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My mother was pacing on the other side of her table, skirts rustling with each restless stride. Our family’s eldest and closest adviser, Onal, sat straight-backed in one of the parlor’s less comfortable chairs, sipping her tea with pinched brown lips and a carefully cultivated disdain. At the sound of the door, my mother’s blue eyes whipped toward me, all of her anxiety loosed at once, like the snap of a bowstring.
“Aurelia!” She used my name like an epithet. Onal took another slow sip of her tea.
I thrust my hands into my pockets. The gesture was supposed to make me look sheepish and repentant, of which I was neither. But this whole thing would be over faster if Mother thought I was remorseful.
“You went to town alone this morning? Have you lost your mind?” She lifted a stack of papers and shook them at me. “These are the letters I’ve received this week—?this week!—?that call for you to be investigated by the Tribunal. Over there”—?she pointed to a separate pile of paper, two inches high—?“are the possible threats against you that my informants have gathered since the beginning of this month. And here”—?she pulled open a drawer—?“are the more poetic and fanatical predictions of your demise we’ve been sent since the beginning of this year. Let me read one to you, shall I? Let’s see . . . all right. This one contains a very detailed methodology of how to determine if you’re a witch. It involves a sharp knife and a thorough examination of the underside of your skin.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her about the severed kitten’s head I’d found in my closet last week, laid out alongside a poorly scrawled country prayer to ward against witches; or the red x’s that were scratched on the underside of my favorite saddle, an old hex meant to make a horse go mad and turn on its rider. I didn’t need to be reminded of how much I was hated. I knew it better than she did. “They want to peel my skin off?” I asked lightly. “Is that all?”
“And burn it,” Onal supplied from behind her teacup.
“One week until you leave,” Mother snapped. “Can’t you manage to stay out of trouble until then? I’m sure when you’re queen in Achleva you’ll be able to come and go as you please. You can go into the city and do . . . whatever it was you
went to do today.”
“I went to a hanging.”
“Stars save me. A hanging? It’s like you want the Tribunal to come after you. We’re very lucky we have Toris there on the inside.”
“Very lucky,” I echoed. She might think Toris, the widowed husband of her favorite cousin, was the crown’s trusted ally keeping the Tribunal in check from within, but I’d never be convinced that he didn’t enjoy the part he played up there on the gallows stand.
“Aurelia,” she said, taking stock of me, head to toe. I knew what she saw: a tangle of pale hair and eyes that should have been blue but weren’t, not quite, erring more on the side of silver. Outside of those attributes, I was not particularly unpleasant-looking, but my peculiar traits and tendencies made me stand out, made me strange. And Renaltans were suspicious enough about me simply because I existed.
I was the first Renaltan princess born to the crown in nearly two centuries—?at least, the first who hadn’t been given away in secret at the hour of her birth. It was my duty to fulfill the treaty that had ended the centuries-long war between our country and Achleva by marrying Achleva’s next heir. For 176 years our people believed that the lack of girls born to the royal family was a sign that we were never to truly align ourselves with the filthy, hedonistic Achlevans. Proof of our moral superiority. My birth shook their faith in the monarchy, the king and queen who had the gall to first have a daughter and then keep her.
Sometimes I agreed with them.
A knock at the door broke the tense quiet. Mother said, “Bring him in, Sir Greythorne.”
Kellan came through first, looking around and then giving a wave behind him.
A man stepped out from behind Kellan. He was dressed in crushed velvet the color of a twilit sky, with a golden sash crossing his chest and fastened by a brooch in the shape of a three-pointed knot. In his ear winked a rakish ruby stud; on his finger shone a silver signet depicting a spread-winged raven. He had a shock of gleaming black hair, untouched by the silver that should have accompanied his age. Startlingly colorful, he was like a lone stained-glass window in a world made up of plain leaded panes.
He was an Achlevan.
2
Mother peered behind Kellan. “You weren’t followed?”
“No.”
“The guards on the grounds?”
“Dismissed. We have perhaps an hour before the new guards come to replace them.”
“The room guards?”
“Taken care of.”
Mother introduced the elegant stranger. “Aurelia, this is Lord Simon Silvis. Brother-in-law to Domhnall, king of Achleva, and uncle to Valentin, prince of Achleva. Welcome, Lord Simon, our honored guest.” She kissed him on each cheek.
Startled into shyness, I averted my eyes, suddenly fascinated with the tiny glass grapes and silken leaves at the foot of a nearby candelabra.
“Hello, Aurelia,” he began, “so glad to meet you again.”
“Again?”
“You were a baby the last time. Still quite small. I barely even got a look at you, though, as your mother wouldn’t let you out of her arms, not for anything.”
