A long time ago, in a castle on a cliff overlooking the sea, a princess was born that was half Mer.

“Princess” was a bit of an overstatement. Given the size of her rocky kingdom, she would perhaps be considered a marchese, at best. But peerage didn’t work that way, as my deportment tutor reiterated time and again. She had the blood. She was a princess.

Even though she was the bastard child of a Mer-Man.

Her mother was the queen. She hadn’t been queen for very long, though. Only sixteen years of age, the rest of her family—her kingly father, queenly mother, and two elder princess sisters—had perished not three months hence. They had plunged to their deaths in a cataclysmic carriage accident involving a rainy day, a skittish horse, and the king’s own refusal to make any attempt to moderate what he thought of as particularly magnificent and monarchical sneezes. The king’s youngest daughter, the only surviving member of the family and now queen, had been left at home due to the unfathomable disgrace of having gotten herself pregnant.

She had been ungovernable since birth. Wild, disobedient, and intemperate, she terrorized the household with her tantrums. At age four, she cut her hair down to the scalp with shepherd’s shears and, when confronted, turned them on the nurse. At age seven, she opened all the stable doors while everybody else was at Michaelmas and switched the horses until they galloped away, frothing and white-eyed. At twelve, she set fire to her bed. Her family despaired.

By age fifteen, she still refused to take up needlework or music, but her wild furies had been replaced by nothing worse than long walks by herself. She would take herself down the steep cliffside switchbacks to the rocky shores below the castle and find treasures amongst the tidepools; sea-glass, driftwood, abalone shells. She brought thread, and a sharp awl, and strung shells into necklaces through the holes she patiently bored. She whittled combs for her hair of mother-of-pearl.

It was with more a sense of resignation, therefore, moreso than shock, that her family received the news that she was pregnant. Of course she would go and get herself with child. She had simply found an inventive new way to plague and burden them all. Who was the father? The stableboy? The chandler’s son? The traveling deacon with whom she had so shamelessly flirted?

She vehemently denied every specific accusation, but refused to provide an answer.

The princess took refuge in uncharacteristic silence. She took her walks and strung her shells. When she lost the entirety of her family and abruptly became the ruling monarch, six months gone with child, she simply sat unmoving for a full five minutes after being informed, then shrugged in what was admittedly a very regal manner and strung the next shell onto the line she was slowly winding into her long dark hair.

The little princess came into the world screaming even more loudly than the storm that thundered outside, and almost as loudly as her mother. She had a full head of dark hair, gills on her throat, and a smattering of iridescent scales glinting on her chubby little thighs.

One midwife burst into tears. The waiting wet nurse ran out of the room. And one midwife, the oldest by far, simply stared for a long moment before saying, “Well, we can’t kill her now; the whole castle has heard her scream bloody health.”

At this pronouncement, the teenage queen, who had taken a moment to catch her breath, renewed her own screams and floundered about on the birthing bed for the nearest weapon—her hand happened across the candlestick on her bedstand—and threw it at the midwife. The midwife ducked, unphased, and handed the squalling baby to her mother to suckle. Both of them instantly quieted.

Due to a complete dearth of even moderately acceptable alternate heirs, and the evident fact that, unlike their half-Winged equivalents, half-Mer were of sound mind, the scaly little princess grew into a very capable and relatively even-tempered young queen. She governed fairly, married well, and went on to have a daughter of her own, a whip-smart little girl with no gills and no scales; only a series of striations on her throat, almost like scars. She married a nearby Duke, and became a Duchess.

That Duchess was coming to dinner.

I found out all this and more in bits and pieces, snatches of conversations overheard between the household staff as they ran to and fro, airing out the guest quarter linens and clattering about in the buttery. She was old now, the last vestiges of her throat striations lost to wrinkles and liver-spots, but still as sharp as ever. And she had a granddaughter about my age who would also be in attendance.

There was some unspecified Trouble with this granddaughter. Nobody knew what it was.

I was not tall for my age. I had to stand on tiptoe to see the retinue as they filed into the dining hall, trying to catch a glimpse of this Troubled girl, wondering vaguely if she was aware that I was now considered somewhat Troubled myself. I wasn’t sure what anybody hoped to accomplish, putting two such Troubled youngsters together. But here we were.

The Duchess was a tiny old woman. Her hair was completely white, and she used a cane to walk. Yet still she exuded an air of vivacity; her gaze was sharp as it found mine, and she gave me a little nod. It was the nod of one equal to another: quarter-breed to quarter-breed, I realized. I didn’t know how to feel.

Her granddaughter was tall and blond, and equally sharp. The look she gave me was appraising, but not malicious, and she strode forward right away to offer me her hand. I bowed over it clumsily. She was older than me by a year, it seemed, and half a head taller.

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“Good evening, Master deRye,” she said. Her voice was loud, but not unpleasant. Melodious, almost. “I hear you’ve made the most marvelous contraption in your chambers. May I see it?”

I stared at her, mouth agape. My experience with young ladies was minimal, practically nonexistent, but I was quite sure they were not supposed to invite themselves into young gentlemen’s private rooms. My deportment tutor was uncompromising in this opinion, as was the pastore. I hadn’t even introduced myself yet. Perhaps this was her Trouble.

The butler, standing at my back, stiffened with offense—evidently he shared the same opinion as my tutor and the pastore vis a vis young women in my room—but curiously, neither the Duchess nor Renella batted an eye.

“Perhaps after dinner, Francesca,” the Duchess said.

“All right,” Francesca replied amiably, and reclaimed her hand. She looked around the dining hall curiously. “Gosh, d’you always keep it this dark inside?”

“Francesca.” The Duchess’s voice this time was sharp. “Take your seat.”

Francesca rolled her eyes and—for my benefit, it seemed—and strode back to her grandmother’s side. Her skirts swirled. She hitched at them uncomfortably.

Francesca spent all evening fussing at her dress; the waistband, the collar, the cuffs. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Not due to any prurience on my part—although she was comely enough, I supposed, in a bony sort of way—but because she genuinely appeared to be painfully uncomfortable. I’d never seen a girl act like she longed to be rid of her clothes, as though she were trapped in them like a sermon on a summer day. She looked like she’d shuck them off the instant she thought nobody was looking.

It made me very nervous about showing her my room.

But I needn’t have worried. Although we were curiously unchaperoned, Francesca was focused solely on racing up the stairs to my room. “D’you really live in a tower?” she called excitedly. Her voice echoed from around the curve. I hurried to keep up.

“Yes,” I said, but my reply was lost to her breathless follow-up: “I suppose you have to do lots of towers here, with the terrain. Nowhere to go but up. Or down. D’you have any anti-towers?”

“What?”

She stopped and peered down at me. “Anti-towers. They’d go down, not up.”

I was taken aback. “Is that a thing?”

Francesca considered this thoughtfully, drumming her fingers on her lips. “I think some dungeons are like that,” she said at last.

“We don’t have anything like that.” I rubbed my nose. “Unless you count the well?”

“Can’t live in a well,” she declared, and turned in a rustle of silk skirt—she pulled at it irritably—and continued up the stairs.

“What’s wrong with your clothes?” I almost clapped my hand over my mouth. I hadn’t meant to ask aloud.

This brought her up short. “What?”

Too late now. “You keep pulling at your dress.”

For once, she seemed chagrined. She plucked fretfully at the hem of her sleeve, realized what she was doing, and clasped her hands together tightly, a flush starting up her neck. “I suppose I am,” she admitted. “I don’t normally wear dresses.”

“What do you normally wear?”

“Trousers,” she replied, promptly and with no reticence. “Trousers and shirt.”

I stared. “They let you wear trousers?”

“Oh, they’re mad about trousers at Annie’s!”

“What?” I was completely lost. “Who?”

“All the girls. At Saint Annunziata’s. It’s where I go to school—a boarding school for girls. They encourage us to dress in a way that defies our natural susceptibility to vanity. And what better way than trousers!” She was grinning now. “They’re so useful! Some of them even have pockets!”

“Dresses don’t have pockets?”

“No,” Francesca replied, voice twisted with disgust. “Not the ones I’m made to wear, anyway. Like this one.” She whisked angrily at the silk.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.” She turned again and pointed. “Is that your room?”

“Yes.”

She looked enviously at the door. “I wish I lived in a tower.”

“What do you live in?”

“A boring old normal room.”

I opened the door. Francesca crowed with delight and bounded in. I was momentarily terrified that she would go blundering into my whirligig, but she stopped well short of the contraption and looked at it carefully, noting how it was bolted to the floor. “Gosh. They let you just build this in here?”

“No. I did it in secret.”

“Gosh,” she said again, clearly impressed. I felt my spine straighten, and added, in a slightly surer tone, “I did it in a day and a half. I pretended to be sick.”

“Brilliant,” Francesca breathed. She reached out carefully and touched a chain. “Where’d you get the supplies?”

“Just stuff lying around.” For some reason, I didn’t want to tell her about the observation tower. It was my father’s domain. His to speak about, not mine. And he never would.

“What’s it for?”

“Um.” I rubbed my nose again, suddenly overwarm and itchy. “It’s just interesting, I guess. Here, look.” I made it spin, to distract her.

She had me reset it twice, and made appreciative noises each time it whirled around. There was no sunlight to reflect, but even the candles and fire in the hearth were sufficient to set it glittering. When her attention began to wander, I asked if she wanted to go back down.

“Oh,” she said, voice carefully neutral. “Oh, no, I’m supposed to stay up here.”

I looked at her, abruptly uneasy. “What do you mean?”

She gave a little shrug. “I’m just… supposed to be here now.”

Her response irritated me. It was hardly a response at all. “Says who?”

“Grandmama.”

“Why?” And then, before she could answer, emboldened by her familiarity and my own irritation, I added, “Isn’t she worried that we’re not chaperoned?”

“Of course not,” Francesca replied, somewhat acidly. “That’s the point. I’m supposed to kiss you.”