Prologue
13 Winters Past
“Is it a love story?”
The little girl sniffed, and rolled over in her bed, peering up at him with red-rimmed eyes.
It was there, in the bedroom of his quietly heartbroken eight-year-old daughter, that Silas truly considered committing treason for the first time. He set the storybook down on her bedside table, and brushed the wispy cloud of curls back from her forehead.
“Everystory is a love story,” he told her. “From the pages of your fairytales, to the stories of everyone in this palace and beyond.”
He needed her to believe it. To believe that this life was not herwholelife. That her story was not yet written.
She sat up, the thick covers tenting as she drew her knees to her chin. In her little round face, his own brown eyes were mirrored back at him, though hers were wide and shiny with tears.
“Every story?”
“Every story. It’s all about love, one way or another. If you want to understand someone’s character, Adeline, look to what they love the most.”
She was silent for so long that he worried he’d been too cryptic; that he’d lost her with his subtle lesson in the nuance of human nature, and what made us behave as we did. What made a grown woman treat a child of her own blood with such bone chilling cruelty.
As though Aera herself were listening, a gentle gust pressed at the window, the wind heaving a low sigh beyond the palace walls. Across the room, the windowpanes were blurred with frost, snow clinging neatly to the frame at the corners and cross-sections. Silas shivered despite the warmth of the room, the pop and roar of the small fire in the grate behind him.
Winds guide me,he prayed.
Eight years in, and he still didn’t know how to do this. How to be everything to this child, who asked for so little and needed so much more than he alone could give.
Bring her home, his family had written, time and time again.Bring her to Dhalias.
And he wanted to. He had never wanted to run as badly as he did today, on Adeline’s long-awaited Blessing Day.
For most children, a Blessing Day might mean a ceremony at the temple and a meal shared with friends and neighbours. For the second-born Princess of Eisalaan, it meant a citywide event.
She had run off to the kitchens that morning, tucking herself out of the way as she so often did when the bladed pendulum of her mother’s attention came swinging towards her. She lived a lonely childhood, always just slightly too young for her sister and the older children of the Queen’s closest courtiers. But there was one girl her age in the palace, the child of a porter; a sweet-natured little wisp named Elsie. They shared jokes and warm bread rolls, and she was Adeline’s only true friend.
Silas had been overrun with preparations, and foolishly left his daughter to keep herself busy. He had not seen her find the tray of goblets set aside for the family dining table. He had not known she would dust the goblet rims with silvered sugar, some little trick she planned to play on her sister. He had not guessed that the Queen of Eisalaan would drink from a dusted goblet, and deliver a Blessing Day speech to the entire city with a silver pencil moustache upon her lip. Nor that the laughter of the crowd could bring such a warmth to her cold blue eyes; a burning, raging warmth. The blue heart of a flame. A fire that caught too quickly.
She acted fast.
By the time they set down the desserts, the Queen had sent a message to the kitchens; a message to be delivered to Elsie’s mother with great haste. And, as Adeline said goodnight, and the Queen took the girl in a rare embrace, Silas felt a prickle of unease roll down his spine. He stood frozen, rooted as he watched her lips move, as she poured soft, venomous words into his child’s ear.
Adeline fled the hall in tears.
Bring her home, that’s what his family would have told him.
But he couldn’t.
Not even now, not even after what she’d done.
“What about you then, Papa?” Adeline asked finally, drawing him back to himself. She fixed him with a sly, sideways look, impish beneath the dewy shine of her tears. “What do you love the most?”
Silas swallowed against the tightness in his throat, and fixed on the warmest grin he could find within.
“Whyyouof course, little Mischief. The sound of your laughter? That’smylove story.”
And with that, he lunged at her, tickling mercilessly at her ribs and under her arms. Adeline screeched and giggled, and writhed out of his grasp, scrambling among the pillows to escape him. Safely out of reach, her laughter slowed, and she was silent for another long moment. And as she caught her breath, Silas held his. Knowing, somehow, what would come next.
“What about my mother?” She tilted her small face up, chin lifted high. “What does she love?”
