In Anryn’s dreams, she’d never been a man at all, and her body felt light and airy. She savored the feel of a silken hair around her shoulders, peeking out from the folds of a veil. A man stood beside her and drew a lock of it between his fingers. Part wish, part memory, she pulled Maertyn Blackfire close to kiss her.

Anryn strained against the edges of sleep. She’d slid between the sheets long after Beatrice had gone to bed. She felt her wife brush against her now and pulled her into an embrace. Beatrice wound her satin-soft arms around Anryn’s neck and rolled on top of her. She pushed aside her bed clothes with drowsy abidance while Beatrice raised her hips. Anryn held on to the feel of her body in the dream while they moved. If she woke up all the way, she’d feel the man’s flesh too much, chafing against her like a boot that didn’t fit.

“What’s wrong?” Beatrice murmured in her ear.

“Nothing.” Anryn bit her lips to keep back the sounds, not wanting to give the maids gossip. She saw how they looked at the sheets every morning. Each word of their knowing whispers felt like a knife in Anryn’s heart.

Afterward, Anryn stared up at the canopy while Beatrice turned over and went back to sleep, completely unaware how Anryn betrayed her in dreams.

I warned her when we married I might not give her children — I don’t know how to tell her the rest.

Ciamon’s mark prickled on Anryn’s chest. She rubbed it while she stared up into the dark, wondering how many more marks lay beneath her skin. Sometimes she imagined them burning somewhere within her. Invisible scars nestled between the folds of her skin like snapped threads poking through embroidery.

When the watchmen struck their clappers to mark the fourth part of the night, Anryn gave up on sleep. She left the silver bed by Beatrice’s bed untouched, preferring to dress herself. She slipped on a simple shirt with a high collar and soft breaches that covered her bony knees. Not for the first time, she wondered how her clothes would fit if she had more curves to fill them. Beatrice said she had a dancer’s legs, but no one ever saw them beneath the layers of armor and robes of state.

Was that why the Great Dome sent a veil?

The mystery of the archmages was one of many she contemplated alone while her kingdom slept. Anryn carried her sword belt in her hand and drew her boots in the hall so she would not make a sound. She nodded to the guards who stood outside the bedroom and made her way through the sleeping castle while they followed silently behind. Portraits of her ancestors glared down at her from every hallway, each with blue eyes like hers and nearly every single one with a beard. Anryn had never been able to grow more than peach fuzz near her ears—and now she saw no point in trying at all.

She waved for her guards to wait outside while she stepped into the throne room. Anryn paused inside the door, half-expecting to see her father there still, looking up from some map or leaning on an elbow propped up on his throne. Instead, the empty chair faced her from across the room, accusing.

As she had every night since the Massacre, Anryn walked right up to the throne and drew her sword. She saluted the bloodstain soaked deep into its age-dark wood.

“I will find out who killed you, Father,” she whispered. “And I know damn well it wasn’t Maertyn Blackfire.”

Anryn sank into a swordsman’s pose. When she held the blade, doubt fell away and she did not think of herself as a man or woman. She was only arms and legs, and a beating heart—the essential things one needed to wield a blade. The tip traced lines of doubt and worry through the air as she shuffled across the floor with one foot pointed forward and the other turned out to the side.

To anyone who might see her there in the dark, it would look as though the king practiced paries and footwork. No one would notice how Anryn widened and narrowed her eyes, calling the Sight to the razor edge of her sword.

It came to her as swirling colors, brightening the darkened room. Anryn understood it as double vision with the things she wanted to See picked out in glowing lines while the ordinary world moved beneath them. Maertyn hadn’t taught Anryn much about the Sight, but she knew that it had limits. The longer she used it, the more her eyes watered and her head pounded—as if she’d drunk four cups of wine and chased them with a full glass of whiskey.

She faced the throne and Saw the dull red line that lost a little more of its color every day. Even without the Sight, the bloodstains were easy to spot, pooled at the seat and midway up the back where a deep gouge marked the wood. Beatrice had begged Anryn to replace the throne, but Anryn had refused since the day she first sat in it — knowing her friend had sat there when a sword went through his chest. A silvery sheen marked the place where Maertyn had sat, bleeding, while whatever happened to him kept happening.

He didn’t die — he drinks like that because he can’t die. Anryn traced the fading red line from the silvery pool with the tip of her blade. She followed it along the floor to where it formed a man-shaped silhouette, lying flat on its back as if someone had lain down to sleep at the foot of the throne.

Anryn stepped close to the apparition, more sure than ever that this was where the Lightning King had lain when he died. She looked back up at the throne and shuffled back and forth between the two places, counting up her paces. Just ten ordinary steps — or one ordinary lunge from a man as tall as the Lightning King — put the tip of her sword against the throne. Anryn measured the lunge herself, adding a half-step to make up for the inches she lacked. When she had the distance right, the tip of her blade fit right into the missing chunk of the throne.

“That’s his blood, not yours,” Anryn muttered to her father’s shade. She slammed her blade back into its sheath. She raged against the Lightning King silently—Why would anyone lie about how you died? It’s just another chapter in your legend.

Professor Lawson hurt her the most. For two years, he insisted that he hadn’t seen it. From the way his hands shook and his voice broke when he said, she knew he lied. Anryn didn’t dare betray her teacher’s trust by turning witchcraft on him—but her heart broke a little more every time he affirmed the official ruling: Maertyn alone was the cause of the Witch Massacre. He started the fire that panicked the crowd, which quickly became a mob. He broke into the palace and murdered the Lightning King, and was extradited to Nynomath after his capture.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Not possible. Not credible, is what Professor Lawson would have said if he were in his right mind. He’d known Maertyn almost as long as Anryn had—traveling through the Ammarish countryside for weeks to escort them both safely to her wedding. The professor knew how Maertyn hated mages.

He never would have gone with them, Anryn thought. And he could not have killed the Lightning King. Not from twelve feet away with a sword in his chest. Even the most powerful magic in the world bowed to time and distance.

Anryn sat on the throne and cradled her head in her hands. The Sight gave Anryn such fierce headaches, it almost wasn’t worth it to go there every night. Yet reliving her father’s death through witchcraft gave her clarity and purpose. That dull red line between Maertyn and the Lightning King darkened every day. Something told her that when it turned black, time would run out and she’d lose the chance to rescue him.

And he’ll stay chained up somewhere in their dungeon while they pour his favorite whiskey down his throat forever.

“You shouldn’t go anywhere alone, my son. Not even in your own castle.”

Anryn jumped off of the throne at the sound of her mother’s voice. The dowager stepped out from the yawning shadows beneath the stained glass windows. The heavy black hem of her mourning veils whispered across the floor as she approached Anryn.

“I’m not alone, Mother. I have a thousand ghosts for company.”

She still hadn’t grown used to the sight of her mother bowing to her. For some reason, tears started in her eyes.

The dowager reached for her with shaking hands, lifting a hem of her veil to dry Anryn’s cheeks.

“You’ve grown so tall,” her mother sighed. “Do you remember when you were a little boy and I would dry your eyes like this? What did I tell you then?”

Boy.

Anryn pushed her mother’s hand away and stepped back. A sword’s distance separated them. Anryn searched her mother’s face behind her embroidered veil as if she searched for holes in armor. She wanted to hurt her. Badly.

“You said I was a prince of Ammar and I had nothing to fear,” she said through tears. Her voice turned ragged and nasally—shrill, just like her father’s. “But you never said what kings had to fear. Did you think the day would never come, Mama? Now I have everything to fear — and you didn’t even warn me. About any of it.”

The words dangled between them, weighed down by parts Anryn couldn’t bring herself to say out loud. Never had she dared ask her mother about the curse. From the moment Maertyn first showed her the black-haired woman in the bowl, she’d known deep in her heart that one or both of her parents had done it. When the aging Lightning King carried his elderly wife out of Sanchia with a newborn baby in her arms, the whole world called it a miracle.

All except the Dome who foretold that she’d never make it to manhood.

“They sent me a veil. My enemy knows who I am when I still don’t!” Anryn’s chest ached, each line of Ciamon’s word searing just over where the breasts would be if she’d looked at a mirror with the Sight. “You knew that I was cursed, Mother — and you never told me. Why?”

“I have been trying all your life to think of how.” Queen Eva’s words hit Anryn hard, though she spoke them soft and sweet like a lullaby. The Old Language — the tongue of Nynomath known only to its initiates. “When you were born, we didn't know who you were. The son I gave your father? The daughter I denied Nymaut? It didn’t matter. You were alive. You are alive, Anryniel. Will you throw that away so easily? It should be me who joins your father first, not you.”

Something beneath Queen Eva’s veil crumbled. The stiff black crinoline rustled as the old woman fell to her knees. She gripped her chest with shaking hands and a sob erupted from the pile of silk. Anryn wavered, unsure whether her mother teetered at the edge of madness or only pretended. Horror warred with disgust as she watched the dowager crawl on hands and knees along the ground. Horror won out as her mother curled herself into a ball in the exact place where the Lightning King had died.

“Say it,” she begged. “Say the words to my curse out loud. You wrote them yourself, didn’t you? Did he ask you to do it?”

“I thought I was saving him,” Queen Eva wept. Her thin shoulders shook as she pushed herself back onto her knees. The bony fingers clawed at her thin, white hair, pulling out the pins to her veil. It slid down around her shoulders. “Look, but don’t See. I never thought I would need to teach you this, my baby, but there are some things you shouldn't ever See.”

Gold-blonde curls on a gold-brown skin. A face unlined and unmarked and a long, graceful neck. Anryn stared at Queen Eva and thought her mother looked exactly as beautiful as the [PAINTER] had rendered her on her wedding day. Because she’s the exact same age.

Anryn had seen a curse like it before. Even as cruel realization dawned, Queen Eva reached around to the back of her gown and fumbled with the buttons at the top to pull it off. Wordless, the uncanny woman turned her back to Anryn, exposing the nine bone-white lines of scars up and down her back. An exact copy of the ones on Maertyn Blackfire’s back.

“When stars wrote time into the clay, it is decreed that Mat holds dominion,” Anryn read aloud. “Never to die, never to rise… You have his same curse? You wrote it, too?”

“My baby, my king,” said Queen Eva. “I did not know just what would happen when I wrote the words. I didn’t believe the Dome would ever try to make you answer for them. I was the greatest Seer that time had ever known and I am telling you — I believed when I sent them the Winze, they would gladly shut their mouths for all eternity rather than raise a hand to you and admit that they were wrong.”

Anryn swallowed, feeling every line of the word Ciamon had seen going down her throat. When he’d examined her curse, he told her he’d seen the word love written down her throat three times. The words on her mother’s back said nothing so kind or gentle. Maertyn told her he killed the mages who’d carved him before they could finish. Never to die, never to rise… She could read the words, but she was terrified to understand them.

“What does it say?” she asked. “What curse did you put on me, mother?”

And when Queen Eva answered, her heart turned to stone:

“Love of my life, desire of my heart. A son for your sins and all the wrongs I have committed.”

And as she spoke, the dull red line beneath the Lightning King’s death-shadow darkened.