Ambrose had learned this lesson young. He was the middle child, sandwiched between cold and determined Ulrich and handsome and grinning Octavius. Their mother, who was fair and lovely and young, had never had the chance to be anything but.
When she died, the brothers mourned, and not knowing where to turn, they turned to each other. Ambrose remembered a time when they pushed their beds together so they could sleep side by side, when one of them refused to start eating if their trio was incomplete. If their father grew angry with one, the other two would leap up to take the blame. With his brothers beside him, Ambrose felt quite invincible.
Until it ended.
They were eighteen, seventeen, and sixteen. By then, adulthood had descended upon them like night. The world grew darker, shapes once familiar blurred into unknown entities, and all of it had happened so slowly that Ambrose hadn’t even realized his eyes had adjusted to the dark.
Until eighteen, the three brothers had assumed that Ulrich, the eldest, would take the throne. But then their father announced that the throne would in fact go to the brother he deemed the most deserving. It was a strange shift, one that Ambrose didn’t know what to do with. Was he supposed to want the throne? What if he didn’t?
The evening of the announcement, he found his younger brother waiting for him in the library, two amber-colored drinks gleaming before him. Ambrose would never forget how his youngest brother turned to him, the smile he’d fixed on his face that looked no different from any of his smiles in the past. He would not forget how tightly Octavius hugged him, and how relieved Ambrose had felt that nothing would change.
Octavius had held out his glass. “To new changes, brother.”
Ambrose clinked his glass to his, then knocked it back. The world blurred, and he fell to the ground. When he came to, it had turned to night outside, and he was lying in the healer’s chamber. He later found out he would have died if he had taken just a sip more of poison.
The next day, he had moved to a new bedchamber. He feigned ignorance when Octavius approached him with something like shame in his eyes. Ambrose took his love, and he put distance between himself and it, and in this way, he survived.
Distance, he thought, was crucial.
He knew this, which was why he felt lightheaded when he danced with Imelda. It was dangerous to hold her this close, and he’d known it for some time. He’d never admitted this to Imelda, but once he’d seen her dancing in Love’s Keep. She thought she was alone, for she moved so freely. So happily. He’d watched her a moment too long, all too aware of the length of her limbs and the fierce joy in her eyes. And he knew, right there and then, that she could hurt him.
So what was he doing?
He spun Imelda in a circle, pulling her closer, inhaling the strange, smoky scent of her. Every part of Imelda burned with life—from the feral curls of hair to the flash of amber fire in her eyes, the startling heat of her skin, and the frantic thrum of her heart, like a bird beating its wings against a cage, desperate for flight.
Soon, this would end.
He might be dancing with Imelda, but he hadn’t forgotten why.
The witch queen, and her potions, drew closer to them with every expert twist and twirl, sidestep, and spin. Soon, Imelda would release him, and that distance would rush back in like a wave. But for these next few heartbeats, he didn’t have to let go. He brought her even closer, lowering his head to her now-upturned face. Imelda inhaled sharply, sucking on her lower lip. Lightning flashed through his body. The moment he looked at her, Imelda’s eyes fluttered shut.
Look at me, he willed.
Ambrose hadn’t realized that over the years, he’d made himself a ghost. All this time, the fear of losing anything had left him with nothing, and the world had never felt so real until Imelda marched into it, refusing to stay out of the way. Now, when she closed her eyes, he might as well have been snipped out of existence.
Look at me, he willed once more.Don’t make me invisible.
As if she’d heard him, Imelda’s eyes flew open.
They beheld each other.
For one moment, the candlelight conspired to render them unfamiliar to the other. For one moment, they were no longer the tragic king and queen of Love’s Keep, but just Imelda and Ambrose, two strangers whose lives had knitted together for the length of a song. Two people so used to walking that sly line between defeat and expectation that to stumble across one another felt like they had blindfolded Fate and turned her about the room, setting her loose upon some other unfortunate soul while they drank the other in and knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was exactly where they wished to stand.
“Iknowyou!” an unfamiliar voice proclaimed.
The moment broke.
Ambrose felt Fate reasserting itself. His hands jerked back from Imelda’s body as if pulled on by invisible strings. When the witch queen stepped into their midst, Ambrose felt all of Imelda’s borrowed vibrancy falling away from him. He was half a ghost once more.
Imelda swiveled toward the witch queen, her eyes widening.
The revelers paused, and the music stopped once more. The circle of dancers around the witch queen jerked back like puppets. The king, who Ambrose had realized was little more than a prop wielded by his wife, eyed Imelda warily. The witch queen stepped forward, and Ambrose could see her clearly now.
She was tall and pale, with a thin nose and a shrewd mouth and—he realized with a lurch—Imelda’seyes. That exact shade of honey, and tilted like a fey’s. It was saying something that he’d noticed her eyes before her strange, uncanny hair, which caught the light of the candles and refracted it into rainbows.
The witch queen’s hair was made of individual strands of glass.
“You are my brother’s daughter, aren’t you, child? One of my twelve dancing nieces, I presume?”
