Ina kicks Mava forward. Honey follows. Ina and I make a strange pair—a princess and a servant, one long-time orphaned and one freshly so, one with the favor of the Queen and one with the love of a father. It occurs to me that I wouldn’t trade places with her if I was given the chance, wouldn’t trade Papa for the Queen.
The thought sends a fresh bolt of grief through me, and I cast around for another topic of conversation quickly, before it overcomes me. “I thought the Queen’s orphanage was on the eastern shore, near the palace,” I say. Of course, that would be a journey of weeks. Ina and I are packed for hours.
“That was the first orphanage,” Ina says. “I’ve almost been to them all, by now. There are so many, Jules, all over the kingdom—families still abandon their children on the palace shores. We could form a whole city by ourselves.”
I shake my head, imagining a city of orphans, running wild with no knowledge of their past.
“I’ve visited every one I could find, to look through their records,” Ina continues. The outpouring of words makes it clear she’s thought about this, turned it over in her head many times. “The truth is that I have no idea which one I came from. I cannot ask Her Majesty.”
“Of course not,” I murmur. Something makes me shiver, and I pull the wool cloak closer to me.
“All I know is that Ina is the name my birth mother gave me.” She pauses. “And still, I don’t know that for sure.” Without being told, I know what Ina is feeling: the ache of longing for a parent’s kind touch, a reassuring word, has carved out a hole in my chest. “So I’ve gone to nearly every orphanage in the kingdom. And I’ve found nothing.”
Now a morbid curiosity has taken hold of me. Are my birth parents alive or dead? Did they leave me on the shores of the palace, to be chosen by the Queen, picked up by an orphanage, or else die breathing the sea-salt air? How did Papa come to claim me as his own?
Does it have anything to do with why he died for me?
We pass through a clearing; though the sun is high now, I shiver again, then let the letter tucked near my heart warm me. Papa must have found me at one of these orphanages, and given me what even Ina Gold, princess of Sempera, lacks: love.
After the gloomy turn in the conversation, we ride the rest of the way in relative quiet. Ina’s map takes us down narrower and narrower roads, through plains and woods, until finally in a forest of birch we encounter a huge and ornate but rusted wrought-iron gate. The words carved at the top have been crusted over with snow and ice, but I can still make them out: Here is a refuge for Sempera’s children, so that all may have a home. The inscription twists at something deeply buried in my heart.
We pause at the gate for a few minutes, unsure whether to call out—all we can see beyond it is more snow and more trees. But before either of us get down from our horses, a child appears at the bars—a little girl with shorn black hair and wide, wide eyes, no older than six or seven. She regards us solemnly, wrapping bare hands around the carved iron. She’s wearing a threadbare coat and trousers too big for her, not remotely enough for this cold.
“Are you a fairy?” the child asks.
Ina opens her mouth and falters, then glances at me. Her usual composure seems to have deserted her; she looks anxious and uncertain, her lips chapped where she’s bitten them. Except for the brief moment outside the Queen’s chambers, I’ve never seen her nervous—not even when she was parading into Everless for the first time at the Queen’s side. But she’s nervous now. So I swing down from the saddle, landing heavily in the snow.
The little girl doesn’t move as I draw near. At the gate, I crouch down so I’m at her eye level and try to channel the way Lora speaks to me, or the way Papa did when I was little.
“Fairies aren’t real, love,” I say trying to sound bright and open, though I can’t shake the thought of how cold she must be, her fingers entwined in the metal of the gate.
The girl nods and stares past me. Then I realize she’s not gazing at me or Ina, but at the horses. I glance over my shoulder and see them through her eyes, Mava’s shiny coat and silky mane, the proud arch of Honey’s neck. “You can pet them,” I tell the girl. “Go on.”
She blinks at me, then the barest hint of a smile brightens her face. She grips the metal bars and backs up, hauling the gate along with her. I beckon to Ina—she blinks uncertainly, then dismounts and takes the reins of both horses in hand, leading them through the gate. The girl lifts her hand to brush Mava’s side as Ina leads them past, captivated.
Between the trees ahead of us, a building starts to take form—a large, ramshackle building that looks as if someone tried to imitate Everless without possessing either the blood-iron or foresight of the Gerlings. Two wings of black stone wrap around a large, bare courtyard, where dozens of young boys and girls are scattered, racing about and playing in the snow. None of them seem to be older than ten. Their shrieks and yells echo off the trees.
Ina puts a hand on my arm. She’s hanging back, looking up at the building with trepidation.
“Will you . . . will you go inside for me?” she asks. “I need to walk.”
I blink. “Don’t you want to see for yourself?”
“We’re nearly the same age . . .” Ina avoids my gaze, staring instead at the children who are now gawking at the horses. “Ask if we can look through the records from the month before the day the Queen found me. That should be enough, I think. But say it’s for you—that you’re wondering about you.” Talking faster and faster with nervousness, she gives me the day of her birth as the Queen remembers it—March sixth—and I register with surprise that she is only a few days older than me, born on the eleventh.
With a flash of clarity, I also understand why she means me to pose as the one seeking information, because it can’t be known that she’s out here in the country, trying to learn about her life before the Queen. My gut twists in a combination of disappointment and hurt. I’m still a tool, or a glove to be slipped on and used as needed by those more powerful—even to Ina Gold, the girl who only an hour before said she could trust me, that we understood each other. But I say, “Of course.”
Ina leaves to find a stable for the horses, and I continue inside. Up close, I can see that the orphanage building is ill-maintained. Some bricks in the wall look loose, and I find myself standing on a floor of ancient, warped boards. A little fire burns in a hearth. A small, balding older man is seated at a desk across the room, writing in a ledger. When the door closes, he looks up, startled, and takes me in.
“Good afternoon,” he says, his voice creaky. “How can I help you, miss?”