Prologue
At dawn, Aurelia’s palm began to burn.
It always ached a little, in the cold, in the mornings. The skin had healed shiny and pink in the shape of a ring of tiny flowers, and no salve in Dijamantheim would take the mark away. She kept it tucked inside her sleeve.
This morning it burned like a brand.
She did not need to look for him. She knew where he was. Up the long winding stair, in the cold rooms he had slept in as a boy, standing at the window with a little clay jug in his hand, watering that ugly peach tree. She had shut the stair. She had told the servants to throw the tree out, and not one of them would touch it. And every morning now, he went up anyway.
She did not go up after him.
She went to the little dressing room beyond the bedchamber instead, and locked the door, and leaned her back against it with her eyes shut.
The mirror was in a box at the bottom of her clothes-chest.
What was left of it. The handle and the empty frame, because all eleven pieces of the glass were under the rug in the archive, holding him. All but one. A splinter no bigger than a fingernail, that had fallen into her glove on the night she gathered them, and that she had pressed into the frame with a drop of wax and never told anybody about. She dug the box out with shaking hands and sat on the floor with it in her lap.
“Show me,” she whispered.
The glass was only glass. Then it clouded over, and cleared again.
It showed her snow.
Snow falling softly on a hillside in the north. Dark pines. A stream. A grey boulder with lichen on it. And covering the whole hill, from the trees at the top to the water at the bottom, blue flowers. Thousands of them, glowing in the frost like a lake of stars, where there had been nothing yesterday but dead brown grass.
In the middle of them, kneeling, a girl in a torn red dress.
Aurelia’s burned hand closed so tight round the frame that the broken edge of the glass cut into her palm.
She sat with her blood running down her wrist and stared at the girl in the flowers, and the red light came up slowly in her green eyes, the way a coal glows when you blow on it.
"No,” she whispered. “You don’t get to come back.”
Outside her window, over the golden city, the first snow of winter was still falling.
She put the mirror away, washed and bound her hand, and changed her gown. Then she rang the little silver bell by her bed, and when her maid came, a thin, silent girl with freckles who scrubbed the floors of the west wing and never met anybody’s eye, Aurelia did not look at her either.
“Send for Captain Ravn,” she said. “Tell him to come to me. Alone. And tell him to bring the men who don’t wear the king’s colours.”
