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“Breena left House Thanos as part of a marriage contract,” Ivain explained. “When she joined House Arendryl, she became Breena Venwraith.”

The world dulled, sound bleeding out of it like color from a painting. Even her own heartbeat felt far away.

Because that name—oh, Shards, Taly knew that name.

Breena Venwraith, the shadow mage who used illegal bloodcraft magic in an official Council-sponsored tournament and then managed to leverage that otherwise career-ending blunder into a crown.

She forfeited the win, of course, was never prosecuted—the noble families generally dealt with these sorts of things internally. Hers disowned her.

Except then, in a twist no one saw coming, the Crystal Guard, so impressed by her performance at the tournament and herget-it-done-no-matter-the-costattitude, recruited her to guard one of their more “difficult” assignments.

And that’s how she met and fell in love with the High Lord of Water in the true story that would go on to inspire a best-selling romance, three stage adaptations, a vidreel classic still passed around dorms and parlor halls alike, and an entire library’s worth of spinoffs.

Taly laughed weakly. This was a joke. She’d watchedTheHigh Lord Takes a Mateone too many times, and now they were pranking her, obviously. Except nobody else was laughing…

“The High Lord of Water is my father.” It felt truly absurd to say, but nobody corrected her.

“This is a lot to take in,” Ivain said.

“And no matter which name you eventually choose, we’ll support you.” Sarina gave her an encouraging smile.

“Name?” Taly asked. “Oh… right.”

Because while the High Lord of Water did have a daughter, her name wasn’t Taly. It was Corinna. She knew that because she was also in the vid—at the end in an epilogue that was tacked on roughly 21 years ago when the two lovers were tragically torn apart. Some creative license had to be taken since no one knew what really happened, but the story now ended with a tired but hopeful Breena giving birth to a baby girl before the glamera faded to black. They didn’t want to ruin the story, after all. Betterto tie up tragic loose ends in sterile white text flashing across the screen as the audience filed out of the theatre.

Taly tried to find some connection to that name, a thread that might lead her back to a memory, but there was nothing. Only the vague sense that the world was slipping out from underneath her, like a wave drawing out to sea.

Maybe she wasn’t getting enough aether?

She took a breath off the airbalm to see.

When that did nothing to stop the pieces of everything she had ever known from crumbling at her feet, she focused on something else—on one of the few pieces of the story she could grasp as it tumbled by, equally unbelievable but for some reason easier to digest.

Taly buried her face in her hands and groaned, “Oh, Shards… I’m the Lost Rose of Arendryl, aren’t I?”

“I…” Ivain hesitated. “I suppose you are.”

Everyone loved a good mystery. Even better, they loved a scandal involving the nobility. Atlas Venwraith had one child, a girl who died during her Attunement Ceremony in some sort of freak accident, the details of which had never been released to the public. The Dawn Court had tried to keep the matter quiet, out of respect for the grieving family. But thanks to the connected suicide of a royal, a botched investigation, as well as the conspicuous lack of a funeral for both mother and child, Corinna Venwraith still lived on in the minds of countless conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Taly had heard all the major theories surrounding the disappearance of Corinna Venwraith, the Lost Rose of Arendryl. Was she alive? Was she dead? Was it an accident, or was it murder?

Or perhaps—and this had always been Taly’s favorite theory—the High Lord of Water’s only child, when tested, had been so depressingly lacking in magical power that her mother, in hershame, had taken her own life, leaving Atlas to then cover the scandal by sending the girl off to a convent in the Splintered Kingdom. She lived there to this day, chanting benedictions and tending vegetable gardens.

Of course, none of them had gotten it quite right. Because, as it turned out, Corinna Venwraith was alive and well, kicking around Tempris as a secret time mage.

Taly’s head swam. She folded in on herself, forehead to knees, praying for the world to make sense again.

“Skye is going to have a field day with this, isn’t he?” she grumbled.

“Well,” Sarina said, “you did make him watch all those docudramas. Come to think of it, you’ll probably end up in the docudrama one day yourself.”

Taly let out a thin, high-pitched whine that sounded almost exactly like a teakettle.

Sarina ran a comforting hand down her back. “I think she’s taking it rather well,” she said to Ivain.

“I think she looks like she’s about to pass out.”

“Little one, when air goes out, you’re supposed to bring more in.”