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"Examining?"

"We detected irregularities."

"I would like it returned."

"You will. As soon as they've determined it poses no danger." He walked away.

My mother watched him disappear down the corridor.

She already knew.

She would never ask him for it again.

Men like Orsin did not surrender the things they wanted.

The memory shifted.

Several months later. The same palace but different somehow.

Jularin had not left.

I found my mother in a corridor, alone, holding something small in her hands. A pendant. She turned it over once and then pressed it against her chest and closed her eyes and her face did the thing faces did when they were deciding something they had already decided and needed to finish deciding.

She had come back.

She had left and come back and I understood why without being told. Jularin was not herself. I could see that the moment the memory brought me to her. She sat in a room that was too small and too quiet with a child in her arms. Another child slept in a cradle beside her.

She had given birth just days ago. She should have been elsewhere, somewhere warmer, somewhere that smelled less like silver and cold water.

He had not attempted to siphon Jularin because he knew she was not the key. But he had been draining her lightcraft all the same. The toll of it was written plainly across her face.

The servants whispered in the corner.

"She will be taken to the North Tower soon."

"Twelve coins says she gets the yellow room," another said quietly.

My mother crossed the room, sat beside her sister, and took her hand. She did not speak for a long time.

It was the morning of the wedding.

I did not want to watch this part, but I watched anyway.

My mother in a gown that was not hers, standing in a room that was not meant for her, the king announcing to a hall full of Yorali court that Ryaran of Alarna would be his wife. Not Jularin, who had just borne his children. Ryaran.

I knew without anyone saying it aloud that the king could not resist. My mother bore the same Mark of Forizan on her chest as I did. She was more beautiful than Jularin. Moreover, she was the Queen Heir. She could provide him with power and access.

I watched Jularin's face.

The fury first. Raw and immediate and real, the face of someone who had given everything and been told it was not enough. Then, and this was the part that broke something in me, the understanding that moved through her slowly. Her sister's name in the king's mouth. The gown. The expression on Ryaran's face that was not happiness and had never been happiness.

Jularin understood.

She had always been the clever one. That was what the memory told me, in the way memories told you things that were true without saying them directly. She understood what her sister had done and why and what it was going to cost her, and she sat in that hall and did not make a sound.

The king turned to Jularin, smug, looking at her as though she were vermin.

“The children may return to Alarna, but make no mistake. I do not intend to claim them, they will be nameless bastards. Should I need them for their magic I will use them as I do all my bastards. And should you deny me, my deathmages will find a way to crawl through Alarna’s wards and take them from you, alive or dead.”