“You see, Lady Rielle,” said the king, “my charge is not to decide whether what you have done is a crime and whether—or how—you should be punished. It is that you seem to be neither firebrand nor sunspinner nor earthshaker, but all of those things, and more, which is unprecedented. You performed magic more powerful than there has been in half an age, even after spending thirteen years being taught to suppress your abilities in the hope that they would disappear. And you did so without the aid of a casting, which is something not even the saints could manage at the height of their glory.

“My sacred duty,” said the king, his face grave, “is to determine what, exactly, you are. I must decide if you are one of these Queens—and if so, which one.”

Rielle heard the unsaid words plainly: And what that will mean for you.

She clenched her fists in her skirts and curtsied before the king, the shadow of Saint Katell falling like a sword across her neck.

10

   Eliana

“When darkest is the night

When lost is the fight

When blood is all in sight

Look to the rising dawn”

—Venteran folk song

Whenever Eliana dressed for one of Lord Arkelion’s parties, she thought about her father.

Ioseph Ferracora had spent most of her childhood fighting on the eastern front as the Empire wore down the last of Ventera’s resistance.

“Every night he’s gone, we’ll leave lights in the windows for him,” her mother had decided. In those golden days before the invasion, before Remy, the distant war had felt no more real to Eliana than a ghost story.

“But what will the lights do?” Eliana asked.

“They belong to the Sun Queen,” Rozen explained, “and will help bring your father safely back to us.”

So every night before bed, Eliana had lit the candle in her window and whispered the Sun Queen’s prayer: “May the Queen’s light guide him home.”

As she grew older, she came to dread her father’s visits, for they became shorter, and they would always end. But she never stopped looking forward to the summer solstice, when Ioseph would return for the annual festival—and most importantly, for the Sun Queen pageant.

Before the Fall, before the Blood Queen Rielle died and left everything in ruins, the world was full of magic. So said the stories, and as a child, Eliana had believed in them with all her heart. They said people of the Old World used shields and swords to summon wind and fire. They worshipped mighty saints who had banished the race of angels into oblivion, and they believed that a queen would someday save the world from evil. She was called the Sun Queen, for she would bring light into darkness.

Even long after the age of the Old World had ended, and it was understood that angels and magic did not exist, had never existed—that the legends of the Old World were simply that—many people still visited temples to pray to the saints, and the myth of the Sun Queen remained.

And every summer, Ioseph Ferracora returned home to his daughter, bringing with him some new ornament for her costume—a gilded hairpiece from Rinthos, a white mink pelt smuggled in from Astavar.

Together, Eliana and her parents would join the parades crowding the city. Children with gold-dusted cheeks climbed up the crumbling statues of Saint Katell the sunspinner to leave garlands of gemma flowers around her neck. Musicians beat their drums and plucked their harps. White-robed storytellers performed tales of the Sun Queen’s long-awaited coming.

The parade ended at the high turn of the river, in the easternmost hills, where the statue of Audric the Lightbringer stood. He sat on his winged horse, sword in hand and somber eyes fixed on the eastern horizon. It was Eliana’s favorite statue in the city, for the doomed king’s face looked both brave and tired. Looking at him made her heart twist with pity.

“I’m sorry, Lightbringer,” she whispered to him, that last year. She kissed his weathered stone boot, clutched her necklace bearing his ruined likeness in the other. As always, she searched for his face in the necklace’s layers of wear, but while the winged horse was clear, the person riding it had been buried beneath the darkness of time, no matter how diligently Eliana tried to clean it.

“Watch the horizon,” Rozen had whispered to her daughter, an infant Remy asleep in her arms. “Do you see her? Do you see the Sun Queen?”

“Will she come this year, Papa?” seven-year-old Eliana had asked, elated even after the long night.

“Keep looking, sweet girl,” Ioseph had answered, his arms trembling around her. “Keep watching for the light.”

He had left again for war the next day, and he had never returned.

• • •

Ten years later, Eliana sat before the mirror in her bedroom as Remy finished twisting her wavy brown hair into a low knot. Her cheeks—not so pale as Remy’s, closer to the warm olive tones of her mother—shimmered with silver powder. Dark kohl rimmed her eyes; diamonds glinted in each ear.

She finished applying a rich red dye to her lips and smiled at her reflection.

“I look good,” she declared.

Remy rolled his eyes. “You always look good.”

“Yes, but tonight it’s really something, isn’t it?”

“I’m just going to keep rolling my eyes until you stop talking.”

She grinned at him in the mirror. “So. Tell me once more.”

Remy sulked on her bed. “I’m supposed to stay with Harkan, no matter what, and do exactly as he tells me, no matter what, and not even think of asking you again about what you’ll be doing tonight. No matter what.”

Eliana stood, the wine-colored gown Lord Arkelion sent her falling in sparkling folds about her legs. “And if something happens to Harkan?”

“I wait for you at the east bridge, by the Admiral’s statue.”

“But nothing will happen to Harkan,” said the man himself, entering from the hallway. He wore tall brown boots, dark trousers, a long coat that hugged his trim torso, and a hooded cloak. He set down a small bag of supplies and ruffled Remy’s hair. “Harkan’s altogether too impressive for that.”

Normally Remy would have rolled his eyes and told Harkan that the only impressive thing he could do was belch like a drunk old grandfather.

But Remy sat silent and pale, his lips chapped from biting them. Since their mother’s disappearance, he had not let anyone see him cry, had even bravely tried to match Eliana’s jokes, but she knew better.

If something went wrong, if anything happened to him or Harkan because of the deal she had made with Simon…

She tucked her necklace into her dress, the pendant rough against her skin, and smoothed her features into a glittering mask.