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Prologue

I had not disturbedthe graves on purpose.

Truthfully, I’d forgotten they were even there. I rarely visited this corner of the palace grounds, after all. No one did. The shadows cast by the walls around me were long, the pebbled paths beneath my sandaled feet overtaken with weeds and the rotting corpses of long-dead foliage. Most of the headstones were lost to the ravages of time, whatever secrets they held unreadable and unremarkable to the average eye.

At any rate, the graves marked by those headstones had certainly not been mytargets.

My aim had been higher. Focused on the withered flowers clinging to the twisting tree branches that formed a canopy over this tucked-away corner of my home. I felt a sickness in those shriveled blooms whenever I stared at them; their fading life force moved as a tingling sensation along my arms, raising little bumps across my skin.

Death took many different forms to me. I was still learning what forms I could detect, what I could decipher, what I could control…

And what I was better off leaving alone.

But the dying flowers, I’d decided, would be excellent practice targets. A good chance to exercise my powers, which had been growing increasingly restless with all the extra attention being paid to me over the past week.

It should have been an easy task, extracting the decaying energy from them and temporarily bringing them back to something that mimicked the brightness of life. It was a trick I’d managed with relative ease in the past.

Yet, for all my familiarity with this trick, I’d failed.

So there I stood, still surrounded by withered blooms—and now by cracked gravesites, too. Little bits of white danced in the air above the broken ground, drifting and sparkling like snowflakes—the faint auras of the long-deceased. When those cold flakes brushed my skin, the tingling in my arms became more like the sharp prodding of needles...

More like a warning.

The air smelled of freshly turned soil, with a rotten, musty undercurrent. The night seemed eerily quiet, save for the occasional groan of the slow, cold wind.

But at least there were no accidentalbodiesrising up, this time.

My mother—the queen—still would not be pleased at the messy disturbance I’d caused.

My father, meanwhile, would find it all wonderfully amusing; I could already imagine his laughter, his eyes dancing as he gently teased me about my wayward magic. Thinking of his laugh gave me courage enough to shake off the needling sensation in my skin and keep going in spite of my mistakes.

Everything is fixable, My Star.You just have to keep trying.

The sound of plodding footfalls made me jump.

I rolled the tension from my shoulders as Phantom—the silky-haired puppy my father had given me a year prior—clambered into view. He took one look at the ghostly specksof energy flitting through the air and clumsily settled onto his haunches with his head cocked in curiosity.

A trio of blackbirds alighted on the nearby wall as well, their feathers glistening like oil in the pale blue moonlight.

I ignored my audience and focused on soothing the bits of lingering energy in the air, guiding each one back into the broken ground with precise movements of my fingers. It helped to imagine the bits attached to my fingertips, I’d learned over the years—to tether myself to such energy by way of invisible chains.

Once the air was clear again, I took a fallen branch covered in blooms, closed my eyes, and tried to refocus on the precise feel of the flowers’ decay.

Nothing had changed in those flowers when I opened my eyes—but the cracks in the dirt had widened in several places. The space again grew hazy, thick with my misguided magic and the uneasy, partially-roused energies of the dead.

I cursed under my breath.

Why couldn’t I do this?

Phantom yipped his disapproval. His keen blue eyes had a human-like awareness to them, I’d always thought, putting his judgmental looks on par with my mother’s.

“No one asked your opinion, now did they?” I muttered, hiking up my skirts and trudging toward the disturbed ground. I dropped down before the first grave and started to smooth it with my bare hands, raking my fingers through the cold soil to break up the uneven clumps, paying little mind to the grime collecting beneath my freshly painted nails.

Phantom panted and whined loudly behind me. I shot him a disagreeable look, but he didn’t seem bothered by it; I would have sworn the damned dog only smiled in response.

Secretly, however, I was glad he was here, judgment and all. He was fast becoming my constant companion. The only beingin the court—aside from my father—who didn’t flinch when they saw me coming.

I crawled from one grave to the next, putting the dirt back in order and pulling a few weeds along the way. The shimmering hem of my silver dress was soon streaked with grass stains and growing heavy from the clinging, damp earth, but I persevered nonetheless.