Britomart awoke bleary-eyed the next morning after a long night of studying the dictionary of the Old Tongue. She had fallen asleep reading it, and at some point she seemed to have converted it into her pillow, with the result that she awoke with the title tooled into its leather cover imprinted on her cheek: Llyfr Geiriau'r Ysgolhaig Ieuainc Yn Iaith Rhyfedd y De, Wedi Ei Gyfieithu o'r Newydd yn Tylwythiaith. Her first fifteen minutes with the dictionary had been dedicated to puzzling the title out. She was now fairly sure that it read something like The Young Scholar’s Compendium of Words from the Strange Tongue of the South, Newly Translated into Tylwythiaith. It had never occurred to Britomart that the Old Ones would have their own name for their language, and she felt silly now for not having realized it. Tylwythiaith: it must have been the language of the Tylwyth Teg long ago. No wonder it sounded like a spell even when Amoret was just talking to a squirrel about acorns.

Britomart had wanted to take one of the more impressive dictionaries instead—the kind that were heavy enough to have doubled as a weapon against a fully armed knight—but Amoret had told her that she would find little use for those dictionaries unless she decided to become an Old Tongue scholar. Even in that case, she had better work up to it. Instead, Amoret had selected this slimmer volume. Amoret had refused to translate the title for Britomart, telling her only that it was the right level for her and that her first task could be to figure out the title herself. Britomart had stubbornly set to work doing so, wanting to prove to Amoret that she could.

The dictionary had come from amidst the row of glowing books that had lit up when Britomart wrote “Dictionary of Galbrican and the Old Tongue” on a worn piece of parchment stretched taut beneath the lid of an ornate desk near the center of the library. Britomart had examined the desk early on in her search of the library, but she had dismissed it from her thoughts after finding only a piece of parchment, a quill pen, and a bottle of ink under its folding top. How was she to know that the piece of parchment was some sort of magical inventory? But as soon as she had finished writing her request, the ink had seeped into the parchment and disappeared, and the books had begun to glow.

Britomart looked ruefully down at the book as she got out of bed and set it on her dressing table. She wished she had thought to ask for a dictionary with a pronunciation guide. She could understand the title now, but she couldn’t have said it aloud if her life depended on it. She had to remind herself that speaking the Old Tongue wasn’t her primary purpose, although it had been easy enough to let Amoret believe that. True, she did want to be able to speak it—very much in fact—but that wasn’t as important as being able to read the other books the library had to offer: books that might contain a clue to a blood witch’s weaknesses. She wondered why the prospect of finding such a book no longer left her feeling excited.

Britomart greeted Amoret at the breakfast table with the phrase that she had memorized from the dictionary while she was tugging on a fresh tunic and leggings: “Bore da.” Good morning.

Amoret stared at Britomart blankly, then broke out into a grin and slowly repeated the words back to her, correcting her pronunciation. Then, Amoret said the phrase again, but with something else at the end. Britomart wished she had brought her dictionary with her. She tried to stow the sounds away in her mind to look up when she got back to her room. They had been something like “hardow kisskeh.” She had a feeling there were probably some g’s and y’s hidden somewhere in there, though. She tried repeating the whole phrase back to Amoret, carefully enunciating every sound so that it came out as “Boar-e dah, harrow kisskeh.”

Amoret’s grin widened. “For me, I think, just Bore da, Cysgu.”

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what that means?” Britomart asked, sitting down and helping herself to porridge.

“Bore da, Cysgu? It means ‘Good morning, Beauty.’”

“And what was the word you told me to leave out?”

“Harddwch. ‘Sleeping.’”

Good morning, Sleeping Beauty. Britomart felt suddenly irritable. Amoret seemed to have a gift for making her feel that way. But it was hardly fair of Amoret to tease her for falling under a sleeping spell that Amoret’s own ancestors had created. “I wasn’t under the sleeping spell for that long,” she protested.

“No, I saw to that,” Amoret replied with aggravating equanimity. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. Judging by the circles under your eyes, you hardly slept at all last night.” Amoret craned closer. “Are those letters imprinted on your cheek?” She reached towards Britomart’s cheek as if to trace them, then seemed to catch herself and withdrew her hand.

Britomart rubbed at her cheek and scowled, even more irritated at the fluttering feeling that had just started in her stomach. She wondered if it was from sleep deprivation or the porridge. “I fell asleep on the dictionary.”

“An innovative way to read it.”

“If you’re just going to tease me about it, maybe I should return the dashed thing to the library.”

Amoret’s expression softened. “I’m not teasing you, princess. Well, alright, maybe a little. But I’m doing it because I’m happy that you’re learning the Old Tongue. My tongue. Few Galbricans speak it.”

Britomart sighed in frustration. “I’m about as close to speaking the Old Tongue as a scholar of Aegyrian runes is to speaking ancient Aegyrian. Nothing sounds like it looks. I can’t even get dore right, and that doesn’t even have any y’s.”

Amoret looked at Britomart consideringly. “You’re serious about learning to speak the Old Tongue?”

“Yes,” said Britomart, forgetting that she had spent much of the last hour convincing herself that this wasn’t about learning to speak the Old Tongue; it was about deciphering books that would reveal the way to defeat a blood witch.

“A dictionary won’t be enough for that. I doubt even an Old Tongue primer would be, if we could find one. You need a teacher.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

Amoret nodded decisively. “We’ll start now.”

“What?”

“I’ll teach you. I should have from the start, only it didn’t occur to me that you would want to learn. Besides, we can hardly continue my riding lessons with so much snow on the ground. This will be a good project. Now, you already know ‘Bore da, Cysgu’”—

“I am not calling you Beauty. I was just repeating after you. You were the one calling me that: ‘Sleepy Beauty’ or whatever it was.”

“Sleeping Beauty,” Amoret corrected. “Harddwch Cysgu. It is an expression in the Old Tongue. I think your equivalent would be ‘sleepyhead.’”

“Oh,” said Britomart, feeling very foolish.

A hint of mischief entered Amoret’s eyes. “Although it would not have been so very inaccurate to have called you Cysgu instead. Now, let’s start with the basics. You say bore da, I say it in turn, and then you ask, ‘Sut wyt ti bore ma?’ How fare you this morning? Try it. ‘Sut wyt ti bore ma?’ ”

Britomart had to clear her throat several times before repeating after Amoret, for she had the distinct impression that somewhere in there, Amoret had just called her beautiful.

By lunchtime, Britomart knew greetings for every time of day and could creditably answer the question of how her day was going, as long as her day was either going well, poorly, or so-so. Beyond that, her vocabulary ran out. She was torn between pride that she had mastered that much and annoyance that she could not say more.

That afternoon, she returned to the library, where she began a study of a different sort. She glanced nervously over her shoulder as she scrawled the words “Blood Witch” on the magical parchment, but Amoret had retreated to the east tower, and there was nobody to observe Britomart as she searched. She climbed the library’s winding stairs to a row of softly glowing books. She picked the grimmest-looking one from among them, a musty old volume with a singed and peeling leather cover the color of dried blood. Then, walking so furtively that she looked as guilty as she felt, she retreated to her room to begin translating it. She had to go back to the library almost immediately to find a dictionary that went from the Old Tongue to Galbrican, since her current dictionary, which translated in the other direction, proved to be useless.

She locked her chamber door and set to work on the chapter titles, writing them out in Galbrican as she deciphered them word by word. Slowly, they revealed themselves to her:

Chapter 1: A Preamble Considering the Utility and Delight to Be Had of Studying the Most Excellent Magic of Our Great Protectors, the Blood Witches.

Chapter 2: A Discourse on the History of Blood Witches, Including the Coming of the Tylwyth Teg and the Effects of Tylwyth-Human Miscegenation on Magical Efficacy Relating to Living Forms.

Chapter 3: A Metaphysical Speculation on the Mingling of Elemental Magic and Human Life Force as Manifested in the Operations of Blood Magic.

And so it went. Britomart was glad that she had grabbed a thicker dictionary this time. She did not think her dictionary for young scholars would have had any more of an idea of what some of those words meant than she did.

Fifteen chapters later, she could safely say that the book did not contain a single chapter along the lines of “On the Weaknesses of Blood Witches and How to Defeat Them in Ten Ways Most Sneaky and Simple.” She tore up the paper she had been using for her translation and threw it in the fire, not sure whether to feel disappointed or relieved. She thought of the row of books that had glowed when she wrote “Blood Witch” on the parchment. She would try the next one tomorrow.

By the time Britomart found the right book, the snow had long melted, and her language lessons had progressed far enough that she could hold a basic conversation in the Old Tongue about her summer travels. It went something like this:

Amoret: “What did you do this summer?”

Britomart: “I went on a trip to the North.”

Amoret: “Did you meet new friends?”

Britomart: “I made one friend. His name is Smudge. He is small.”

Amoret: “Did you visit anywhere fun?”

Britomart: “I visited a castle. It was not fun.”

Amoret: “Not at all?”

Britomart, grudgingly: “Sometimes it was fun.”

Britomart had worked her way nearly to the end of the row of books on blood witches, and she was beginning to lose hope. She had painstakingly deciphered chapters on the actual practice of blood magic—perhaps if she understood how it worked, she could disrupt it? She had blundered her way through accounts of the great feats of blood witches past. She had carefully examined all mentions of the instances when a blood witch had lost her powers (no conclusive reason for such instances had been found, although Blewedyn the Blunderer proposed that it was due to the instability of the humors in the female body, which had to purge itself of blood monthly or risk exploding from an excess of it). A foray into theoretical treatises on blood magic had quickly convinced Britomart that sticking to practical guides and histories was more productive. As far as she was concerned, an hour spent puzzling over “the synergistic interpenetration of elemental energies and sanguineous material” was more than enough for one lifetime.

The book that changed things was a massive volume with a plain leather cover, its spine bearing only the words Cronicl gan Gruffydd. Gruffydd’s Chronicle. Britomart had not run across any mention of a chronicler named Gruffydd in the other histories, and she figured he must not be very important. Chroniclers like Amlodd True-Quill and Maelog Pinch-Parchment were constantly mentioned. It had not occurred to Britomart that Gruffydd was simply a more recent chronicler than those whose histories she had read.

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As soon as Britomart opened the book and read its full title, she realized that she should have looked at it long ago. Inked across the first page were words she translated as Gruffydd’s Chronicle, Being a True and Full Account of the Kingdom of the North, Its Rise and Fall under the Blood Witches, the Lives of the Rulers Aforesaid, and Its Most Tragical Conquest by the Southern Strangers. Britomart had not come across anything about the Galbrican Conquest yet, and she had come to the conclusion that, as far as the historians were concerned, the history of blood witches ended when the Conquest began. That was certainly the view in Galbrica. She should have known that it wouldn’t be the view in the North. Her heart thumped faster as she turned to the table of contents and skimmed down it. She saw the name Morgwynna a few chapters from the end. The pages trembled slightly as she flipped through them to reach it.

The official Galbrican histories of the Conquest were straightforward enough. After the death of the Northern queen with only a young child for her heir, the loose conglomeration of villages that constituted the Northern Kingdom had fallen into disarray. A small Galbrican army had been able to quickly subdue the North—always an unruly neighbor—amidst that disarray, bringing the North under the law and order of Galbrica. One of the commanders of the army that conquered the locals had been appointed to rule the North in Queen Boemia’s name. He had become the first Duke of Svernhold. Historians disagreed about whether Queen Boemia herself had been present in the campaign. Some said that her role in the Conquest was merely legend; others said that every legend had some grain of truth in it, and surely this one might too, for Boemia had been known to lead her own troops into other battles. Historians disagreed, too, over what had caused the Northern queen’s death. Some said that she had wasted away from a fever brought on by the North’s unwholesome climate; some that she had been gored by a wild beast while out hunting; some that she had been assassinated by a vengeful noble.

That history had been a shock to Britomart when she first learned it, for she had not realized until she was fifteen that the legends of Queen Boemia were not actually historical accounts. She had slipped into her father’s library soon after her sister Goneril had told her that, hoping for some proof that Goneril was wrong, but the histories she found there had merely confirmed her sister’s words. Even so, the old tales had never ceased to feel more true than the official histories.

Britomart felt the old tales whispering past her in the rustle of pages as she leafed through the book searching for the chapter on Morgwynna: a chapter that might tell her how one of the North’s most powerful blood witches had been defeated, and how a blood witch might be defeated again.

Boemia searched as day followed day, and spring turned to summer, and summer to fall. She searched as the land grew hard with fierce winter, and the wind of the North whipped her skin chapped and red. She searched always stealthy, amidst spies and enticements, amidst hardships unheard of and magic accursed. She searched till the end of her servitude neared her, and but one day remained of her bondage oath-sealed. Now the Blood Witch grew fearful for the Queen had not broken, had not bent to her will like a creature in thrall. For the Witch had schemed slyly to bind the Queen to her: through fear or through love, to make Boemia hers: hers to command, and Galbrica with her, the Witch’s to rule with sorcery cruel. But Boemia too feared the time’s waning, lest the contract expire ere she found the Witch’s heart. For what would it be worth, that year’s hated service, if she found not the way to destroy her fell host?

Britomart wondered if she was about to find that there was some truth in the old tales after all: that there truly was some dark object—a heart or otherwise—hidden somewhere in the castle that was the key to Amoret’s power.

As the last day grew dim and the Witch ventured wood-wards, to do the grim rites that filled her foul nights, one chamber remained, its contents untried, for the door was close-watched by the spirits who lurked there, guarding in guise of servants most fair. Boemia knew that her one last hope lay there, but the servants must go if enter she would. So she lured into the castle many a wild boar, lured them in close near the chamber’s watched door. She pricked them with nettles and their rage grew to bloodlust; they stampeded the hallway and chased servants clear. The chamber door yielded not to her pressure, and she knew, as she feared, that it must have been locked. She took from her belt the ax that she’s stored there, snuck from the armory that morning at dawn. The first blow could doom her, she knew as she struck it, for she had no way to hide the damage she’d done; when the Blood Witch returned, she would know what the Queen sought there and punish her sorely if the Queen found it not. But if Boemia found it and held firm the Witch’s heart, the Blood Witch’s life she would hold in her hands. So one blow and another Queen Boemia did strike, till the thick oaken wood could no longer withstand. The door splintered and fractured and gave way before her, and into the chamber she strode with her ax.

How many times had the ending of the tale echoed through Britomart’s mind when she spotted a dark patch of stone on the castle floor that might have been (but never was) a trapdoor? How many times had it haunted her when she walked past the forbidden east tower?

She searched high and low in the room’s every crevice, but nowhere she looked hid the Blood Witch’s heart. She knew soon the servants would come back and find her, and her searching redoubled as she scoured the room. Then her keen eyes did see it, the mark yet unnoticed, and when her hand touched it, stone moved away. A hollow lay hidden behind the stone’s roughness, and inside the hollow, a chest white as bone. From the hollow she pulled it and flipped the lid open, as behind her she heard racing spirits approach. Inside the box, on red velvet nestled, a still-beating heart pulsed in time to her own. She took it in her hands and held it before her, warm to the touch like a newly-slain deer. When she turned to the servants pouring in to surround her, they stopped still as stone when they saw what she held. For the first time that year, Queen Boemia smiled, for she knew once and for all the battle was won. Some servants fled fast to warn their fell mistress, and Boemia waited for the Blood Witch to come. Our great queen sat stately in the chamber and waited, until the Witch came before her, eyes blazing with rage. But her rage was all useless, and the Witch herself knew it, for Boemia held her heart in her hands.

With voice sweet and terrible, the Blood Witch did ask her, “Will you kill me, then, false queen, and break your sworn promise, to grant me one year of the life that you live?”

Queen Boemia answered with words pure and regal, “I am no false queen, but truer than iron, and as I have sworn, so I will do. Yet the last day is waning and midnight approaches, and when it arrives, my one year is through. Then no oath will bind me and my freedom will be mine, to do with your heart as my duty demands.”

“Does your duty demand that you show me no mercy?” the Blood Witch did ask with cunning most low.

“ Mercy I’ll show if you show you deserve it, though none have you shown me this filth-laden year. Yield me your kingdom and forswear your black arts; live as my prisoner, and I’ll grant you your life.”

“Wealth I can grant you, and beauty unfathomed, a life longer than mortals, strength greater than oaks. This will I grant you if you give me my heart back, to live once more my own, queen of the North. But my kingdom I’ll not grant, nor my magic I’ll forswear, for both are my own, as is my heart.”

“Your heart you have sold for the price of your magic. Now that price has come due since your pride will not yield. My mercy I’ve offered, my offer you’ve refused, then bear the reward for the dark acts you have done. No blood witch shall live on to threaten my borders, to prey on my people and endanger their lives. This is my sentence, this is true justice: die for the evil with which you have lived.”

Then outside a wolf howled, and despair seized the Blood Witch, for she felt in her bones that midnight had come. She drew out her dagger, pricked blood from her finger, our true queen to slay with a blood spell perverse. But our queen, she was quicker and took from beside her the ax she had used to break down the door; in its place on the stone floor, she laid down the cursed heart, and swinging the ax, clove it in twain. The Blood Witch screamed once as her heart was cleaved open, then she crumbled to ash, and the heart crumbled too. And at once all around her, her magic was vanquished, and all was exposed as it truly was: a castle of ripe rot, furnished with fungus, and served by gross spirits who now wailing fled.

No more would the Blood Witch send beasts to kill children; no more would she blight Northern Galbrica’s crops. No more would she threaten at Galbrica’s borders; no more would she harm our kingdom so blessed. For our queen had protected the Galbrican people and defeated the Witch who would poison their lives.

Boemia strode from the castle thus conquered, and she saddled her horse, and rode from the wood. She rode back to her country, to her throne rich and golden, her mission completed, her realm safe once more. There she chose from among the staunchest of her knights a band to go North and rule in her name, for the Blood Witch’s kingdom lay now in chaos, lay now in need of Galbrica’s rule. So the North became our land, Galbrican by right, through Boemia’s courage and her heart pure and true.

Pure and true. The words shivered through Britomart’s memory as she turned one final page and found herself staring at the chapter she had been looking for, the one with Morgwynna’s name in the title. She read the chapter’s title carefully now, translating it word by word: “On the Death of Queen Morgwynna, Killed by the Queen of the South, and the Fall of the Kingdom of the North.” So Queen Boemia had been the one to kill Morwgynna and conquer the North. Britomart felt a surge of triumph at being right when the Galbrican historians had been wrong. Perhaps she hadn’t been so foolish in believing the old tales after all. She adjusted the book and began to translate the chapter.

In the twelfth year of the reign of Queen Morgwynna the Great, which was the year 651 after the founding of the Kingdom of the North, the Queen of the Southern Strangers, Boemia by name, arrived at Castle Curiadcalon in the company of eight of her best knights, claiming to have come on a diplomatic mission and begging leave to stay as visitors at Queen Morwygnna’s court, that they might learn the Northern ways and be joined to us in friendship and understanding. Only through such an understanding, the Southern Queen claimed, could the two kingdoms come to an agreement that would stop the constant border skirmishes that had grown up between them. Queen Morgwynna assented, for she knew that such skirmishes might grow to war if they were not stopped.

A diplomatic mission? That wasn’t in any of the histories Britomart had read before. Still, what was wrong with a diplomatic mission? It showed that Queen Boemia had come in peace.

…The Southern Queen stayed for many moons, until all knew that she must return to her kingdom soon, lest her power become unstable in her absence, for Galbrica was not so old of a realm as the Kingdom of the North, and Boemia’s rule was what held it strong. The two queens came to an agreement to stop the border skirmishes and establish peaceful trade between their kingdoms, but still the Southern Queen stayed. Diaries salvaged from residents of Castle Curiadcalon at the time, now housed in the castle library, indicate a persistent rumor that Boemia’s protracted stay was the result of an intensely personal relationship that had developed between the two. Morgwynna’s consort had died some years earlier after providing her with a daughter, and the queen’s widowed state intensified speculation on the nature of her relationship with the foreign queen.

Britomart’s bewilderment grew. It was all wrong. It had to be. Based on this, it sounded like Boemia had been Queen Morgwynna’s guest, not her captive. That couldn't have been the case. Killing one’s host was sacrilege. Even a child knew that. And what did it matter if Morgwynna was a widow? Was Britomart supposed to feel sorry for her because of that? But it made her think of the way Rowena had talked about Amoret needing a companion, and the way Britomart had tried to make use of that in her attempt to free Alfrick. Britomart’s hand felt clammy where she held the quill, and she had to wipe her palms against her tunic before continuing to write out her translation.

…Whether or not the rumor was correct that the Southern Queen had become Queen Morgwynna’s lover companion—here Britomart had to correct her translation because the word she had translated as ‘lover’ clearly had an alternate definition—it ultimately became clear that Queen Boemia’s visit also had another purpose. It was a ploy designed to allow the Southern conquest of the North. In that aim, it was, alas, successful. On the last night of her visit, the Southern Queen stabbed the sleeping Queen Morgwynna and proceeded, with the assistance of her retinue of knights, to eliminate as many of the Northern nobles as possible. Presumably, the assassination fell on a prearranged date, for when the remaining nobles were finally able to mount a defense, the Southern Queen and her retinue fled through the Shadowed Wood to the Koleagh Pass, where they were met by a Galbrican army that had arrived to provide reinforcements.

A blot of ink seeped into the paper as Britomart pressed down on her quill nearly hard enough to break its nib. It was wrong. All wrong. She wanted to stop reading, to slam the book shut and never think about it again, but something made her keep going.

…The Galbricans swept across the Kingdom of the North, meeting with little resistance as the North reeled from the loss of its queen and much of her court. The queen’s heir, who now ascended to the Northern throne as Queen Aerona, was only nine years old, and had neither the experience nor the power to lead a successful defense, not yet having grown into a full blood witch. Some of the nobles attempted forays against the Southern conquerors, but the numbers of the Southern army were too large to resist without the strength of a full blood witch. The North fell. Historians speculate that the horror of the attack on Castle Curiadcalon, suffered at a young age, permanently stunted Queen Aerona’s powers, for even when she grew to adulthood, she was unable to fully wield the power of the land and reclaim what had been conquered. She dedicated her reign sealing off the Shadowed Wood, which was all that remained of her kingdom. So it has remained since.

Britomart made herself set the quill down calmly and read back over her translation. Perhaps she had mistranslated some crucial part, some part that had made her misunderstand the whole thing. By the time she finished rereading it, she knew that was not the case. Northern lies, she assured herself. Northern lies told to assuage the North’s pride after being justly conquered by Galbrica. Queen Morgwynna had been harming the Galbrican people, and Boemia had acted nobly to save the Galbricans.

So why did this book make Queen Boemia’s vanquishing of Morgwynna sound like a guest’s calculated assassination of her host? And what was that about an ‘intensely personal relationship’ between Boemia and Morgwynna? There was nothing about that in the Galbrican histories, unless you counted Morgwynna’s attempts to enthrall Boemia in the old tales. This book made it sound almost like the two women had been friends. Or perhaps more than that. Britomart thought of the word she’d crossed out: lovers. That had to have been a mistranslation. Two women couldn’t be lovers.

Two women couldn’t…

Britomart’s breath seemed to freeze in her chest as a wave of realization hit her. Images washed over her. The firelight dancing in Amoret’s eyes as they talked after dinner. The feel of Amoret’s hand in hers. The warmth of Amoret’s waist under Britomart’s hands as they rode into the Shadowed Wood together. Snow on dark eyelashes. That familiar raised eyebrow. The sound of Amoret’s infuriating, wonderful voice correcting Britomart’s pronunciation on a new word in the Old Tongue. All of the things that Britomart had been trying so hard, and so unsuccessfully, not to think about.

Perhaps lovers had not been a mistranslation after all.

Britomart slammed the book shut and rose to her feet. She crumpled up her translation and tossed it in the fire. Lies. It had to be lies. Whatever the secret of Queen Boemia’s defeat of Morgwynna had been, it had not been killing Morgwynna in her sleep. That meant that the book was hiding something: some other way to defeat a blood witch, to break her power. Perhaps, if the part about Boemia being the one to kill Morgwynna was true, then the legend about the Blood Witch’s heart was true also.

The time had come to find the truth, no matter the consequences.

The time had come to search the east tower.