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Sometimes I fell under the hard gaze of the lord regent, though, especially if he caught his son playing with me. He did not approve of me, and he would periodically remind me of my place in the order of things. To clarify, he believed my place was somewhere alongside the scullery maid, not throwing darts with Stig.

The king and queen were not around the day I started to seriously consider my future, however. That day’s hard truth came from an unexpected source, amid a child’s game.

We had finished in the schoolroom and had a small amount of time to ourselves before lunch. The princesses were being unruly, and I was little better as we played a lively game of shadow tag, running up and down corridors and through bedchambers with shrill shrieks and stomping feet.

At some point I had stopped breathlessly in the king and queen’s lavish sitting room that adjoined their bedchambers, pulling up short on the lush rug to admire the wedding portrait of the queen, so bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked in her bridal finery.

I studied her likeness on the canvas. Her chin was tilted at a coy angle, highlighting the slender column of her neck. She was young, of course, barely more than a girl, and the similarity to her pretty daughters was strong. I self-consciously twisted a strand of my red hair around my finger, acutely aware of how little I resembled them.

A gauzy veil flowed past her slight shoulders, a glittering gold and ruby circlet holding it in place and stretching across her smooth forehead. Her frame was delicate, almost birdlike. Unlike now—with curves aplenty, she was a formidable presence.

Feena stomped gleefully on my shadow as she came to a gasping halt beside me. My admiration of the portrait must have been visible in my gaze. She pointed to the dazzling jeweled circlet on hermother’s head. “Iwill wear that onmywedding day.” She twirled in a clumsy circle. “Youwon’t, though.”

She had tossed the words out so casually. Not cruelly and not to be unkind. That wasn’t Feena. Feena held my hand almost everywhere we went. Any time she did something she was proud of she would squeal my name first, eager to show off her accomplishment to me.

And yet I’d felt her words like the stinging prick of a knife, a sharp blade sinking into my tender heart.

Youwon’t, though.

“I... won’t,” I’d agreed, trying to sound as though I’d known that. As though it were obvious to me, too... even though no one had told me that directly. Even if I had never thought about the notion of marriage before. Suddenly, I was. Then I could think of little else.

I might have been the eldest by seven months, but around Feena—and even Sybilia to some degree—I had always felt behind. Less clever. Less knowledgeable. Less worldly. Justless, I supposed. A crystal with a little less sparkle. Gold with a little less shine.

Not so shocking since I was...less.

Lessthan them in the way that counted the most. I needed only to ask anyone for confirmation of that fact. I could recognize this with no self-loathing or ill will. It was simply the natural order of things. My entire existence revolved around this fact.

Feena had bobbed her head. “It’s been passed down through the women in my family for generations. Those rubies were claimed from a dragon’s hoard way back when they still filled the skies. I’ll wear it first at my wedding. Then Sybilia will. And then Alise.”

But not me.

Never me.

Treating me as a royal princess went only so far. It did not extend to a future in which I would marry in the grand tradition of a Penterran princess. Feena had only been informing me of what everyone else knew. I understood that then. I accepted it—with help from Stig.

He had consoled me, introducing me to all the whipping boys and girls captured on canvas in the gallery. He’d reassured me, persuading me that I would have a purpose. It wouldn’t be a marriage formed to secure an important alliance. That fate belonged to my sisters. But my fate would besomething.

And yet here I was on the eve of my wedding. Against all odds. Against Stig’s reassuring words, against everything I had been led to believe, I would be married to secure an important alliance, after all. I guess he had been wrong.

I couldn’t fall asleep for thinking about it.

I would be married on the morrow. To a stranger. To a barbaric border lord with no gentle manners, more accustomed to killing than to life at court. Was there even court life to be had where he lived? Any civilization at all among these coarse and vulgar brutes who wore their bloodstained garments into the royal palace?

The hour was late and growing later with every slow, crawling tick of the clock on my bedside table. The revelry had come to an end. The air hummed with silence. By now everyone had quit the Great Hall and found their beds at last.

The lord regent’s voice repeated over and over in my head.

We are giving him... you.

The world had gone hazy at those words. Giving me... to him. As though I were an object. Not a person.

My throat constricted. As though they were serving me up like roasted pheasant at Eldr feast.

When I had recovered the power of speech, I’d made a mild protest. At first. But it was not in me to disobey. All my life, for twenty-one years, I had served the throne of Penterra, sacrificing myself for my sisters, for my country. It was the only thing I had ever known. I was good at it. This would be a continuation of those duties. The only person I knew how to be.

My door eased open with the softest groan of its hinges, but in the silence the sound was jarring. A bedchamber door opening in the middle of the night might set off alarm bells for some, but notwhen you had three sisters fond of barging into your room at all hours without knocking or even calling out.

Many a morning I had found myself with one or more of them curled up in bed beside me, arms and legs tangled with mine—especially following a punishment for one of their transgressions. They always felt terrible and guilty and had to reassure themselves that I was not permanently maimed by spending the night cuddled up next to me.