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My mother stood. “Let me adopt them,” she said. “Let me raise them as my own. Legitimize them through me.”

Jularin looked anguished but my mother's eyes met hers and said everything that needed to be said.

Later, they were in a corridor. Just the two of them.

Ryaran held her sister's hands, begging her to promise to stick to the plan. Jularin's face did everything at once, grief and guilt and the anguish of someone being asked to leave behind the people they love because staying would only make it worse.

Two small children sleeping in a room nearby.

Jularin's hands shook as she packed what little she had brought. She turned to Ryaran and said quietly. “Ivanoxa and Tamal. You must raise them to be kind like me, but strong like you."

Ryaran grabbed her hand one more time. “Alarna. My brother. Axar, they must all believe it was for foolishness, for love. You must sell that lie."

Jularin nodded.

Ryaran said nothing else and watched her go.

Jularin paused in the corridor and reached into her cloak. She pulled out the Paravin pin that Orsin had given her.

I thought she was going to leave it in the palace. Or perhaps throw it out the window.

She stared at it. Then placed it on with trembling hands and resumed walking.

The last image was my mother's face after Jularin had turned the corner and was gone. She stood in the empty corridor of the Yorali palace and she looked at the wall and her expression was the most honest thing I had ever seen on anyone's face. The quiet of someone who had made a choice they could not unmake and had decided to carry it cleanly.

Then she turned and walked back toward the sound of the wedding.

The memory dissolved.

I opened my eyes to the ceiling of the guest chamber in Morrath and lay there for a moment without moving, the stone still warm in my palm, my chest doing something I did not have a name for.

My whole life I had been called a whore’s daughter, told that my mother was of no value. My family in Alarna had seemed convinced that my mother stupidly fell in love. They did not know that she had walked into his court to save her sister and had never walked back out again.

Moreover, Tamal and Ivanoxa. I thought of Ivanoxa's gold eyes, of how strange my intunar had felt pressed against her.

Of course it did.

We were sisters.

CHAPTER 16

The Secret War

RYARAN’S MEMORY STONE

Ifelt a sting on my arm and smelled antiseptic and could tell that Fiersa was cleaning my wound.

I kept my eyes closed but stirred enough to let Axar know that I was ready for the next stone. A new one was pressed into the palm of my hand. It was warm.

I touched the stone again.

She was not crying. She was not broken.

She was learning.

I watched her walk through libraries with the focused attention of someone memorizing rather than reading. Talking to servants in corridors. She would listen, catalogue. She won over healers with small gestures that cost her nothing and built something she needed. She moved through the palace like water, finding every crack, every gap, every person who was afraid of something and could therefore be trusted with something else.

Everyone underestimated her.