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“Then your roses need about ten more colors.” I was, I thought, showing admirable restraint in my criticism. There’d been no end of these poems over the years. I wondered if this one was intended for the guardsman. Or the kitchen maid. Or someone entirely new. Yudit fell passionately in love every few weeks or so.

“Hm,” she said. “What other colors do they come in?”

“Orange, cream, lavender, green—”

“Green? Seriously?” Yudit pondered. “I could add those later on. They’ll fit in somewhere, it’s got forty verses. Ready for the next thirty-nine?”

I no longer regretted how grudging my thanks had been. In a few more verses, my admirable restraint was likely to be gone as well. But I’d never figured out how to ask her to stop without turning it into a screaming argument.

Happily, just then there was a rustle from the underbrush; my other three sisters had returned from their patrol around the keep’s grounds. “Quiet doon, ye three,” Drusilla said as she emerged, scowling. Which was rather unfair to Nicki, who hadn’t done anything louder than blow her nose. “I worked mah bahookie off tae make sure we were nae spotted hiding here, and if ye gie us away—”

“Give us away to who?” Alexandra was following just behind her. She crossed her arms and scoffed. “We should call it a night. I’m hungry.”

“Of course ye are,” Drusilla muttered. Unlike the rest of us, her native accent had never softened during her time away from home. I think she considered it a point of pride.

“We should maintain mission readiness at all times,” Winifred said as she slipped between the trees, the last of my sisters joining the pack. “This is a clandestine assignment.”

If Yudit rolled her eyes any harder, she’d do them an injury. “You’re not a master spy just because you know your way around a window, Winifred.”

“I’m a master spy compared to you, frog breath!”

“If I hae tae say quiet doon one mair time—”

The five of them fell to squabbling. Or rather, four of them did, with Nicki adding the occasional phlegmy cough. On the bright side, the poetry had been forgotten.

I considered trying to intercede, but there didn’t seem to be much point; no one was around to overhear them, anyway. So instead, I watched in silence and waited for the quarrel to subside—a dynamic that hadn’t changed much since our childhood. They could somehow argue without hurting each other’s feelings too badly. I never could, so I did my best to stay out of it.

To an outside observer, it would have looked like a single person yelling at a set of mirrors. All of my sisters were the exact same height and shared curls of the same bright red color. As well as freckled cheeks and eyes the pale blue of asters. I could spot the subtle differences beyond that, but someone less familiar with the family might be hard-pressed to do so. The only odd one out was me, solely because I still kept my hair cropped short while my sisters were letting theirs grow out.

The six of us served in the corps of magical knights that protected the Kingdom of Tailliz. We were sworn to the queen and had pledged to use our fairy-gifted powers in the service of our adopted homeland. Yudit, who withered plants and spat frogs and toads. Drusilla, who covered tracks so well that neither birds nor beasts were able to follow them. Alexandra, who could eat anything. Nicki, who had the ability to make anyone sneeze. Winifred, who was able to turn small windows into somewhat larger windows. And me, who made flowers spring up wherever I walked. Along with one other ability I very seldom used. Since it hurt. A lot.

It might be obvious that we were, shall we say, very much the second stringers in the corps of magical knights. We could not freeze an army to death in their tracks or toss them into the sky with a breath of gale-force wind. But the mightiest knights were all off doing other, more important tasks, leaving us with the less-than-spectacular job of keeping watch over a disused tower on the basis of a dubious tip.

I took a final glance at the keep as the argument, having achieved nothing in particular, wound its way to a conclusion. We’d be leaving soon enough. It was only an hour or so before dawn. We’d been waiting there all night long and were thoroughly exhausted.

“If we’re all agreed that nothing’s happening,” Yudit was saying behind me, “then I’m going to—”

“I see something,” I hissed, cutting her off. “Up there.”

Without another word, the rest of them came to my side, six heads of red hair lined up in a row behind the log. Above us, a few figures on horseback had crested the hill.

I peered up at them. All I could make out were shadowy blurs.

“Does anyone recognize who they are?” Winifred whispered.

Alexandra squinted. “No.”

“It’s too dark,” Yudit said. “I can’t see their faces.” Her eyes slid toward Drusilla. “You’re sure they won’t notice us?”

“I ken what I’m doing,” Drusilla answered crossly. She’d picked the spot we were hiding in. The hollow at the base of the hill was screened by dense, close-set trees, and the moonlight cast the tower’s shadow over it, obscuring us in deeper darkness. Drusilla’s powers had erased any evidence of our arrival.

The silhouetted figures above us tethered their horses by the gate. If they were speaking to each other, we were too far away to hear what they said. At least that meant they probably couldn’t hear us, either. As long as we didn’t go back to yelling at each other.

“We need to get closer,” I said. “Once they’ve gone inside, we should—”

The frog that Yudit had spat out released a ribbit as loud as a foghorn. The people up the hill went still.

I tensed, my fingers going white on the log. Surely they wouldn’t make anything of it. A frog in the forest. Nothing so odd as to seem suspicious.