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The woman patted my head, a clever sort of smile on her face. “Prince Kagesh. What is all this?”

He blanched as she circled him. “N-Nothing. Just games.”

“I see,” she said. “Well, it is so fortunate I have found you both. I am in dire need of additional hands for a task.”

Kage glanced at me, then back at the woman—I knew she was my mother. The way she winked, the way she smelled, it was her.

“I’m honored to help, Lady Ravenwood.”

My mother clapped her hands together. “Wonderful.”

Not more than an hour later, Kage frowned where we stood shoulder to shoulder, reaching our slender arms into a tube, dragging out putrid clumps of waste from the stables.

“Can’t have the water to the hogs backed up.” From the stoop ofthe palace, my mother stood beside another woman—hair like the sun, clad in a vibrant blue gown, with a crystal circlet around her head. She looked a great deal like the sleeping queen.

Together they snickered, as though they’d played the worlds grandest trick.

“This is your fault,” Kage grumbled, his voice cracking.

It was delightful to mock the prince over the change in his deepening voice, but today I could not even find the joy. “It is not, you stupid prince. If you’d just leave me alone.”

“Me?” His mouth dropped. “I was reading, minding my own damn thoughts, then you and Gwyn came in and started mocking my book. My father gave it to me, Ravenwood.”

“Well . . .” I struggled to find the rebuttal. “I’msorry. That was unkind.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Kage huffed and dropped another pile of debris at his side. “I shouldn’t have dumped ink on your boots, I suppose.”

For the first time, it seemed we did not know what insults to sling. Unsettling to us both and for the rest of the torturous chore, we worked in silence until shadows dragged my mind into another moment, drearier than before.

Kage, a little broader, a little older now, pressed his brow to one of the shelves near a newly placed heartstone box in the tomb, a tear on his cheek.

He didn’t see me approach until I was right behind him.

“Not today, Ravenwood,” he said in a broken rasp.

“My heart aches about Beth. I am sorry she is gone.” I rested a palm on his back, and whispered, “I won’t tell a soul if you wish to cry.”

The smoked shattered the tomb at his first rough sob.

Another moment, another memory. This time, I stood in a dusty gray tunic between my mother and a man with russet hair to his shoulders—my father. They were dressed in their fine clothes, beaming as I was summoned to a raised dais.

A line of seers and the king’s high-ranking Soturi towered above me.

“Adira of House Ravenwood,” one man boomed. Thick bear furdraped over his shoulders, and it was pinned with a golden eagle in flight. “Do you vow to honor the call of the Soturi?”

I dipped my chin, a prickle on my back, as though already anticipating the bite of pain that would come from earning my brand.

“Do you vow fealty to your kingdom, your people, and to only use the violence in your abilities for the defense of this land.”

“I do, Lord Bakkur.”

The king’s leading Soturi during the war. Somehow, I knew he’d fallen on a battlefield of his choosing.

Bakkur grinned and stepped aside. “Then rise, Soturi Ravenwood, and accept your charm from Soturi Wilder, meant to aid and strengthen you as you grow the goddess-blessed magic in your blood.”

I held my breath as Kage approached. When Cy whispered in my ear before studies broke for Harvesttide that the prince was to be the forger of my charm, my stomach tightened in a way I did not understand.

Kage held my stare. I frowned in return. I would cut off all his stupid hair if he commissioned something to taunt me.