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T he soldiers come for me as I am scribing Histories of the Peninsula by lamplight.

The mouser cat, Numen, is snoring on my feet.

She spent an edifying hour chasing fireflies before succumbing to sleep, but hours have passed since then, and the night’s insects are now a rich froth on the lamp, unhindered by her curious paws.

The light is so dimmed by gossamer wings that I ruin my copy of Chapter Three, The Rise of Kings long before the soldiers thunder up the stone steps, rattle my door, throw it open and fling themselves to their knees around my desk.

Still, I blame them for the damage, my voice trembling, as Numen launches herself across the room and claws her way into her preferred hiding spot on top of my wardrobe.

“This is a hermitage,” I say shakily. “How dare you disturb this sanctum – my manuscript is ruined – I – I cannot fix it – the azure ink alone cost me five gold talons—”

“Mistress Silver,” the first soldier says, as I flounder for words. “A thousand apologies. But it is your time, ma’am. The old king has been dead six moons, and the wars of succession are done. You’ve been chosen.”

I push my spectacles up my nose, and inhale deeply. My lungs, and my head, are suddenly quite empty.

“There’s been some mistake,” I reply, when I find my voice again.

“There are twelve other potential brides.” And any new king, approaching their coronation, would pick from those twelve before choosing me.

I do not claim this out of any desire to denigrate myself.

I simply know my worth. I have carefully cultivated my value, after all.

“The new king chose you, Mistress Silver,” the soldier says. “The ceremony of faces was held – your portrait was presented – and when I bowed before the king, I was given your image and tasked to seek you out.”

The first soldier – the commander of this group, I realise now – removes a miniature from his stiff jacket to confirm his claim.

In the hazy light I peer at a palm-sized copy of an oil painting of myself.

I remember sitting for the original; it was painted eleven years ago when I was still only a girl of eighteen, and the artist did me the great disservice of rendering my likeness with painstaking accuracy.

There on the miniature before me is my own face, pinched and thin, my black hair scraped severely back, my Tyrene-marked orange eyes narrowed behind gold-wired frames.

There is my unsmiling mouth, my stiff shoulders, my grey gown embellished with crescents of green thread.

I embroidered the gown myself – even in miniature, my lack of skill with a needle is glaring.

I take the painting from him, and it is a miracle I do not drop it. My hands are quite numb with shock. I cannot imagine any new king, still steaming with blood from the battlefield, looking at my sallow and unlovely face and thinking, Ah yes, this is the bride for me .

The soldier has been speaking, but I have not been listening. I force myself to pay attention.

“…proxy marriage will be carried out here before dawn, and then we will accompany you back to Anamora.”

“A proxy marriage,” I repeat.

“Contractual and symbolic,” the soldier says, voice placating. “A priest has come from Anamora to stand in the king’s stead. You must understand, the king cannot risk travelling with the throne so freshly blooded.”

The sting of being lectured about kingly marriage practices – me! Lectured! On topics I am clearly, necessarily expert in! – returns my good sense.

“I understand,” I say. “Take me to the priest.”

***

How is a crown born? How does a nation decide upon its rulers?

I have lived and studied long enough in the hermitage in Braithen to know that every land has its tales of how it came to be, and its reason for crowning and worshipping the mortals they raise above the rest. But in all the fourteen entwined regions of the Helvell Peninsula, they say a ruler is made first by their well-blooded sword, and second by their marriage to one of magic’s heirs.

This is how to gain a throne: when the previous king dies, an ambitious warrior must slay all other would-be kings, those likely lords who think a crown would suit them well. But then a king must lay down their sword, and take a spouse from Tyrene’s bloodline to bed.

Magic’s wiliness. Might’s steel. These are the words engraved into the king’s crown, and into the spouse’s wedding torc. No king can rule without their witch.

And I, it seems, am to be the witch of our new Anamoren ruler.

There are many descendants of Tyrene – she was a lusty thing, and fecund with it – but precious few of us are born with both her mark and her magic.

Thousands of years have thinned the blood to the faintest spark of holiness, rarely ignited.

I showed my blood, as we all do, in my eyes first: rust-coloured, lambent as a cat’s.

The magic came later, when I reached adulthood, long after I joined Anamora’s grand monastery at age five.

The blood shows young in us all, but not every heir of the First Witch is discovered in a timely manner.

I was there when the last heir joined us.

I was seventeen years old, and nigh on nocturnal.

It was past midnight when the gates of the grand monastery where I was raised clanged open, and a monk strode in with a girl wrapped in her arms. The girl was bleeding.

There was a tumult of noise in the courtyard.

I, seated on a window ledge with a book in my lap and a candle at my hip, hurriedly snuffed out the flame and watched the monks converge on her, lanterns in hand.

When the lanterns were dimmed once more, and the courtyard was empty, I crept down to the sickroom. I could hear the monks singing. Prayers would keep them busy.

The girl was lying alone on a pallet. She was bone-thin, with collarbones like knives, and hollows for cheeks.

Her hair was ragged, a short auburn, her skin brown, and her eyes very much like mine – a flame-bright umber, blazing in her gaunt face.

Someone had bandaged her arms and left a tonic by her bed.

She was entirely alone. The monks were at pre-dawn prayers, and they would not return until sunrise began.

“My name is Lark,” she said, and grinned. Her teeth were limned in blood. She wanted to scare me, I think; her grin certainly faltered when I simply poured her a glass of thinned ale, and placed it neatly on her bedside.

“Drink,” I said. “You’ll feel better. The blood must taste vile.”

“It isn’t my blood,” she said. “I bit off some bastard’s ear.”

“Then you’ll feel much better when you can’t taste any more ear blood, won’t you?”

She gave me a long look, and then she drank, deeply and violently, liquid pouring down her throat and her tunic. She placed the empty cup on her bedside with a clang.

“It’s polite to tell me your name, when I tell you mine,” she said. There was something dangerous in her voice and the curl of her mouth. “Do you think I’m not deserving of politeness, little monk?”

“My name is Silver,” I said. “I am not a monk. Like you, I’m a child of Tyrene.”

“Is that what I am?” When I nodded, she gave an ugly laugh. “All these years, I’ve been clawing to survive, and all I had to do was come here and tell these sheep I have witch blood?”

“They should have brought you here when you were small,” I replied. “It’s their fault you suffered. I’d be angry with them, too.”

Lark’s eyes narrowed. She gave me a considering, piercing look.

“Do you want to know how I got hurt?” Lark asked.

“No.”

“Oh, you’re a terrible liar.” Lark sounded delighted. “You’d be eaten alive in the city. There’d be babies gnawing on your bones.”

“I don’t care for hyperbole,” I said stiffly – I was then, as I have always been – and did not know what to do when Lark laughed.

“How’s this then? The city’s a hole,” said Lark.

“Ugly, full of shit and people who’ll slit a throat for no more than a copper talon.

I tried to steal a talon or three, and the bloke who I stole from wasn’t well pleased with me.

He tried to throw me into the Gel, but I stabbed him in the throat and ran to the monastery gates hoping someone would save me.

” I shuddered. The Gel was the river that ran by our monastery, and it was a beast of rocks and churning waters.

“He’s dead now. What do you think of that?

Do you think I’m brave?” she asked. “Or do you think I’m a monster? ”

“Monsters aren’t real,” I said to her. “There are just people who choose chaos or order, compassion or destruction, for their own ends.”

“How wise you are!” Lark exclaimed. I was not sure if she was mocking me, and that made me bristle.

“I am not wise,” I said. I could not stand incorrectness. “I’m quoting Serene’s Ethics .”

“Ooh, you read .” She sounded delighted. She reached forward, adder-swift, and grasped me. “We are either going to be friends or great enemies, Silver,” she said solemnly, her hand over my own. I looked down at our clasped hands – her bruised knuckles, my ink-blemished skin.

I did not know what to do with such a dramatic pronouncement. “We may be neither,” I said.

“We may,” said Lark. “But I’m rarely wrong. You’ll see.”

In the end, she was right, but so was I. At first, Lark was my dearest friend. And then she became something else entirely. I am not a poetic woman, but she was like a bard’s song to me. I believed we would live and die together.

But she has been gone for ten years now. And I have been in Braithen ever since.

***