Snow was officially Princess Zara’s least favorite thing in the world. In her most humble opinion, it was worse than being sick, embarrassing herself in front of her mother’s courtiers, or even peas, which she had despised since childhood.

If she never had to see the cursed white rain from Hell, she’d be eternally grateful.

When the notice from King Cygnus’s Head of the Guard, a surly man by the name of Captain Wentworth, finally came that she and Asher were finally free to go, Zara could have wept with relief. She supposed her mother and uncle’s threats of war probably helped sway King Cygnus’s decision in letting them go home, but after nearly two weeks of relentless questioning even the King had to realize he was getting nowhere by holding the two foreign royals captive.

Zara watched the snow fall from the window of her guest chambers, feeling as though this cursed country was taunting her.

Behind her, the servants she had brought from Maris were hastily packing her belongings, each of them as eager to leave as she was. The journey to Hercynia’s capital had been long, cold and awful, and the visit had felt very much the same. Zara couldn’t wait to return to Maris, with its eternal sunshine and comforting heat. She’d never complain about the summer’s heat again after this.

She felt Asher’s presence before he announced himself. They hadn’t seen each other much since Zara had been sent to finishing school, but she would know the sound of her cousin’s steps and recognize the smell of his cologne anywhere.

“I hate this place,” she muttered, glaring out the window with her arms tightly crossed against her chest. She knew she sounded like a child, but she didn’t care.

“You and me both,” Asher sighed, giving her a gentle nudge against her shoulder before he sat down on the stone window sill, tracing little shapes into frosty glass with his finger.

Zara felt a twinge of guilt. Ever since Princess Neve’s attempted murder, the entire capital had gone into lockdown. While she hadn’t been allowed to leave the castle, she knew her questioning hadn’t been anywhere near as intensive as Asher’s.

It had been painfully obvious to everyone who attended the engagement ball that the first meeting between Asher and Princess Neve had been disastrous. Zara had practically felt their loathing for each other while they danced from the safety of the side lines. One of the first theories had been that Asher, or at least one of his lovers, had poisoned Neve in order to stop the wedding.

As clear as it had been that Asher didn’t even remotely care for his fiancé, Zara knew he’d never poison her, and he hadn’t brought any of his ever revolving door of exes with him, so the theory had sounded absurd to her. From what Asher relayed to her each evening after his interrogations, Captain Wentworth didn’t think much of the theory either, but King Cygnus was beside himself and everyone was guilty in his eyes.

Zara supposed she really couldn’t blame the King. She knew if she’d been poisoned her mother, Queen Merle, would act the same way. Still, she wasn’t sorry to say goodbye to Essen Castle and all this blasted snow.

“It’s still snowing,” Zara muttered. A sudden terrible thought filled her. “What if it snows so much that we can’t leave?”

“I will personally dig us out,” Asher said, and although he sounded quite serious, Zara couldn’t help but laugh. “I mean it,” he said, dropping his hand from the window and turning to her. “I’ll use my hands if I need to.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Zara said before dropping into the plush armchair she had dragged over to the window. She shimmed herself into a comfortable position before looking back to her cousin. “Any word on Princess Neve?”

Asher shook his head. “Still unconscious.”

Zara pursed her lips at his flippant tone.

Asher noticed and fixed her with a challenging stare. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said quietly, looking away and smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles in the skirt of her dress.

She knew in her heart Asher had nothing to do with what happened to Neve, but she didn’t like how aloof he was about the whole situation. A part of her suspected that his uncaring attitude was why they had both been stuck here for so long. Who watches their fiancé almost die in front of them and then goes and flirt with half the castle the very next day? At the very least he could pretend to be sad.

“Are you still going on your tour?” Asher asked, obviously changing the subject.

Zara bit her bottom lip. “I hope so.”

Neve’s poisoning had unsettled her mother. That much was obvious from the frantic letters she received. It wouldn’t surprise her if Queen Merle called off the tour and kept Zara in a lockdown of her own once she was safely back home.

Asher looked at her and sighed.

“What happened to Neve was unfortunate,” he began.

“Unfortunate? Someone tried to kill her,” Zara interjected. Asher rolled his eyes and stood up. The lines from the shapes he had drawn on the window remained, each of them bleeding down the glass from the heat of his finger.

Asher sat down on the arm of her chair and ruffled her hair, causing Zara to bat his hand away in protest. Her maids put a lot of work into her hair.

“As I was saying,” Asher said, “what happened to Neve was unfortunate, but a one off. We’ve been here for two weeks and no one else has been poisoned.”

Neve had been the only one poisoned at the ball, making it clear it had been a targeted attack. After weeks of having all of her food and drinks taste tested by nervous but still alive servants, that much was obvious.

“So?” Zara asked, frowning up at him.

“So clearly she was the only target. Your mother will have to see that you’ve been perfectly safe.”

“Or perhaps the poisoner managed to escape,” Zara pointed out. There had been much talk among everyone from the servants to the courtiers about what had happened during the engagement ball. Every possible theory Zara had heard a thousand times over.

“The castle went into lockdown right away,” Asher said. “They’d have to be inhumanly fast to make it past all of the guards in the time between Neve drinking the poison and the gates shutting.”

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Zara pursed her lips again. If the would-be killer hadn’t managed to escape, that meant they were still in the castle and Neve really had been the only target. But if the poisoner had managed to get out before the lockdown happened, that opened up to a thousand other possibilities.

The King’s Guard were no closer to finding the person who poisoned the princess, just as the physicians were no closer to waking Neve or even finding out what poison was used. No one could even determine when she had been poisoned. Was it at the ball, or hours before? Some toxins took time to make their way through the body while others were more instantaneous.

So many questions were left unanswered.

“No matter what happened to Neve,” Asher continued, “not a hair on your pretty little head has been harmed. Your mother has nothing to worry about.”

“I suppose,” Zara said, not feeling even remotely reassured.

When Asher left to go supervise his own packing, Zara decided she needed to get out of that room. One of her newly assigned ladies-in-waiting, a girl around her age named Clara, accompanied her as she walked through the overly decorated hallways. How anyone lived here without constant headaches from all of the stimulation Zara would never know.

“We should be back in Girona in time for your birthday,” Clara was saying as they passed two servants carrying tea trays. The servants stopped and pressed themselves against the wall to let the ladies pass. Girona was the capital of Maris, and home to her mother’s court.

“Thank goodness,” Zara whispered once they were out of earshot from the servants. “How depressing would it be if I had to spend my birthday in this hellscape?”

Clara gave a small laugh. “Not the holiday we were expecting.”

“Indeed,” Zara said quietly. She needed to be careful with what she said outside of her own chambers. Everyone was still on edge from the engagement ball, and she was still a representation of the Kingdom of Maris. It would not look good if she were found openly slandering Hercynia.

The two girls turned a corner and found themselves in a hallway with one side almost completely windows, showing off an unobstructed view of the gardens. The snow was still falling, covering the hedges and trees in a thick blanket.

In spite of herself, Zara couldn’t help but let out a shudder and pulled her woolen shawl tightly around herself.

Further down the hall, a young woman stood and stared out one of the windows. She clearly wasn’t a servant, judging by the expensive looking dress in black velvet with pearls embroidered into the bust the woman wore. Her long golden blond hair was done up out of her face and as Zara drew closer, she realized the woman’s eyes were rimmed red from crying.

Beside her, Clara self-consciously touched her own blond hair, which was a mess of tight curls that didn’t have anywhere close to the shine and volume this woman’s hair had.

“Are you alright?” Zara asked in concern. The woman turned slowly to look at them as they approached, her beautiful face blotchy and puffy from crying. She had tanned skin that would have seemed more appropriate in either Maris or Cendril, but Zara didn’t recognize her.

The woman had her arms wrapped tightly around herself, as if she were giving herself an embrace. “I’m fine, thank you.” Her voice wavered as she spoke and her eyes were shining like glass with tears threatening to fall.

“You don’t seem fine,” Zara began. Beside her Clara stiffened.

“Oh, you’re Lady Louisa,” Clara said, recognition spreading through her face. She turned to Zara. “Your Highness, this is Lady Louisa… she’s one of Princess Neve’s ladies-in-waiting. We met at the ball, before, you know…”

Zara felt her face heat uncomfortably. That would certainly explain why she was so upset.

If Louisa noticed Zara and Clara’s embarrassment, she didn’t comment on it. Wiping her eyes, she slipped into a well practiced curtsy before straightening and clasping her hands in front of her. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Your Highness. I’m terribly sorry we couldn’t have met under happier circumstances.”

Louisa moved and spoke with such grace that would have made Queen Merle positively beam.

Zara smiled weakly, unsure of what to say. “Has there been improvement in Princess Neve’s condition?”

Ultimately, that had been the wrong thing to ask as Louisa’s lip began to quiver rapidly.

“No,” Louisa said in a small, tight voice. “No change at all. Please excuse me, Your Highness.”

Louisa dropped into another quick curtsy before brushing past them, leaving a chilling breeze in her wake as she hurried down the hall. Zara’s chest tightened with guilt.

“I take it they were, sorry, they are close?” Zara asked as she and Clara hurried down the hall.

“I suppose so,” Clara said, sounding a little dazed. “I only spoke to her briefly at the ball, but she did say she and Princess Neve had been friends since they were children.”

Zara’s chest constricted again. “Poor thing. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose such a dear friend.”

Zara felt herself wince once she realized what she had said. Neve wasn’t dead. Not yet anyways.

“You spoke to her, didn’t you?” Clara asked.

“Briefly,” Zara recalled, glancing around to make sure no one else was around. The rest of the hall remained eerily empty. “She seemed a little uptight but nice enough.”

Though to be fair to Neve, she had just been introduced to the man she had no say in marrying, and it hadn’t exactly been love at first sight. Zara would have paid half her dowry to know exactly what Asher and Neve had said to each other while they danced. They looked like they had been seconds from strangling each other. Asher had scoffed and told her he wasn’t giving her gossip fuel when she had asked at the ball, and he hadn’t changed his answer in the time since.

The next morning, Zara pulled her fur-lined coat tightly around herself as she hurried towards the carriage that was waiting to take her to Hercynia’s nearest port town, where a ship would be waiting to take her home. She couldn’t wait to be far, far away from Essen Castle.

Asher walked beside her, his hands stuffed into his coat pockets, his dark hair swaying in the wind. They would travel to the port together before ultimately parting ways, with Asher heading back to Cendril.

King Cygrus hadn’t even bothered to bid them farewell in person, not that Zara was complaining. She had met him during her first interrogation session, and he had been incredibly rude and pompous. It made her wonder how Neve had turned out so rigidly polite being raised by an impudent man, though she supposed a governess was likely the one to thank for that.

Zara all but threw herself into the carriage, with Asher climbing in after her.

“The first thing I’m doing when I get back to Glassen is order the hottest bath I can possibly take without boiling my skin off,” he grumbled as he settled into his seat and the footman closed the door behind him.

Zara hummed in response. She would likely do the same. There was something about the cold in Hercynia. It practically seeped into one’s bones and stayed there.

The snow at least had stopped the night before and servants had worked overnight to clear a path out of Essen and towards the port. It would take a few days to make it to the ship, but Asher had instructed the coachman to make as few stops as possible.

As they made their way through the heavily guarded gates out of the castle, Zara turned to her cousin. “Did the King say anything to you before you left?”

Asher shrugged nonchalantly. “He asked to see me last night. All he said was he’ll send word if Neve wakes up.”

Zara played with the toggles on her coat. Shyly, she asked, “do you want Neve to wake up?”

The question had been on her mind for some time, and this was her last chance to ask it.

Asher threw her a dark look that made her shrink back a little. “I might not like her, but I don’t want her to die, Zara.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Asher scoffed and looked away from her, facing the carriage window. Outside the world was a blur of white, brown and black as they raced through the streets of Essen towards the woods. The sun hadn’t quite risen yet, and the sky was a mix of pink, purple and yellow. It actually looked quite pretty, reflecting off the snowy ground.

The silence dragged on between them for several minutes. Finally, still facing the window, Asher whispered, “I don’t know.”

A chill rushed through Zara that had nothing to do with the frigid weather. Asher was nine years her senior, and had very much been the older brother she never had growing up. All her life he had been a comforting presence. Of course she had heard the rumors, of how flippantly he treated the women he courted, but she had never seen that callousness for herself.

Zara turned to look out her own window, watching as Essen Castle became smaller and smaller.

“Well, I hope Neve does wake up,” she said quietly. She wasn’t sure if she was saying it to her cousin or herself.

Asher remained stoically silent, and Zara spent the rest of the journey hoping that one day he would meet a woman that treated him the way he treated all those before Neve.