Time has always moved strangely around me, clinging for one moment too long, then stuttering to catch up with the world. Maybe Briarsmoor has clung to me all these years.
And I certainly feel cursed. The weight of everything I’ve lost is like a collection of stones in my chest. My mother and Papa are the heaviest, but there are a thousand other things too, little things, taken from me—our tiny garden in Crofton, Amma’s comforting embrace . . . and further back, the blazing warmth of the blacksmith’s workshop, Roan’s childhood smile. I pull on Honey’s reins and fall behind, so Ina won’t see the couple of tears that escape and track down my face.
We come into view of Everless just as the sun is starting to set. The estate is a spiky dark silhouette against the orange glow of the sky. Ina stops on the empty road, and I pull to a halt beside her. I peer at her, unsure if something is wrong, but she’s just staring at it, this temporary home we both share, a curious mix of wonder and grief on her beautiful face.
“Maybe it’s better that I don’t know,” she says, half to herself. I lean close to hear her. “There are less than three weeks left until the wedding, for Sorceress’s sake. Maybe this is a sign I shouldn’t be running all over the kingdom looking for answers that probably don’t exist . . . I mean, I have everything I need already.”
She looks over at me, vulnerable. And though I can’t understand why Ina Gold, the daughter of the Queen, should need reassurance from a servant girl, she clearly does. The need is written all over her face.
A hint of irritation seeps into me. Why should Ina need me to comfort her, when she has everything she could ever dream of at her fingertips, when she will sit on the throne one day?
But her eyes remind me of the does I used to see, foraging alone in the Crofton forest. My survival, and Papa’s, depended on my being a merciless hunter. Even so, if a doe ever looked me straight in the eye, I could never bring myself to fire.
I take her gloved hand in my own. In spite of everything, I want to help her. I know what it is to be lost. “My father raised me as his, but then confessed that I wasn’t, Ina,” I tell her. She squeezes my hands so tightly that I wince. “I know what it’s like not to know. But—” I pause, letting the truth swirl inside of me. “It’s more lonely that he didn’t tell me the truth. That he was afraid to, I think, because he thought I wouldn’t love him like a father. But he was wrong.”
The Queen’s daughter takes her hands from mine, covers her own face. Then, in the growing shadow of the estate, she sobs. The sound pierces me—I’ve said the wrong thing, let my grief carry me away.
“Everyone at Everless loves you,” I say. She leans over and quietly nods into my shoulder. “No one talked of anything else before you arrived—just Ina Gold, how beautiful and kind she was, and how lucky Roan was to have her.” Saying Roan’s name makes the stones in my chest get heavier, but I push past them. “And that’s only the beginning. Anyone can see how much the Queen loves you. Caro loves you. Roan”—I pause—“adores you.”
A smile, faint but genuine, breaks out over Ina’s face. “Thank you, Jules.” She gazes back at Everless. “I’m about to marry Roan Gerling. Surely no girl ever had less cause to be ungrateful.”
A memory sneaks into the back of my mind—Roan in the narrow hallway where I ran into him the other day, flushed and smelling of perfume. Lavender, not rosewater. It’s not my business, I shouldn’t, but—“Do you love him?” I blurt out.
Surprise flashes across Ina’s face. She looks at me, at Everless, and at me again. “Yes,” she says. “More than anything.”
Ina urges her horse forward, toward Everless, toward Roan, toward her future. My horse follows ploddingly along—a living, breathing shadow of Ina’s own. I close my eyes against the sight. I am escorted, in case you think this girl is a ghost, she’d said. But right now, I feel like I might be.
After we’ve left Honey and Mava at the stables with Tam and are approaching the east entrance, Ina whispers to me in the pooling shadows.
“It’s not that I’m unhappy, Jules, you must know that,” she urges.
“I do,” I say. “I understand.” It’s possible to feel joy and grief at the same time. It’s possible to look forward to the horizon while mourning what you’ve lost.
I realize Ina’s stopped. I turn to her—she’s wringing her hands. There’s something else on her face, longing to escape. “Ina . . . what is it?”
“You have to promise not to tell anyone,” she says. “Not Caro, not the other servants.”
My heart pounds. “I promise.”
“There was a man.” Her voice is quiet. “A few years ago, at the summer harvest in an Elsen province, the Queen was addressing the crowd. I was standing among them, so I could watch, too.” She swallowed. “The man reached me—he took me by the arm. Of course, I yelled for my guard, as I was trained to do. Before he ran off, he told me—” She stops, looks around.
“What? Tell me,” I say, unthinking and then shocked at the command. Ina’s mouth twitches.
“The Queen means you harm. She’ll kill you.” Immediately after she says it, Ina looks as though she’s swallowed poison. I hear her breathing quicken. “I’ve thought and thought about it. He reached me—risked his life to do so. Why did he do that? He didn’t seem to want to hurt me.”
“He sounds mad,” I say, my voice a whisper. His words sound less mad, though, than they would have before I saw the Queen’s knife flying at Ina’s chest. Lady Sida’s words float through my head once again. She is mad too, certainly, and yet . . .
Ina nods. “That must be it. That’s what I told myself until I got sick of thinking it. For a moment, I thought he might be . . .” She presses her lips together in a tight line. “My father. That the Queen stole me from my parents, like a fairy stealing away with a child in the night.” She laughs. Her laugh is short and bitter. “Impossible, I know. Don’t tell anyone, Jules, please. It would ruin me.”
“Of course,” I murmur, but say nothing more, and neither does Ina. But I know that the same thought has woven itself into our minds.
What if he told the truth?
19
The Queen returns to Everless before dawn breaks the next morning. That she prefers to travel at night is a message, tied up in brown paper, desperate to speak.
When I get back to the women’s dormitory after watching her carriage pull into Everless, I find a little velvet bag sitting on top of my made bed. Another gift—which means more gossip at my expense. Beside it, a note, in Ina’s pretty handwriting: Thank you for your discretion, Jules.
I sit down and pick up the bag. The weight of blood-irons inside is like a blow to the stomach. The bag drops from my hand, spilling a glittering month-coin onto my thin coverlet, and around me, women turn to stare, their purposefully averted gazes now drawn by the flash of gold.