And then Irina began to laugh.
The princess shivered deep within as the guards closest to the queen fell back, clutching their faces while their skin peeled away from their bones and their blood bubbled like soup left too long on the fire.
“Take your brother and run!” the king shouted as he put the prince’s hand in hers. “Protect him.”
The princess snatched her brother’s hand and pulled him toward a small doorway that led to the servants’ hall.
Irina scooped up the prince’s pet snake and with a whisper turned him into an enormous black viper. The snake slithered across the bloodstained marble and sank his fangs into the king.
“No!” The princess turned back for her father, but Irina raised her arms above her head and slammed her palms into the wall behind her.
Instantly, the stone shuddered and twisted. The princess screamed as the floor buckled, heaving upward and throwing her against a pillar that was quickly disintegrating into dust. All around her, the walls were crumbling, the floor was cracking, and the snake was attacking anyone still left alive.
The princess locked eyes with the queen, a lake of blood and horror between them, and Irina smiled as the wall behind the princess exploded outward to crush the girl into dust.
Chunks of stone crashed around the princess, leaving her a small circle of space full of acrid dust. She was trapped, the debris above her creaking and sliding as the floor shuddered. She was going to die, and there would be no one left to protect her brother from the monster who’d taken Ravenspire’s throne.
A large dark hand reached through a space in the debris, wrapped around the princess’s wrist, and pulled her through the narrow opening between the pile of rubble and the servants’ hall. Gabril, the head of her father’s palace guard, crouched before her, his brown eyes steady on hers, his voice calm.
“Can you run?” he asked as he scooped the prince onto his shoulders.
The princess didn’t want to run. She wanted to see her father. She wanted to stay in her home.
She wanted to fight.
But though the queen had said that the princess was the daughter she’d never had, Irina had kept the knowledge of how to use magic as a weapon for herself alone.
And so, as the walls caved in behind them, the princess put her hand in Gabril’s, told her brother everything would be all right, and ran.
NINE YEARS LATER
ONE
“WERE YOU SEEN?” Gabril asked, his dark skin gilded with the last rays of the setting sun as he motioned Lorelai and Leo into the barn. The former guardsman had gray sprinkled throughout his short black hair now, and tiny lines were etched around his eyes. He still carried himself like a soldier, but the cost of trying to keep the queen from discovering that the prince and princess were still alive showed in the slight stoop of his shoulders and the worry that filled his eyes when he thought no one was looking.
“No.” Lorelai Diederich, crown princess of Ravenspire and fugitive at large, hurried into the dim interior. The barn was tucked away at the edges of an abandoned farm just outside the mountain village of Felsigen and was so dilapidated, a good stiff wind might flatten it.
“You’re sure?” Gabril’s voice was urgent as he stepped past the princess to help her brother Leo pull a heavily loaded hay cart into the barn.
“Please. You’re talking about the Royal Rogues. Nobody sees us unless we want to be seen.” Leo gave the hay cart one last push inside and then pulled the door shut. He glanced down at his filthy trousers and heaved a sigh. “Although we really should rethink these disguises.”
“I told you, we aren’t calling ourselves the Royal Rogues. And our disguises are fine.” Lorelai’s gloved fingers fumbled with the buttons of her ragged coat.
“If by fine you mean hideous, then, yes, they are.” Leo rubbed at the dirt he’d smudged on his face earlier in the afternoon—part of his attempt to look like an unkempt farm boy in case anyone caught sight of him waiting beside the road that led from Felsigen to the queen’s northeast garrison. “And I have several other excellent suggestions for names. The Plucky Pair. The Royal Robbers, though personally I think that makes us sound too much like criminals—”
“We are criminals.” Lorelai folded up her coat and laid it beside her travel pack. “At least in the eyes of the queen.”