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My thoughts were a tide quickly sweeping over me. Mymother had rarely spoken of my father. She had never spoken of the king. She avoided talk of Le Château.... All these years, could she have done so out ofshame? Had she left behind an old life, an old name, and all memories of the husband she had betrayed?

The faces around me swirled, morphing in my tear-spotted vision, looking more like twisted masks than faces at all. Emilia said something I couldn’t understand, and the courtiers around the table laughed—laughed at me. I thought of Shadows grasping at my throat, and the way their faces split, almost like a smile. How Mother had saved me in the garden. Mother. Mother. Mother, who I knew, who I loved, who had been alie?

I left behind the ballroom. I left behind the beauty and the dreams, staggering about in the dark hallways until Lope finally found me. She rescued me, yet again, as I clung to her, sobbing.

8

Lope

I loved her in the darkness,

When the warmth of her body

And the sweet push and pull of her breath

Was the entirety of my world.

As I lay in the daybed, I counted Ofelia’s breaths. She had stopped crying hours ago and had finally fallen asleep. Each breath I counted was supposed to assure me that she was well. That she was alive. It was supposed to lull me into sleeping, too.

But when I closed my eyes, the world grew dark, and I was no longer alert. And she’d no longer be safe.

I remembered being a child, arriving at the barracks at the edge of the manor. Those first few hours—Carlos, a year my senior, introduced himself and explained to me that I would be sleeping during the daylight hours from then on. I couldn’t fall asleep then, either.

“I cannot listen to you tossing and turning one more minute!” he had said with a dramatic sigh. And as sunlight had gleamed in a small beam through our shutters, he sat on the floor across from me and taught me to play chess.

Cradled in the warm embrace of the palace daybed, for a moment, I could still feel the smooth wood of the rook beneath my fingers. Hear the triumphant click as Carlos knocked down my king and then laughed at me.

“Another round,” I’d said.

And he’d said my name, my old name,Luisa, the name that didn’t suit me. “This is supposed to bore you to sleep.”

“I want to learn,” I had whispered, while the world was awake beyond our window.

His eyes, green like crisp apples, had twinkled at me. “You’re stubborn. You will make a good knight.”

What good knight allowed their mentor to die?

I clawed my way out of my memories and sat up in the bed, rubbing my eyes. My gaze fixed once more upon Ofelia, lying on her side in her bed, her hands tucked beneath her cheek.

She looked like a painting. Not like the ones here, in dark tones with ostentatious gold frames. She was softer, sweeter. Something painted not for the need of lavish decor, but because such beautyneededto exist.

I sat on the daybed, my breath held tight in my chest.

I failed Carlos. I cannot fail her.

My hands trembled. I had no more weapons. And at thiscourt, they did not fight with blades. They wielded stories, and the story of Ofelia’s mother had been like a dagger to her heart.

With such cruelty within these walls, I needed to be stronger, strong enough to protect Ofelia.

I needed the strength of the gods. Any god, any that would listen to my fervent prayer.

I crept toward the nightstand beside Ofelia’s large bed. Silently, I drew open the drawer and selected a single yellow candle, and then lit it with the flint from my tinderbox. I placed the burning candle in a brass candlestick before the vanity and frowned at the faint, white blur of my reflection in the dim light. A moment later, I threw my bedsheet over the mirror.

From my rucksack, I procured the journal Ofelia had given me, filling up fast. Poem after poem, verse after verse. All of the nonsense I could not keep trapped in my mind. By the flickering, golden light, I wrote down a few verses. They were all I could give.

You are attached to my heart,

If I am a tree, you are all of my roots,