autumn breeze.
None of the fresh, crisp air reached Elodie up in the balcony. Instead, she suffocated on the sympathetic glances thrown her way. The coronation’s guest list was incredibly exclusive—the audience included dignitaries from the Six Republics, historians from the finest colleges on the neighboring continent of Ideshore, and political allies who had known Elodie since birth. All had expected her to stand beside Brianne during the coronation as Queen’s Regent. To keep the crown under the control of a Warnou woman until the Third Daughter came of age.
“El.” Rob elbowed his sister sharply, nodding toward the narrow staircase that led to the ground floor of the church. “You’re holding up the line.”
Elodie got slowly to her feet, relishing the feeling of making people wait. She’d been kept waiting since the moment the doctor delivered the news that Queen Tera had perished in her sleep. One minute, grief rippled through the queen’s chambers. The next, a burning question: Who would rule in her stead?
Brianne would wear the crown, of course. But as to who would be the voice in her ear—it took mere moments for the competition between Elodie and the Chaplain to spark.
Our mother spent her life preparing me to help you rule, Elodie remembered insisting, before the tears had even dried on her cheeks. I was born for this.
I’m your father, countered the Chaplain. Even before I gave you life, I spoke for you. I have been the New Maiden’s voice longer than your time on this earth. I knew you then as I know you now.
It was difficult to argue with divine right. Still, Elodie had tried.
Rob nudged her forward and she stumbled, the toe of her satin slipper skidding against a knot in the wood floor. Elodie cursed, her already foul mood darkening further. “I’m going to bed,” she announced, once she’d reached the bottom of the stairs.
“No, you’re not,” her brother said incredulously, joining her on the main floor. “I let you brush my hair for this.”
Elodie reached up to ruffle his dark curls. “Not that anyone can tell.”
“You have to come, Elodie,” Cleo whined, sidling up to her sister. “Brianne will be devastated if you’re not there. She’s been so nervous she’s cried every night this week.”
So have I, Elodie thought selfishly, but Cleo’s brown eyes were so infuriatingly hopeful that she couldn’t bring herself to disappoint the one sister she actually liked. “Fine.” She twisted a lock of Cleo’s thick black hair around her finger and gave it a gentle tug. “One dance.” Cleo clapped her hands excitedly, throwing her arms around Elodie. “And one lingonberry tart.” Rob cleared his throat indelicately. “Okay, fine,” Elodie conceded. “Two.”
Cleo led Elodie out of the church and into the afternoon. Nut trees lined the winding path from the church to the north tower, their foliage glinting in the warm light of the golden hour; the masquerade ball would begin as soon as the sun set. For now, the dignitaries seemed distracted as they paused to bend a knee before Queen Tera’s mausoleum. Elodie clenched her fist as the Chaplain dropped a flower in the doorway of his ex-lover’s tomb, his face an irreproachable performance of pain. He was the picture of a brokenhearted widower, his hair and beard shorn short in mourning.
But Elodie saw right through him. Queen Tera, despite bearing four children by four different partners, had never married. Chaplain René had no more ownership over her mother’s memory than anyone else.
The queen was the most combative monarch the Church of the New Maiden had been faced with for nearly a century. She had rolled her eyes at the clergy’s requests for increased funds, had never bothered with mass herself but sent a proxy to attend in her stead. Her devotion to the New Maiden had been performative at best.
She’d had good reason to be cynical. As the youngest of three daughters, Elodie’s mother had spent her life primed to one day parent the New Maiden. But Tera Warnou was always more interested in the power she could wield than the power she might bear. Her two older sisters had died young, leaving her the throne. Once the crown was on Tera’s head, she’d turned away from the prophecy and toward Velle’s future. She’d taught her eldest daughter to value country and crown above all.
No, Tera Warnou had never wanted to mother the New Maiden. She’d wanted to rule in her own right. But even once she’d claimed ultimate power, there was pressure from her country to bear children. Expectations from her people. From the Church. Elodie couldn’t help but think the brunt of that force had come from the once-charming Chaplain, who was now simpering before the departed queen’s grave.
Sensing a lapse in her older sister’s attention, Cleo quickened her pace, nearly jerking Elodie’s arm from its socket.
“I thought you were supposed to be the gentle one,” Elodie said darkly, rubbing her shoulder.
“Not when there’s dancing to be done.” Cleo smiled sweetly.
Empires would fall for that smile. Cleo had inherited the dark, shiny hair, golden skin, and full lips of her father, a cartographer from the western Kingdom of Ralik. With her good looks came a tender temperament and purehearted charm.
Elodie and Cleo were just as different in personality as they were in appearance. Where Cleo was warm, Elodie was cold. Where Cleo was bright, Elodie was pale.
She’d often heard the castle guards, the Loyalists, whispering about her when they thought she was out of earshot. Elodie, the colorless girl, as pale as the palace and just as impenetrable.
So be it. Powerful women were always disreputable.
Begrudgingly, Elodie allowed herself to be led past the stables and the storerooms and into the north corridor, through the white marble hallway where the coronation’s attendees were filtering back into their rooms to pick up their elaborate masks for the costume ball. Lord Tybert of the House of Hale donned a papier-mâché monstrosity boasting real peacock feathers that must have cost nearly half of his family’s rapidly diminishing fortune. A lady emerged from the third stateroom with a mask made of pure gold, glimmering in the light of the candelabras that sat in every arched window lining the long hall.
“It’s all so gaudy,” Elodie muttered, loud enough that a man wearing a mask made of eucalyptus leaves turned to look over his shoulder to glare at her. She was used to the sharp, clean lines of her white palace, where she perfectly matched the decor. All these embellishments threw strange shadows against the wall, leaving glitter, feathers, and flecks of color in their wake.
“I think they all look nice.” Cleo sounded wistful. “I wanted a mask of white feathers, but Chaplain René said that doves are too rare to be used so frivolously.”
Elodie chewed on her bottom lip. “Why is the Chaplain telling you what you can and cannot wear?”
Cleo shrugged. “He’s probably right.”
“You should have asked me,” Elodie said sharply. That Cleo was obeying the Chaplain’s orders as though he was her own father stung like the slap of a leather belt. “I would have trapped and plucked a dove for you myself.”
“Maybe that’s why she didn’t ask you, El,” Rob said, biting back a laugh.
“If you want something done, best a Warnou woman do it,” Elodie said darkly, repeating her mother’s favorite phrase.
It was still unfathomable to her that there would be no more afternoon teas in her mother’s chambers, Elodie curled up on a cushion by the window while the queen sighed over paperwork, offering tidbits of political gossip and military strategy. Even after the prophesied Third Daughter was born, Queen Tera had kept her eldest daughter close.
With such a prophecy comes fear, Elodie recalled her mother’s words. The New Maiden will live in danger—from political rivals to warring religions, there will always be those who do not wish for her to grow old. She will spend most of her time protecting her own life. That means it is up to you to protect our country.
Elodie had taken her mother’s warning to heart. It was the reason she could identify every single political leader staying in the castle. Could recite the names of their partners and children; could recall their wartime allegiances; could even trace the routes each had traveled to get to Velle.
Her best friend, Tal, had often teased her for sneaking maps from the library and poring over them in the courtyard while he and Rob parried with swords. The son of the castle’s blacksmith, Tal was obsessed with steel, always smuggling out some heavy, fearsome-looking weapon for the Warnou siblings to study. Elodie would dodge the blunt end of Tal’s training rapier as he tried to distract her, tripping him for good measure so Rob could get in the final blow.
Tal was kinesthetic—tactical and possessive. He learned by doing, and thus was always pacing, darting, poking, drumming, picking things up and examining them to determine where they fit. But despite his teasing, he never plucked the books from Elodie’s hands, never tore the maps from between her fingers. Instead, he stood patiently beside her, waiting in the wings to execute Elodie’s strategy.
They’d been a good team then, laughing in the afternoon sun, dreaming of what could be. It was no surprise when Tal had enlisted in the First Army. He needed to do, needed to fight, needed to enact. That had always been his destiny. But where Tal had embraced his future triumphantly, Elodie failed to meet hers.
As the Warnou siblings turned toward the ballroom, the swell of instruments tuning echoed through the corridor like the screech of a cat trying to drown out the warbling of birds.
“That viola string is flat,” Rob said, almost idly. Despite being the son of the highest-ranking general in Velle’s army, Elodie’s brother had shown no interest in military tactics and instead had found solace in music. His lithe fingers flew across piano keys like skin against silk, and his compositions could be heard throughout the country, played in taverns and concert halls alike.
“Why don’t you go up there and fix it for them?” Elodie teased. Rob blushed, the tips of his pale ears turning a soft pink, cementing Elodie’s suspicion that he was harboring a crush on his friend Avery, the viola player. “At the very least, when the string section takes a break, you must ask them to dance.”
“I don’t dance,” Rob grumbled, throwing Elodie an absolutely foul glare. “I would never subject them to my lumbering feet.”
“I’ll teach you,” Cleo nearly shouted with glee. “Let me find Pru—she has my mask. Then I’ll meet you on the floor!” She scurried to find the royal nursemaid with the sort of boundless energy that nearly made Elodie want to dance, too. Instead, she sighed deeply and rummaged through the left pocket of her gray satin gown, pulling out a small mask of black lace.
“She’ll have me waltzing with her until midnight.” Rob reached for the ribbons of his sister’s mask, tying what Elodie knew would be a perfect bow to secure it tightly on her head. The mask was simple and slightly itchy, but Elodie only planned to attend the festivities long enough to be seen. “I hate you sometimes, you know,” Rob grumbled.
“I know,” Elodie agreed. “But you love me more.”
“Maybe,” Rob conceded as he put on his own eye mask of black leather. The music swelled, a tune bold and bright and beautiful. The Loyalist who was standing guard gave them a nod of recognition, reaching for the door. Elodie steeled herself, slapping on a false smile.
She would stay for one hour.
She would eat two lingonberry tarts.
And then, Elodie Warnou—whose mother was dead, who had been passed over for the position of Queen’s Regent, who would go down in the history books as a mere footnote—was going to bed.
The evenings were the hardest.
When sunlight streamed through the grimy window of her family’s apartment, Sabine could almost pretend it was light at the end of the tunnel, that the swirling sadness that held a hand to her throat didn’t run through her blood, didn’t threaten to topple over her optimism and take root in her heart. But at night the main room was full of shadows. From where she lay on her straw-stuffed pallet, the flickering flame in the hearth cast strange ghosts across the walls. Sabine pulled a patchwork quilt over her head. The darkness was now even more complete, but at least the ghosts were gone.
They’re never really gone, whispered that cold voice, the one that crept in only during the worst of it. A flat, punishing voice that turned her blood to ice. Sabine shivered. She ought to be used to it by now. She’d done this enough in her seventeen years—bottled up her emotions so viciously, let herself dwell in the sadness inside of her until the voice took over, uttering all the things she was too frightened to say herself.
The floorboards creaked as footsteps shuffled about the small room. Although the sounds were muffled by the quilt flung over her head, Sabine could still make out the cadence of the steps: steady and slow. When her sister, Katrynn, moved, she glided, a stone skipping on the water’s surface. When her brother, Artur, walked, he clomped like the Loyalists’ horses thundering across the cobblestones. This must be her mother, then. Beneath the blanket, Sabine groaned.
“Sabine?” The footsteps stopped. The quilt was flung away from her face, the light of a candle dancing behind her closed eyelids. “It’s nearly time, Bet.” Despite the lighthearted use of her childhood nickname, her mother’s voice was sharp. Stern. Her eyes lingered on the dark, prominent veins on Sabine’s hands. They were black, like pitch. “You’ve waited long enough.”
“No,” Sabine moaned, even though she’d known this was coming. They’d planned for it, after all. But the planning was easier than the doing. The doing hurt. “I don’t want to.”
“I know, babe,” her mother sighed, pressing a hand to her daughter’s sweaty brow. “But sadness is like a splinter. You’ve got to root around inside to find it. Hell to extract, but it’s the only way you’ll be able to properly heal. Besides,” she said, “tonight’s the ball. There’s too much coin to be had. They’ll be coming from all four corners of the world now that the New Maiden is crowned.”
The coronation had attracted people from Velle’s many territories and neighboring countries to the center of the city. They’d docked their posh ships in the harbor, noses up as they took in the foul atmosphere of their surroundings. But with their strange dresses, superior airs, and funny-looking horses also came their coin.
The exchange rate between crooners and kelbers was exceptionally high at the moment. Sabine’s family only needed to bully a handful of drunken lords from Wilton into overpaying for sleeping draughts, and the family could turn one quarter’s rent into a year’s. The fools from the Outer Banks still used real gold in their currency. Sabine knew this. It was all part of the plan.
But the plan had been concocted right after a brewing, when Sabine’s mind was clear and her emotions under control. Now, though, after weeks of holding all her feelings in, nothing sounded worse than being enveloped by a throng of excitable people. Having to smile, lie, and flirt her way into coins when all she wanted was to stay wrapped up in this blanket by the dying embers of the fire.
“Katrynn and Artur are already there,” her mother reminded her. “My cursed knee has flared up again, so I can’t go in your stead. They need you.”
And your magic, came that voice, reminding Sabine where her value truly lay.
Both she and her mother looked back down at Sabine’s dark veins. “You’ve never let it go this long, love,” her mother said gently. “We’ve got to get it out before it consumes you.”
And before anyone outside the family notices, the voice finished for her.
She never said it aloud, but Orla Anders was ashamed of her daughter’s sadness. It was clear in the way she inhaled sharply each time Sabine’s veins turned from blue to black. The pity that welled in her eyes when her daughter could not muster up the energy to join the rest of the family for sup. . .
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