Britomart strode to the east tower, her sword a reassuring weight against her hip. She couldn’t have said exactly what she meant to do with it—it would be far less useful for breaking down doors than Queen Boemia’s ax—but she certainly did not want to be unarmed when she met whatever awaited her in the forbidden tower.

Every instinct told her to stop as she stepped onto the tower’s spiral staircase. Even if she didn’t get caught—which she might not, for Amoret had gone out that afternoon to tend to the wood—Britomart knew she would not be able to hide her trespass into the forbidden tower. Her guilt would show as plainly on her face as her thoughts always did. She fought her instincts down. A Galbrican knight did not give into fear. A Galbrican knight did not worry about destroying her friendship with a blood witch. There could be no such friendship, not with people who warped the truth to try to turn Galbricans against their own country. There could be no friendship, only a temporary truce. And truces come to an end.

Britomart held her breath as she reached the door to the first chamber and tried its handle. None of the castle’s doors had been locked so far, but none of those had been intended to keep her out. Not for the first time, she missed Smudge. She did not think that a locked door would have been much of a barrier to him.

Her breath whooshed out as the latch yielded to her touch, but her relief was followed by uneasiness. It felt too easy. Was this some sort of trap that Amoret had set for her, or had Amoret merely grown careless in guarding whatever secrets the tower hid, lulled into a false sense of security by Britomart’s compliance? Or, worst of all, had the prohibition been no more than a test of Britomart’s trustworthiness: a test she had just irrevocably failed? It did not matter. It could not matter. Britomart gritted her teeth and stepped into the room.

It was a bedchamber like her own, and she knew at once that it must be Amoret’s. The crimson gown that Amoret had worn to dinner the night before was thrown over the back of a chair, and the matching slippers lay at an awkward angle on the floor, as if they had been kicked off and left to lie where they landed. A smile tugged at the corner of Britomart’s mouth. Amoret was so perfectly composed in everything she did that Britomart had assumed her bedchamber would be perfectly neat. As it was, Britomart was surprised that the castle had not found some way to protest. Britomart’s eyes fell on the book on Amoret’s dressing table, and her amusement died as she remembered why she was there. She began to search.

She investigated every nook and cranny she could find, throwing open the wardrobe, scouring the contents of the small desk, pulling the covers off the bed, running her hands under the mattress, searching the floor for any mismatched stones, and scanning the walls for the tracery of a hidden compartment. Nothing. Nothing except for the traces of everyday life: a half-finished sheet of notes about an ointment for split hooves, a pair of stockings forlorn and forgotten under the bed, a single pearl earring missing its mate. Britomart hastily put the room back in order, though she knew it would fool no one. She closed the door quietly behind her as she left. There was a tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with fear. She assured herself that the truth would be worth it. It had to be.

The stairs spiraled upwards, leading her onwards.

The next chamber Britomart came to opened just as easily. She flinched back as an intense light hit her eyes, then realized that it was no more than the glare of sunlight off of glass. She was facing a counter filled with an assortment of tapered glass containers and a contraption that reminded her of the stills from the castle brewery back home, though much smaller. Beside them sat a small brazier with more than a few scorch marks around its base. The other walls were lined with shelves of carefully labeled jars and bunches of dried herbs, reminding her of the healing shed where she had helped Amoret fix Blewog’s tooth.

At the center of the room was a pitted table with a scroll unrolled upon it, old and faded. A brownish-red smudge ran down one side of the scroll as if someone had run their finger down it without properly wiping blood off their hands. Britomart tried not to look too closely at the stain as she craned over the scroll to study its title. The title was long enough to have made the ancient chroniclers proud: Swyn Trwy'r Hwn y Galler Dyrchafu'r Gosb Fwyaf O'r Amddifadedd o Ymwybyddiaeth, Pan y Gogwydda'r Frenhines, Yn Ei Holl Drugaredd a'i Fawredd, Tuag at Drugaredd. Britomart tried to read it, but none of the words were familiar except for swyn, spell. Well, that and a lot of prepositions, but those weren’t very useful. A chill ran through Britomart as she realized that one of the other words was familiar after all. She had read the chroniclers praising the grandeur of long-dead blood witches too often not to recognize it: fawredd, greatness. A spell for greatness. If Britomart had been looking for proof that Amoret was up to something, she had just found it.

With a pang, Britomart realized that when she had thought of the forbidden tower containing the dark secrets of the blood witch, she had never quite thought of those dark secrets as belonging to Amoret. Not her Amoret, the one who put far too much honey in her porridge and used her magic to heal injured animals. It was as if there were two different Amorets in Britomart’s mind: the Amoret who was a dangerous blood witch, and the Amoret who gave Britomart language lessons and talked with her beside the fire each night. It seemed those two Amorets had been the same woman the whole time. Amoret–her Amoret–had always been and never ceased to be a dangerous blood witch. A blood witch who was preparing a spell to gain power.

Britomart could think of no reason for such a spell other than an attempt to reclaim the North from Galbrica. She slammed her hand down on the table and turned away, wanting to look anywhere else but at the scroll, wanting to be anywhere else but here, here where she finally knew that someday she and Amoret would be facing each other across battlelines. Unless she did something to stop Amoret first.

Britomart grabbed the scroll and left the room. She rolled the scroll tightly as she continued up the stairs, tucking it under her swordbelt where it rubbed uncomfortably against her waist with every step. She would not destroy it. Not yet. For now, she needed the scroll as proof—though whether as proof to anybody else or only to herself, she did not know.

Britomart threw open the door to the next chamber with savage efficiency. Once again, she found herself squinting: not from light this time, but from darkness. The room was so dim that she could make nothing out except for a tall, spindly-legged shape at its center. A thin sliver of light from the far wall led her across the room to where a thick velvet curtain had been pulled over a tall, arched window. The sunlight that poured in when she pulled aside the curtain was almost blinding, and she blinked ferociously for several seconds before the room came into focus around her.

When it did, her breath caught. She was standing in a whirl of color. The chamber walls were lined with canvases painted with the bold grace that could only belong to Corsirian art. Britomart had seen only two Corsirian paintings in her life, but they were not something a person forgot easily. They had been gifted to her father by Corsirian ambassadors, and he had hung them in his own chambers, claiming that it would be un-Galbrican to hang another country’s art in the throne room. Britomart suspected that her father just wanted to keep the paintings for his own chambers. They were that magnificent. And now she was standing in a room full of them.

Entranced, Britomart walked from one painting to the next. She knew that Amoret’s mother Arundel had visited Corsiria in her youth and that she must have met Amoret’s father there, for Amoret’s olive complexion was that of a Corsirian. Arundel must have brought the paintings back with her from Corsiria when she returned to the Shadowed Wood. The cost of so many paintings would have been astounding. So was their beauty.

At last, Britomart came to the easel at the center of the room: the tall, spindly object whose outline she had glimpsed in the dark. Britomart stepped back in shock when she saw what was on it. It held a half-finished painting in the same masterful strokes as the others, but whereas the other canvases had depicted the exploits of the gods or majestic forest views, this one showed only a simple human scene: a woman grooming a horse. There was an undefinable tenderness about it: something about the way the light filtering through the stable door touched the woman’s cheek, or perhaps about the way the artist had captured the untidiness of the woman’s blonde braid. A braid that Britomart knew all too well from her own mirror.

“Do you like it?” asked a voice from behind her.

Britomart whirled, her hand going to her sword hilt. Amoret watched her from the doorway. Britomart swallowed hard and made herself drop her hand to her side. In all her imaginings of being caught, it had never gone quite like this. Instead of accusations or evasions, she found that all she could say was, “Why is there a painting of me here? Is it magic?”

“It is not magic. It is art. And it is here because I have been painting it.”

“You? You mean, these paintings…you...”

“My mother painted many of them, but yes, the rest are mine.”

“How? Nobody paints like that, not outside of Corsiria. And even then, it takes ages to get that good.”

“My father taught her, and she taught me. I have been painting since I was old enough to hold a paint brush. I told you once that the castle got upset with me when I was young for painting on its walls.”

“And your father? Are any of these his?”

A sad smile flickered across Amoret’s face. “Only one.” She crossed to the window and picked up a small painting that was propped beside it, no larger than her outspread hand. She handed it to Britomart. “This one.”

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It was a portrait of a young woman, perfect in every detail. One of the woman’s eyebrows was slightly arched, and there was a familiar glint of amusement in her eyes. Britomart thought she now knew where Amoret had inherited that particular expression. “Your mother,” she said, handing the portrait back to Amoret.

“My mother,” Amoret confirmed, replacing the portrait in its former spot. “It was the only one of my father’s paintings that she could take with her when she fled Corsiria. My father had been a master painter there, good enough to be commissioned to paint the frescoes on the ceilings when his city began construction of a new temple. High ceilings, you understand. The scaffolding that he was standing on gave way, and by the time they brought him to my mother, he was dead. She tried to bring him back to life. It did not work, of course. No blood witch in her right mind would try, particularly not that far from the Shadowed Wood. One of the washing women saw her trying to do it, and soon the whole city knew there was a strega in their midst. A witch. They have legends of witchcraft in Corsiria, just as they do in Galbrica. Their legends are not any kinder to witches than yours are. So the city drove my mother out with stones and fire. She could not resist with her power so diluted that far from the North. The portrait was all she could salvage of my father’s. The portrait and me, that is. By the time she made it back to the Shadowed Wood, she had learned she was with child.”

Amoret gazed out of the window, but she seemed to be looking at something much farther away than anything that lay outside of it. “Rowena says that my mother was different before Corsiria: always out wandering past the borders of the Shadowed Wood, always curious about what the world beyond might hold. She lost her trust in the outside world when she was driven from Corsiria. So she walled herself away in the castle and painted, and when I was old enough, she taught me to paint too. And when my grandmother died and my mother became queen, my mother took down the bell that used to sit outside the castle walls for people to seek a meeting with the blood witch. She did not like visitors, even those who were her own subjects. She was not a very good queen, my mother. I am trying to be better.”

“But you have not rebuilt the bell,” Britomart observed.

“No. I have not rebuilt the bell.” Amoret turned to look at Britomart then, and Britomart nearly stepped back at the ferocity in her gaze. “Tell me, princess, why should I? Why, when the one person I have let into this castle betrays me? I forbade you only one place, and that was this tower. Or had you forgotten?”

“I had not forgotten.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I came to find the truth.” Bracing herself, Britomart added, “The truth about how to defeat a blood witch.”

“Why now? You have had months to do so.”

“I found a book in the library. It said that Queen Boemia murdered Morgwynna in her sleep. It said that the whole thing was a plot to take over the North by killing her host, and that…that Boemia and Morgwynna were lovers.”

“I see. And what do your Galbrican histories tell you?”

“The histories say that Galbrica claimed the North after it fell into chaos following the death of its queen. The old tales say that it was Queen Boemia who took the North. She found the Blood Witch’s heart and clove it in twain, and the Blood Witch crumbled to dust.”

“Did it never occur to you,” Amoret asked with forced levelness, “that the part about Morgwynna’s heart might be metaphorical?”

Britomart stared at Amoret, aghast, then looked down at the floor. “No,” she whispered.

She heard the slither of Amoret’s gown on the stones as Amoret drew closer, then Amoret’s voice, near now, asking, “Did you come to the east tower to search for my heart?”

Britomart couldn’t bring herself to look up. “No—and yes. I wasn’t sure what to believe.”

There was another swish of fabric, and the hem of Amoret’s gown came into view, followed by Amoret’s hand, reaching for Britomart’s. Britomart let Amoret draw her hand upwards and place it over her heart. Amoret’s heartbeat thrummed under Britomart’s palm.

“But you see, princess, there is a problem with your plan. I still have my heart. Here. I would not be so careless as to cut it out and leave it somewhere for you to find. If you were hoping to crumble me into dust, let me assure you that you never had a chance. If, on the other hand, you were simply hoping to trade my heart for Alfrick, we may be able to come to an arrangement.”

Britomart looked up. “What sort of arrangement?”

“I will wake your Alfrick. I will even wake the other sleepers too—all those who sleep in the outer cave, for those who lie in the inner cave were justly sentenced to their sleep by blood witches past. I will do all of this for one simple thing in return: the traditional price for breaking a sleeping spell, though it is typically paid to the sleeper. A kiss.”

“I tried that. I kissed one of the sleepers the first time I saw them. She didn’t wake up. It has to be true love’s kiss.”

“I am not talking about kissing the sleepers.”

Britomart’s eyes widened. “Oh.”

“Do we have a bargain, then?”

“Just one kiss?”

“Just one.”

“And you’ll wake all of the sleepers?”

“All those in the outer cavern, Alfrick included.”

“Done.”

Britomart squinched her eyes shut and held herself as still as stone.

A few moments passed, then more. And more. Finally, Britomart felt her hand fall away from Amoret’s heart as Amoret took a step back. Britomart warily opened her eyes. Amoret was standing by the window again, arms crossed, looking unimpressed.

“Aren’t you going to…you know?” Britomart asked.

“I have no interest in kissing a statue, princess. If this bargain is distasteful to you, perhaps we should find another. I would not have much use for all of the gold in your father’s treasury, but for form’s sake, perhaps that might”—

“No. Wait.”

Britomart reached Amoret before she was even aware that she had started moving. She had a moment to see the startled expression on Amoret’s face, and then her hand was on Amoret’s cheek, tilting her chin upwards. Her lips met Amoret’s, and she felt Amoret soften against her as her surprise passed. It vaguely occurred to Britomart that this was when she should step back—she had performed her duty, no more was necessary—but instead she felt her hand slipping into Amoret’s hair, felt herself pulling Amoret closer. When at last she broke away, she could not have said whether seconds or hours had passed. She only knew that, for a while, the world had stood still, and at its center had been only Amoret.

Then the world snapped back into place, and Britomart stepped back from Amoret so hastily that she nearly crashed into the easel. She steadied herself on the small table of paints beside it and sent several paintbrushes rolling onto the floor. She was surprised to see that Amoret looked equally flustered.

“I see why that is the traditional price,” Amoret said.

Britomart let out a hoarse laugh.

“You’ve kept your end of the bargain. I will keep mine. We’ll leave for the cavern the day after tomorrow. In the meantime, there are things I need to prepare. Things for which I will need the scroll currently tucked into your sword belt.”

Britomart blanched. “You knew I found it.”

“I checked my workroom as soon as I saw that somebody had searched my chamber. That is a very valuable scroll you have there, princess. One that I will need quite soon.”

“I can’t let you have it. I saw the title. A spell for greatness. I don’t know what you were planning to do with it, but I can't let you.”

“Not even if you would be giving up what you just bargained for?”

Regret stabbed through Britomart. She had been so close. So close to waking Alfrick. But the safety of Galbrica came first. “Not even then.”

Amoret shrugged. “As you wish. Take the scroll, and let our bargain end.” She turned to go.

“You’re not going to stop me?” Britomart called after her in confusion.

Amoret paused in the doorway. “No. I am going to get you a dictionary. Kindly wait until I have returned with it before you destroy the scroll. It is for your own benefit.”

Britomart listened to Amoret’s retreating footsteps. She thought about fleeing the castle, taking the scroll and riding back to Galbrica, returning with enough soldiers to put an end to all of this. Whatever Amoret was doing, it had to be a ruse. But it didn’t feel like one.

Amoret returned to find Britomart poised over the scroll with flint and steel at the ready to burn it if needed. “Very dramatic,” Amoret commented wryly as she set down the dictionary. “Now do some reading.”

She left Britomart craning over the ancient scroll and returned to her chamber. Fifteen minutes later, Amoret heard the sound of muffled cursing coming from two floors above.

Britomart wanted to sink through the floor as she knocked on Amoret’s chamber door. Amoret opened it, and the amused look on her face made Britomart go even redder.

Britomart held out the scroll to her. “Here. I want to keep our bargain.”

“You finished your translation, I see,” Amoret said innocently. “And what did you learn?”

“This spell–” Britomart smacked the scroll with her free hand and then quickly smoothed it. “This spell,” she began more calmly, “is not a spell for greatness.”

“Indeed. Shall I check your translation of the title?”

“I’d rather not.”

“I insist.”

Seeing no way around it, Britomart cleared her throat and read out, “A Spell by Which the Most Grave Punishment of the Deprivation of Consciousness May Be Lifted, When the Queen, in All Her Mercy and Greatness, Inclines Towards Mercy.”

“In other words…” Amoret prompted.

“Are you really going to make me say it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the spell to remove the sleeping curse.”

“Good.”

“But how was I supposed to know that?” Britomart burst out. “It was in your workroom, for Woden’s sake! I thought the only things in there would be…you know…things you were working on.”

“They were,” said Amoret.

“They can’t have been! Not this one. If you were working on this spell that would mean…”

“That I had already decided to reverse the curse? Yes, it would.”

“But you made me make a bargain!”

Amoret shrugged. “People always value things more when they come at a cost. And there are other things that come at a cost too. Going where one is forbidden, for example. I could not grant your request for free after that.”

“Well, it’s all settled now,” Britomart said firmly, holding out the scroll again. “I kept my end of the bargain, you’ll keep yours. Here’s your scroll.”

Amoret pushed the scroll gently away. “I think not, princess. You ended that bargain when you took the scroll.”

“But I’m giving the scroll back.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Fine. What do you want this time?”

A slow grin spread over Amoret’s face. “Oh, I think the same terms as last time will do quite nicely.”