Anryn knew how to fight with a sword — she did not know how to fight in a marriage.

She and Beatrice lay beside each other, angry silence filling the space between them. Her body ached too much for sleep. Anryn had spent almost a hundred days since her mother’s confession rising at four every morning to fling herself at all the tasks a king’s life demanded. She marshaled her forces, and prepared to meet the delegation from the Imperial court. Omer Nitty was just one more item on a list with a red line drawn through it. His blood wouldn’t be the last she shed to get Maertyn back.

I have to fix this, Anryn thought. I have to fix everything — for what other reason am I cursed to live like this?

Beatrice sighed and shifted her pillow, her back facing Anryn like a stone wall. The thought of lying there until one or both of them stopped being angry seemed impossible to Anryn. She dug for something small, something that could close the empty space.

“What?” Fatigue made the word come out irritable and short.

Beatrice shifted again and now Anryn heard the little clink of her lucky coins clicking together. “Nothing.”

Something about the sound made Anryn angry. She drew a breath and felt the six lines of Ciamon’s mark prickle on her chest. “Tell me now and not tomorrow when you huff your way through packing.”

They’d agreed already that Beatrice would accompany her as far as Eastport. The high stone tower at the edge of the sea had been where the Lightning King had made his last stand against the Great Dome, and won. Her father-in-law owed his ducal throne to that fight — it was the perfect place for four nations to meet. She’ll be protected. And if I fail, she can escape…

“I did not huff,” Beatrice said. The clink-clink of the coins grew louder. “Tommasi farts. Maelor creaks like a bad saddle. I am not the loudest person in that room, Anryn. If I were, perhaps you would listen to me.”

“Don’t tell me you’re mad about the damn mage.” Anryn tried and failed to soften her anger. She remembered how hard Omer Nitty had hit her when they fought at Java — the terror of being forced into the spell circle where neither sword nor Sight could save her. “He tried to abduct me in broad daylight, Bea. Any slaver I catch in Ammar can rot in Hell one-handed for all I care. And even if that man hadn’t done me any wrong, I couldn’t just let him go. You weren’t raised in Ammar — you don’t understand our laws.”

“Don’t talk down to me,” Beatrice snapped. “I can repeat all your laws backward and forward — I studied them to marry you, remember? Would you like me to recite the ones your father wrote about burning witches?”

The words stung Anryn hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. She could do nothing to keep the Sight back as she blinked them away. The dark red line coiled around their canopied bed like a snake about to strike. It followed her everywhere now, well beyond the throne room. Tendrils of it crept through the castle walls up toward where her mother wept alone in the widow’s tower, too shamefaced to emerge.

A floorboard creaked somewhere outside the bedroom. Anryn and Beatrice fell silent, the angry space somehow widening. Every hour the king and queen spent together invited gossip. Anryn thought of how Beatrice’s maids would strip their sheets in the morning, casting glances at them.

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The tiny sound of the coins clicking together ceased, and her wife turned to her. Anryn never could resist looking Beatrice full in the face with the Sight. Golden lines framed her doe-brown eyes and limed her perfect lips. An easy face for anybody to fall in love with.

“I just… I just want everyone to see you as the king I know you are,” Beatrice said.

The gentle words disarmed her. Anryn felt some of her anger ebbing even as she instinctively argued back.

“What kind of king is that, Bea? A woman, a witch? Nynomath wants my kingdom and they will use my curse against me to get it. They’ve been waiting for Ammar’s royal line to fail ever since the First King of Ammar took the throne.”

And they have been waiting twice as hard since I was born.

The thought struck her hard like a hand across her face. Anryn could trace her lineage back thirty times to Eiynar, the First King of Ammar — a slave of Nynomath who broke their chains. The Emperor promised that they should live as one of His Blessed countries, though they wrote their own laws and followed their own ways. Bad luck stalked Eiynar’s line every day since, losing more of its sons each century to famine, plague, and falls from horses.

Anryn stared up at the ceiling, wishing she could see through timber and stone to where her mother wept. Is that why your curse went so wrong, Mother? Did all of this happen for a reason?

Beatrice noticed her silence. She shifted even closer and put a hand out to touch Anryn’s cheek as she had at council. “I told you — I don’t care that you’re cursed. You are a lot of things, Anryn, I’ve never known you for a liar.”

“You are too good for me.” Anryn swallowed hard. The mingled envy and admiration she felt for her wife came roaring back as Beatrice’s hand drifted lower, trailing down her neck. She felt herself warming to the touch, craving it.

But when Beatrice’s fingers brushed over the mark on her chest, it burned and prickled.

Anryn caught Beatrice’s fingers. “We need to be up early to pack. It's ten days’ ride to Eastport in a coach. You should bring a few of your warm clothes along, just in case.”

An idea emerged from behind her fatigue, bright and clear. Anryn pictured the tower at Eastport again. She knew it well — her father-in-law had it rendered on all the tapestries he’d sent to Ammar to celebrate the Sanchian alliance.

I was born in that tower, she thought. I should bring my mother there. Maybe she could tell me more if she were faced with it.

“Can you make room in your coach for my mother?” she asked. “I can’t leave her here and I can’t send her away… She can sit in the women’s chamber..”

“You can’t be serious.” Beatrice stiffened and pulled her hand from Anryn’s grasp. “I am to sit with your mother and embroider while you go to meet with our enemies? You must be mad.”

Anryn hissed for quiet. If the maids hadn’t heard the first bit, they certainly heard the word mad.

“Lower your voice,” she whispered. “What’s the matter, now? You’ll be safe, you’ll be nearby. What more do you want?”

“I want a damn chair,” said Beatrice. The coins were back in her hand. Beatrice clutched them the way that Anryn held a sword and for a moment she worried her wife would fling them at her. “It’s my fate as well as yours we fight for. Don’t you dare forget it.”

Anryn glared at her, the Sight-bound headache pulsing behind her eyes. Her clear-headed thinking dissolved in an instant and she found herself pushing up from the bed and flinging the curtains aside.

“What are you doing?”

“Something I only do for wives, not mages,” said Anryn. “Retreating.”