Prologue

Seraphine
The Day of the Signing

The lily on my vanity had wilted overnight.

If I were superstitious, I would have considered that an omen and canceled all plans for the day. But I wasn’t, and I pushed the thought to the back of my mind by busying myself in the garden.

After pulling a few weeds, I cut a fresh lily and placed the white flower in the glass beside Jorge's portrait and dusted the frame. The painter had made him too handsome, leaving out the details that I had loved about him. The real Jorge had a chipped front tooth and a crooked nose. He had brought me white lilies every week until the day he died, and then I planted a garden full of them in his memory.

"We sign today," I told the portrait. "Try to look impressed."

This was everything he had wanted. Peace with the kingdom we had been fighting generations with over a cause long forgotten. Some documents said land, others said soured family lines. But it was finally ending today, and I knew Jorge would have celebrated wholeheartedly.

I dressed in grey, the most formal dress I had in my wardrobe. My hands took longer with the clasps than they used to. In the mirror, a woman with lines around her eyes and mouth fastened my mother's crown into her hair. It took me some time to accept the woman reflecting back at me, but now I took comfort in the strength I had to get here. I had buried a husband twelve years gone, raised our daughter alone. All while I held a burning border through every one of those twelve winters, and today was the mark of a new beginning.

The corridors were full of skulls, painted faces and yellowing bone. I had doubled the Skeleton Guard for the delegation's stay, I told the envoy it was out of courtesy. We both understood the other reason. They stood at intervals down the residential wing, still in the way only the dead could be, a soft glow low behind their sockets.

They brought me a sense of comfort being amongst them that outsiders struggled to comprehend. I had grown up among them. Most children of Stygia had a Guard they preferred, and mine had been a tall one posted by the library who let me hide behind him from my tutors and never once gave me up.

The Ravenwood envoy had asked, in the gentlest possible diplomatic language, that the bone Guards stand outside the signing hall rather than within it, the delegation found them difficult to negotiate beneath. I had agreed without argument. Hundreds of years of war, and if peace cost me nothing more than the placement of my soldiers, I would pay it twice.

Even so, I had watched the youngest of their delegates, a sleek man with rings on every finger, take the long way around the entire upper gallery that morning rather than pass within ten feet of the bone Guard stationed at its mouth. He'd kept his eyes on the floor the whole detour and dabbed his lips with a cloth after, as though the dead were something you could catch.

The Skeleton Guard outside Lyra's apartments inclined his skull as I passed, lower than protocol asked, low enough that the amber light in his sockets disappeared for a moment entirely. He was Lyra's personal Guard. He had stood that post since she was small, and there was a quality to his stillness that morning I might have called grief if the dead had any use for it.

"Look after her today," I said. "She'll be impossible once this treaty's signed. I intend to make her plan a wedding."

The skull lifted and the amber glow came back, very bright. “Yes, Your Majesty,” his voice rumbled.

Lyra herself was still asleep, or pretending to be, there was no light beneath her door. Kael had come to me the night before, formal as he had grown to be over the past five years, and asked for her. I told him to ask me again after the treaty was signed. It wasn’t because I thought he wasn’t good enough for my daughter, he was. I had listened to the way Lyra had spoken about him since she was a teenager. The way he looked at her reminded me of Jorge, and I wanted her to have the same kind of love as I had.

But a month ago she had come to my chambers before dawn, unable to sleep, and told me there was someone else. She admitted feeling guilty for having other feelings and I knew she also still loved Kael, but it had grown different. I had told her what Jorge told me once that feelings are not choices, but actions are.

But three weeks ago, I watched a dried flower slip from between the pages of a book my daughter was carrying and saw her catch it against her skirts. A purple calla lily, a color I did not grow within my gardens. She tucked it away and talked brightly about something else, and I had let her, because I was exhausted from a day of political talk.

Then, lying awake in my bed, I had realized that the flowers were not from Kael. The man was courting her with roses. He had asked my permission to take a few from my gardens.

Lyra also was not one to keep things that didn’t hold a sentimental value, nor was she one to press flowers. I had seen the roses and calla lilies in her room after that night, and wilted roses in the trash on occasion.

But not the lilies.

I could not give my blessings to Kael without speaking to my daughter first about where her head was.

Tonight, I had decided, somewhere in the small hours. Tonight, after the signing, after the wine, I will sit my daughter down and ask her about the flowers. I will tell her what her father once told me, the truth will hurt less than the lie. Always. And then I will help her carry whatever she chooses.

And because queens did not get to trust their tomorrows, I had written it all down at first light and sealed it. I left it with Vivian, who playfully rolled her eyes at me and reassured me all was going to go well.

※

The signing hall faced the harbor, and the morning had come up clean off the water, gulls working the tide line, the light off the sea lying in long grey panels across the marble. Weeks of negotiation had worn grooves into every face at that table, mine included.

The treaty ran to forty pages. Fishing rights in the strait. The border forts emptied by spring. The prisoners of both kingdoms home by midsummer. My counselors had bled over every clause and so had theirs, and that, Jorge would have said, was how you knew it was a fair one, everyone limping equally.

Prince Riven of Ravenwood stood when I entered, and the delegation rose with him.

He was younger than I expected, and handsomer. He bowed politely. The last three days of the negotiations he had been present. He said the correct things, conceded the correct points. But his manner had a flatness to it, a quality of recitation that I had put down to a young man performing in front of his father's men.

He had his father's eyes, that flat pale blue with no emotion to them. I reminded myself that a man may have cold eyes but still want peace.

The one called Phoenix Loest stood at the prince's shoulder, where he had stood quietly for three days, watching the room. I had stopped noticing him by the second morning, which I suppose was the point of him.

We signed.

It was a strange thing how small the actual moment was. Forty pages, hundreds of years of turmoil, and at the bottom of it we wrote our names. The wax was pressed, and it was over. My counselors were embracing each other before the seal cooled. Old Harwick was weeping into his beard and not bothering to hide it.

The wine came around. A good vintage Stygian red that I had been saving for such an occasion.

I raised my glass to the room and announced, "To peace! May it outlive everyone in this room."

The room filled with cheers and we all drank. The prince took a long sip and set his cup down. He came around the table toward me, smiling for the first time in three days. It was a relief to see he had finally thawed and there was a real emotion on his face. He put his hand out to clasp mine and I reached to take it.

“Prince—"

Heat rushed across my throat. I felt my eyes widen at the strange sensation sweeping through my body, something warm and wet soaking into the collar of my dress. The prince took a step back, his smile widening into a grin revealing perfect white teeth.

We signed, I thought. We signed. The ink isn't even dry.

The marble floor came rushing up to me. Somewhere, very far away, the room was beginning to scream, a chair tipped over, and steel was coming out of scabbards. It all sounded muffled, as though I was being pulled underwater. My vision darkened around the edges and I could taste copper. The boy's flat blue eyes looked down at me as he lifted his sword.

Lyra.

My fingers found my forehead. The prayer to Eilifir was seven words long.

I got through four.