Chapter 1 The Last Night of the First Life

The cold was in my feet and it wasn't going away.

I kicked at the blankets. Kicked again. My feet were right there, I could see the shape of them, but whatever signal I was sending down was not arriving. I lay back and stared up at the ceiling and opened my mouth and the sound that came out was nothing. A scrape. Less than a whisper. I tried again. Same thing.

The fire across the room was still going. Logs still lit, light still jumping on the stone. Normal fire doing normal fire things like my body wasn't refusing to work six feet away from it.

My hands were on the coverlet.

I know this because I could see them. That's the only reason I know. I couldn't feel them.

The door opened.

Lyris didn't run. She never ran anywhere, my sister, not because she was calm but because she had always moved like wherever she was going was already hers. She crossed the room in her sleeping robe, hair loose, no candle, and came to the foot of the bed. Stood there. Looked at me.

The way she looked at me.

"Sera." Real quiet. "How do you feel."

Not a question. The way you say something when you already know the answer and you're just deciding whether to pretend you don't.

I tried to say something back. She watched me try.

"I know." She got the chair from beside the window. Dragged it over, sat down, folded her hands together in her lap. Completely comfortable. Like this was just a late conversation, like we were two sisters who couldn't sleep. "Five years. I want you to understand I was careful. Fae bodies reject it if you move fast. Yours especially you're strong. Took longer than I planned."

Ashbloom. The word just sitting there between us. I had never heard it before.

"The reason you never conceived." She said it so level. "That wasn't a side effect. I asked for it. Specifically. Cael needed the five-year petition to be available. The Council needed to already have doubts about your reign." Short pause. "It made the whole thing cleaner."

I was looking at her face and trying to find something. The girl who grabbed my hand outside our mother's room when she was eight years old. The face that went to pieces at the burial and had to be held up by two of the maids. This was the same face. Exact same face. I kept waiting for it to be different and it was not different at all.

"Why." One word. It was all I had.

She looked at me like the question had stopped being interesting to her a long time ago. "Because this was never supposed to be yours."

The door opened again.

Cael.

He was dressed. That's what hit me first. Full jacket, buttoned, like he had been somewhere in the palace sitting and waiting on a particular hour. He came and stood beside Lyris's chair and looked at me in the bed and did not say anything.

I looked back.

Fourteen years of that face. Every version of it the one he wore in Council when he was choosing his words, the one at dinner when something was funny, the one from the morning of my ascension when he had touched my face with both hands and said he had been waiting his whole life for this. I had believed it. I had stored it. I had taken it out and looked at it on hard nights as evidence of something real.

The version he was wearing right now I had never seen before. Patient. Flat. A man standing in a finished room.

"She knows," Lyris said to him.

"Was that necessary."

"I didn't want her to die thinking it was just bad luck. That felt—" she considered it  "wrong."

He exhaled. Went to the window. Put his back to the room.

Fourteen years. Trade deals I killed because he had concerns. Three houses I turned away when they told me to reconsider. My own weight used over and over to keep him exactly where he was standing, at my window, watching the dark city, while my sister sat in a chair and timed it.

I tried to move my arm. Nothing came back.

Lyris watched my face. Cael didn't turn around. The fire kept doing what it was doing, completely unaware.

The next breath I reached for wasn't there.

Nothing dramatic. No final clear thought. Just the window with his shape against it and then nothing at all.

The screaming was already happening when I woke up.

My hands flew up and hit something, pillow, and I shoved backward and my back hit the headboard and I sat there with my knees up and my chest going like I'd been underwater.

The room came at me in pieces. Hearth, no fire yet. Window going grey, not dawn yet. The dressing mirror on the far wall.

My hands were in front of my face. I was looking at them.

Both of them. Up. Moving.

I sat with that. Just sat there breathing and staring at my own hands because I needed that before I could do anything else.

The mirror showed me a face I didn't recognise for about a minute and then I did. Twenty-three. Gold dust on the cheekbones from the Midsun celebration, which I had been at yesterday, which I remembered, which meant today was the morning after and the Naming ceremony was tomorrow and Cael was somewhere in this palace right now sleeping.

Sleeping. Like a person with nothing wrong.

I got off the bed.

Legs worked. Floor held. I stood in the middle of the room in the grey predawn and let all of it come back, not just the dying, all of it five years laid out like something someone built very carefully over a long time. The pregnancies that never started because I'd been eating poison since before I was crowned.

The heaviness in my legs in year four, the physician who kept saying rest. Lyris appearing at exactly the right moments with exactly the right words and me thinking that was just what she was, what we were, two sisters who knew each other's worst hours.

I stood there and felt stupid about it. Then I stopped feeling stupid about it because there was no time for that.

Window.

The courtyard below was dark still, torches going, two guards on the perimeter walk, a groom crossing toward the stables with a lamp. Far side of the courtyard the barracks sat quiet except one window. Northeastern corner. Third floor. Light on.

Ryn Ashveil.

I knew enough about him. Half-blood, no house behind him, thirty years old and wore every one of them in a court that stopped aging at twenty-five. His record from the western campaign was the kind of record that should have meant something and the Council had filed it and moved on and he had let them and gone back to work.

Lyris had never once looked at him. No reason to. He had no political weight, no alliances, nothing she needed to move out of the way.

That was the only cover he was going to have tomorrow. The only reason he'd survive what I was about to do to his life.

The lamp across the courtyard went out.

He was done, whatever he was working on before dawn. Had no idea. Zero idea. By this time tomorrow his name was going to be in every conversation in the city.

I sat back on the edge of the bed and went through it all. Laws, debts, soft votes, which houses could be moved and which ones were Lyris's before I could even try.

The Prior Claim statute from the archive I knew where it was, I'd seen it in year three of the first life and kept walking and I was not going to keep walking this time. Lady Maren, what she actually wanted versus what she said she wanted. The Warden of the Thornfold who owed Ryn something nobody talked about.

I went through it until the window went from dark grey to pale.

There was something else I kept coming back to. Not anything from the plan. A face. Someone I'd always trusted, attached to a feeling I couldn't place exactly like a sound that was almost right but wasn't, one note wrong in a thing I'd heard a hundred times, and everybody around me was nodding along.

I didn't have anywhere to put it yet so I left it there.

Light through the window went yellow and thin. I got up. Went to the dressing table and sat down and looked at myself in the mirror for a while the face they hadn't gotten to yet, the one with tomorrow still in it.

Then I picked up the comb and started working through my hair and thought about a general who didn't know I existed as anything real and what I was going to say to him before the day got away from me.

The face came back again while I was sitting there. Third time.

I knew it. I was certain I knew it.

I just couldn't work out yet what it knew about me.