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This was not the first time Ophele had erred in the estimation of her own value.

It made it all the more surreal that she could tell Lady Verr, I don’t want to see anyone else today and know that she would be obeyed. She arrived in the forecourt of the manor with just enough time to dismount, hand Brambles to Jaose, and walk into the house with some semblance of dignity, deaf to the hoofbeats thundering behind her.

She needed to think.

She didn’t want to think.

She couldn’t face anyone else right now, but once she was in her room with the door locked, she especially couldn’t face herself. How had she not seen it? All these years, the evidence had been right there, but the underlying premise was so fundamental, she had never thought to question it.

She knew her father didn’t care about her. Lady Hurrell had explained from earliest childhood that Ophele was a disgrace to him, a bastard, a blot. She brought him nothing but shame. But somehow, in some secret part of her heart, Ophele had thought that he would at least honor the bond of their divine blood. He had acknowledged her as his daughter. If he had wanted to, he could have just denied that she belonged to him at all.

Remin and his men were operating under the same assumption. It was an unquestioned fact that the blood of the House of Agnephus was sacrosanct. All of them thought that her heritage would protect her and serve as a shield for Remin’s heirs and a foundation for his House. A powerful deterrent to any would-be assassins. The Emperor must punish any threat to her ferociously, in defense of the sanctity of his own blood.

But there was a great deal of evidence to the contrary.

Ophele was standing in front of an empty fireplace, but in her mind, she was back at Aldeburke.

She could almost smell that place. Sharp soap. Azelma’s baking. The often-overwhelming scent of dried flowers, as if Lady Hurrell wished to remind everyone that the estate had no hothouse for fresh ones. Ophele had not lied to Sir Justenin, but she had not told him the whole truth, either. She remembered every moment of the ten long, lonely years after her mother’s death. And after her mother had died, Ophele could have chosen almost any week at random to provide powerful counterevidence to the proposition that there was anything sacred about her blood.

But there was one day that she would never forget.

Generally, Lord Hurrell had ignored her. He was not a big man, except maybe in the belly, but still large enough for Ophele to fear him, knowing he did not regard her with favor. But Lisabe had always been his especial pet, and when she came home dripping wet and sobbing that Ophele had pushed her into the stream, his wrath had been so spectacular that Ophele had gone out one of the parlor windows and disappeared into the forest.

For three days, she hid in the woods, foraging for nuts and berries and trying to make friends with the animals, as if they really might make a home for her in a hollow tree, like Rosalie Blue. Sleeping in the forest with all those shifting branches and night noises was scary, but still less scary than Lord Hurrell. Three days, while he stewed impotently and Lisabe goaded him with tears and complaints. Even as a child, Lisabe had known how to manipulate her father. By the time one of the groundskeepers captured Ophele and dragged her back to the estate, Lord Hurrell was so furious he had chosen to deal with her himself.

“But I didn’t push her!” Ophele cried desperately, frightened and bewildered. Lisabe was standing behind her father, smirking, and the injustice made Ophele’s voice quiver. “I was just reading—”

It had been a very hot afternoon. If she closed her eyes, she could remember it exactly, the way the shadows of the leaded glass windows had stretched across the floor, the weight of the eyes on her that made the humid air even stuffier, the silhouettes of the servants at the end of the room. Her words had tumbled forth in breathless, panicked bursts.

“—she tried to take my book, but I didn’t give it to her, and her hands slipped and she fe—”

Crack.

Something smashed into the side of her head so hard, lights exploded behind her eyes. Ophele couldn’t even catch herself before her head smacked painfully on the floor. She lay still, stunned.

“We took you in.” Lord Hurrell was quivering with fury as he stood over her, the words distant and strange, as if she were hearing it underwater. “Raised you after your mother betrayed us, destroyed our House, our family. And this is how you repay us?”

“Didn’t. I didn’t,” Ophele said, staggering back to her feet and clutching her head. It hurt.

“Ophele,” came Lady Hurrell’s voice, and the sound of those soft, sorrowful tones was enough to bring tears to her eyes. Lady Hurrell was her protector. The arms that held her, the hands that tenderly stroked her, the voice that rebuked and then consoled. Ophele’s eyes wove toward her, burning with tears.

Lady Hurrell was smiling.

It was only for a moment. One time in ten years when Lady Hurrell’s carefully controlled mask slipped. A traitorous quiver of her lips before she turned them down, a single instant where malicious glee shone in her eyes. And Ophele might have argued with herself that she was confused, she hadn’t seen right, surely Lady Hurrell could not be pleased…

It was an instant of such stark, searing truth that Ophele could never doubt it.

“You’re a liar.” Ophele’s voice quavered, thick with tears. Slowly, she retreated, her hands trembling as they lifted to touch her own face, reassuring herself that this was real, this had just happened. “You’re a liar. You’re a liar, you’re a liar!”

All this time? All these years? All those times Lady Hurrell had slapped her, all those punishments, all those cold, hungry, lonely days when the only consolation had been that it hurt Lady Hurrell as much as it hurt Ophele. It was Ophele’s fault for making the lady punish her. They had cried together as Lady Hurrell explained that she didn’t want to do it, such discipline was horrid and vulgar, but necessary to correct a bastard’s crooked, ugly nature.

And Ophele had believed her! How could Lady Hurrell smile to see someone strike her? It didn’t make sense. Had she been secretly hiding that smile every time Ophele came to her, cowering and begging pardon for things she couldn’t remember doing? And those moments of kindness, the scraps of affection that Ophele had worn out in her memory, starving her heart out for just a little love…had all of it been lies? Lady Hurrell didn’t care about her at all?

“Ophele…” The smile was gone now. Lady Hurrell had realized how much she had betrayed herself. “Sweetheart, come here, your head…”

Blood was running in a slow stream from Ophele’s temple, dripping down her chin. It felt warm.

She turned and ran.

Somehow, she had found a place to hide. Her head hurt so dreadfully, she wasn’t sure where she was or how she got there. Crawling into the smallest, darkest space in the room, she curled up around her churning belly and slipped into blackness like going underwater.

In her dreams, her father had come for her. Funny, she had forgotten that until now. Ophele dreamed for a very long time, nauseated and sick, her head pounding as if it might burst apart. She dreamed the Emperor came to Aldeburke, sweeping into the house filled with fury that they had dared to lay hands on his child. He had come to take her home, it had all been a mistake, a misunderstanding, and really he had loved Ophele all along…

But he had not come. He had never come. And when eleven year-old Ophele opened her eyes, it was with the understanding that she was alone, and no one cared if she was the Emperor’s daughter. Least of all the Emperor.

It was an understandable error for a child. But Ophele was old enough now to know better.

Mechanically, she went to build a fire, her head thumping with an echo of that remembered pain. The sanctity of the blood of the House of Agnephus was another premise so deeply embedded in the fabric of the Empire, it was sacrilegious to question it. Ospret Agnephus had come from the stars and married a star’s daughter. That bloodline continued unbroken to Bastin Agnephus.

But what would really happen if someone killed her? Remin would make a fuss, of course, and his knights, but who cared about them? Certainly not the Emperor, unless it could be used to his advantage. The Court of Nobility had had nothing to say about all the attempts on Remin’s life, which might not be blasphemous, but was still regarded as a terrible crime, and for the same self-serving reasons. The Temple? It had taken them more than a year to send a representative to the valley.

No. Her illegitimate origin had always outweighed her sacred blood. It would be no protection to Remin. It had been no protection to her. It would not protect their children.

Which meant she had nothing to offer Remin but herself. A lying bastard. A cowering mouse. A princess who did not have the love of her father. A duchess who was barely a lady.

All poison, no sweet.

A sob burst from her throat.

For a long, long time, she curled up in bed, sobbing into Remin’s mutilated jerkin and wishing with all her heart that he was there. There were so many things to cry about. She cried for hours. She cried until her eyes ached and her head throbbed, until the sun set and night fell and the room was cold and quiet. And then she lay silent in the dark, limp and drifting, and wondered what under the stars she should do.

Divorce was unheard of in the Empire. Remin would chase her to the edge of the world if she tried to run away.

In the darkest hours of the night, she slipped out of bed and wrapped herself in a blanket, padding quietly to the southern end of the large bedchamber, still empty except for a few crates. Outside the windows, she could see the moonlight shining on the dark waters of the Brede.

She couldn’t swim. Would it be quick, to go that way?

Ophele looked down at the river and thought about it. Remin was owed a princess. She was not one in any way that mattered. Should he not have a proper lady, at least? Lady Verr would make a far better wife. She always knew what to say. She dressed beautifully. She knew how to dance. And most importantly, she understood the society of the capital in a way that Ophele would take years to learn .

Unconsciously, her finger found the ring that Remin had placed on her hand.

A wife’s work was not trivial. Houses might rise or fall because of the connections and alliances a woman made in society. And after all the talk Ophele had heard of balls and salons and the thousand ways she might make a fool of herself, the bare thought of going to Segoile made her feel like she was going to be sick.

But even now, she did not want to die.

It was the longest night of her life. After all this, she had arrived again at the same place, and every time it seemed she had less to offer and more to learn. Again and again, she built up the fire. She made pots of tea and left the cups to grow cold. If all she had to offer Remin was herself, then somehow she must become so much more than what she was. But how? How?

She was tying herself up in knots. Tearing herself apart. Behind her eyes, she saw it again, the moment in which Lady Hurrell’s mask slipped. But for the first time, Ophele was examining the event as an adult, rather than the heartbroken child she had been. Yes, the lady was a liar. But that did not mean that she did not sometimes tell the truth.

She had wanted Ophele to be weak. Afraid. Ignorant. Dependent. All the better to wrap her up and bind her and make her a puppet for the rest of her life.

But was that what Ophele was? Must she accept it? Or would she look upon the naked truth of herself, and decide to change?

In the gray light of morning, Ophele drew out her books, her silk thread, the Rendevan steel needles. And clumsily, she began to sew.

* * *

Sir Leonin of Breuyir was the fifth son of an Earl.

A fifth son was never really useful.

Long before he was born, everything had already been settled. Leonin’s eldest brother would succeed as Earl. His second brother had gone to the Temple. His third brother went to the Tower, and his fourth brother went to hell.

The expectations for Leonin were correspondingly low.

“He dances well,” said Master Baronen, who had been the dancing-master for all of Leonin’s brothers and sisters .

“I can find no fault in his knowledge of the Imperial Code,” said Master Keirin, a scholar from the Library of Law.

“He is tolerable with the mandolin,” sniffed Master Phantilos, a rather finicky musician from Sachar Veche.

“He is exceptional with the sword,” acknowledged Master Criel, Third Sword of the Court of War, who would know.

That was the only area in which Leonin excelled, and not just because he had actually exerted himself. For the first fourteen years of his life, he had devoted himself with equal indifference to all his lessons as the path of least resistance. Etiquette, oratory, dance, music, conversation, the arts of wine and cuisine: none of them were difficult for him and his mother fussed if he didn’t pay attention. Easier just to get it over with.

From his sisters, he learned the secret languages of fans and flowers. He learned how to speak with the drawling indifference of the fashionable elite. He learned to watch for the least flicker of emotion in the faces of others, and school his own face into an expressionless mask. His father taught him to move among men; his mother taught him how to treat a lady. His brothers thumped him whenever they thought he had it coming.

And all of it was so stultifyingly, excruciatingly boring, that some days Leonin seriously wondered why he bothered getting out of bed. None of the typical activities of an aristocrat moved him in the slightest.

Hunting. Cold, filthy, early, and the prize was a dead animal.

Society balls, where the weight of feminine interest made him feel not so much like a prospective partner as a head of cattle being dragged out for breeding.

Salons, where no one ever spoke of anything that mattered.

“I want something to do,” he told his father once, frustrated that everyone else seemed to enjoy these things so much. “Isn’t there anything else?”

“You can do whatever you want,” his father replied absently, without looking up from his paper. Earl Breuyir read the Gazette religiously. “Just stay out of trouble.”

Stay out of trouble. Be an ornament to his House, make an advantageous marriage, and in due course sire a few unremarkable children. If he had had a passion, his family likely would have indulged it, so long as it wasn’t anything unseemly, but Leonin couldn’t imagine what that would look like. Enthusiasm was gauche. Fashionable society disdained emotional displays as weakness. Everywhere he looked, everywhere he went, everyone was bored, bored, bored.

“You brats don’t know how lucky you are,” grumbled Master Criel. He was on the declining end of his years as a swordsman and complained often of a misery in his back, though he still walloped Leonin in their lessons. “Soft, easy lives. Ten years ago, you’d be singing a different tune, my boy, getting chewed up with the rest of us on the bridges of the Brede. Nothing like a war to let you know you’re alive.”

Those words took on shades of prophecy when, a few weeks later, Valleth crossed the Brede and sacked the city of Hassen. The Gazette said there were no survivors.

That wasn’t boring.

Even the fashionable elite couldn’t hide their excitement, especially when two more cities fell in rapid succession and refugees began to pour south from Firkane and Norgrede. Leonin was nineteen when Remin Grimjaw saved Lomonde, and in Segoile, his name was spoken with equal parts admiration and contempt. Though Leonin had never been interested in the work of knights or the play of tourney, he still went that year with half the city to see seventeen year-old Sir Remin sweep both the joust and the melee in the season’s competition.

There were a half-dozen men with him then, companions earning their own renown. Lord Victorin of Ereguil took the prize with his lance. The beautiful Sir Miche of Harnost was a walking scandal. And the otherwise unremarkable Sir Justenin caused a bit of a stir when a nobleman offered Sir Remin some insult, and Sir Justenin publicly flayed him with such cool eloquence, the man didn’t realize he was bleeding until Sir Justenin was thanking the hostess for a lovely time. People were quoting that little speech for weeks.

These were not indifferent men. These were not bored men. Leonin had never seen anyone so furiously, defiantly alive.

Why?

For Remin Grimjaw, to live at all was defiance. Maybe it rubbed off on the others. They passed in a nine days’ wonder in the capital, and after they were gone, it seemed as if only Leonin remembered them, and wondered with some envy if Master Criel had been right. Maybe mortal peril was what it took to really live.

It was a shame they were all doomed.

That was the prevailing opinion in the capital. The Gazette had a number of somber articles explaining why. The Emperor had ordered Sir Remin to take back the Andelin Valley, an impossible task that had left tens of thousands of men dead on the banks of the Brede over the last hundred years.

“It’s not much of a reward for them,” said Earl Breuyir, exchanging a glance with his wife, whose tender heart had been stirred by the tragedy of it all. “At least they had a social season.”

He didn’t need to say, before they all die. And how surpassingly odd that somehow, Leonin felt…jealous?

He had no illusions about the glory of war. He certainly did not expect any miracles. As he made his usual round through lessons, business, and society, he listened with half an ear for news of the distant war, the mustering of men, the pitifully small force that would challenge the might of Valleth. Of course, no one wanted to go; it was suicide, and the Emperor was not exerting himself to enforce conscription in the duchies. The brunt of the burden fell on Ereguil, and it was whispered that the old duke was only keeping the oath he had made to Remin’s mother.

And then Sir Remin and his knights mounted the charge of the Gresein Bridge.

And took it.

The news blazed south like wildfire, and Leonin actually had to sit down when he heard it. How? It was impossible, everyone said it was impossible. When no one was looking, he stole his father’s Gazette and feverishly read every single article.

“I knew there was some hot blood in those young bucks!” Master Criel exclaimed the next morning, as gleeful as if the accomplishment had been his own. Tossing Leonin his sword, he took his position with more enthusiasm than he had shown in years. “There you are, young master, let’s see how you compare.”

“To them?” Leonin asked cynically, but that question jabbed him long after their practice was over .

Why? What did the actions of the men who charged the Gresein have to do with him? It was a thing so far removed from his safe, tame life that it might as well have happened in another world. Why did it matter what they did? What difference did it make to him? At night, he tossed and turned, trying not to think about it, and for the first time in his life, he was up before dawn, alone in the practice yard with his sword in hand as if he meant to do something with it.

Stars and ancestors, did he?

This was the only thing he was good at. Well, the only thing he excelled at. Sometimes Leonin wondered if that wasn’t half his trouble, that he had never had to work hard at anything in his life.

The next day, he told his father he was going to join Remin Grimjaw’s army.

It was an almighty uproar. His mother and sisters cried. But Leonin was twenty years old now, a fifth son, and very much superfluous. This was the first thing he had ever cared about, and he couldn’t even explain it. He didn’t care whether the Andelin Valley belonged to the Empire or Valleth. He had no loyalty to Sir Remin. Even after the victory on the Brede, it was still an impossible war and anyone who fought in it would almost certainly die.

And he had to go.

Seven years and a war later, he still didn’t know why.

* * *