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It came back as cold.

Icy, brutal cold that swarmed over me and stole the breath from my lungs. Moonlight lit the deep snow my hands sank into, and each thick flake stung where the wind hurled it against my bare skin. I staggered up at the edge of a black and foreboding forest, the night alive with the cries of things I couldn’t name. A few paces off stood a small, half-collapsed barn, pale smoke curling from the gap where a door should have been.

I trudged toward it through the snow, my bare feet screaming, and ducked into its feeble warmth. And there, at the far end, half-buried in a mound of straw, was Melanthe, curled tight and protective around a small sleeping boy, her thin cloak wrapped around them both.

She held him the way someone would hold the only thing left in the world worth living for. Because he was. His small face was peaceful in sleep, but her eyes never left the fire, fixed on it with a trembling, desperate watchfulness, and every so often she pressed her lips to his brow. Fear and exhaustion had carved deep lines into a face that should have still been young.

My heart hammered as I saw how close the fire had crept to the straw. One stray spark, and there would be nothing left of either of them.

And the guilt of being unable to help them tore through me, because they hadn’t asked for any of this. Least of all the child, and I hated that this was the price she’d paid for nothing more than honesty. Honesty given out of love and answered with cruelty. Honesty that had cost her absolutely everything. But then my mind also battled with how wrong her actions had been, leading her to this point. Because the king had been right in his anger.

You couldn’t force anyone to love you.

That wasn’t love. Love was a gift freely given.

And his heart had been nothing more to her than a stolen possession. So, I guess I felt sorry for the poor child who didn’t ask for any of this the most. A life born from deception of the worst kind.

All I could do was watch as her tear-streaked, grime-dark face slowly hardened, sorrow setting into something cold and steely. Pain seared through my own chest, sudden and vast, and for one terrible moment, it was as though we shared the same heart. I could feel the love she carried for her son, so enormous it stole my breath. But I could feel the rest of it too. The betrayal. The humiliation. The king’s rejection. It sat in her like a blade lodged between the ribs, twisting deeper as she stared into the dying embers.

Each breath we drew filled us both with an ache that sharpened and curled until, on a low exhale, it pressed up against something deep inside her. Inside us. Something that wanted, very badly, to lash out.

And as the wind howled through the rotting walls, her grief curdled into a bitterness so thick I could taste it on my own tongue. Shadows began to bleed out of her, out of me, thickening in the dark until they ran together as one. Whispers in a language I didn’t know spilled from both our mouths, and there was nothing I could do but watch as her gaze went hardened.

She pressed her lips to her son’s forehead one last time. But her eyes stared out into the dark, and I heard the vow take shape in her mind even as it festered in mine.

‘They named you nothing. A mistake. A monster.’ Her arms tightened around the sleeping boy.

‘But I swear it to you, my love, on every drop of blood they spill and every door they shut. One day, you will have all of it. The crown they hid from you. The throne they denied you. The blood that called you bastard will kneel at your feet and weep, and I will teach you, my darling, exactly how to make them pay.’

The scene tore away, and I gasped as the pain in my chest let go, the shadows scattered, and that terrible thread between Melanthe and me dissolved.

I stood now, leaning against the stone parapet of a bridge over a moat, the sun barely cresting the horizon, though its warmth already promised a hot and beautiful day. And before the castle’s great wooden gates stood Melanthe, one hand resting on the shoulder of her son, older now, as she argued with a guard.

“Keep your voice down, woman. You’ll wake the whole castle,” one of them said, dark eyes blazing with disgust as he levelled his spear at her.

“Point that thing at me all you like,” Melanthe said, arms crossed, planted and defiant. “I am not leaving until I have spoken with the King.”

“We have told you. The King hears petitions at the end of the month, at open court.”

“And more will come from all over to bring their troubles to him then,” sneered the second guard. “Far more important than the likes of you. He’ll have no time for a peasant.”

Melanthe’s eyes narrowed. Her son shrank back, half-hiding in her skirts, his lip quivering. She raised a finger to answer, but the groan of the great gates swinging open silenced everyone.

A woman walked through them, and the breath left me all over again.

Hair as dark as a raven’s wing. A laugh I would never hear, but a face I somehow already knew, because a man I loved had described it to me only hours before, lying in the dark with grief in his voice.

Ianthe.

Atlas’s mother.

The flower his father had planted a whole garden for.

A stern look sat on her beautiful face. “What’s all this racket?” Her gaze swept across Melanthe and the two guards, who all seemed to lose their tongues at once. It was Melanthe who recovered first.

“I need to see the King. It’s very important.”

The Queen looked her up and down, and then her eyes dropped to the boy, and a flash of recognition, of hurt, marred her lovely face, there and gone in an instant. Because it was obvious. The child looked exactly like her husband, right down to the dimple set into his chin.