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“I will determine the truth!” his mother swore. “For within our Storehouse of Wonders there are magical flowers that will blossom in the presence of a woman, but wither and die forever in the presence of a man.”

“Why do we even have those?” the genius wondered. “I mean, how often does the question come up?”

The genius’s mother put one set of flowers at the bedside of the princess, and placed another at the bedside of her son, most likely to establish a control group for her little experiment in gender policing.

The princess’s magical horse warned her what was afoot, and in the dead of night she slipped into the sleeping genius’s room and exchanged his flowers for hers. When the genius’s mother checked in the morning, she found both sets wilted and was forced to concede defeat. The princess mounted Sunlight and rode away. Her old horse bid her farewell and galloped out of the story altogether.

After a short time traveling, the princess came across a golden curl by the side of the road. She picked it up and tied it around her neck, a completely normal thing to do when you find a strand of someone else’s hair lying in the gutter. And then finally, after journeying onward for several more weeks, she reached the court of the emperor.

He was seated on his throne, surrounded by the sons of conquered kings. They all wondered why they found the newcomer such a strangely attractive man. Just really super hot for a dude, to the point that some of them began questioning a number of preconceived notions about their romantic preferences.

The emperor received the disguised princess kindly, and soon declared her to be his favorite attendant. But after a few weeks, it was whispered to him that his new favorite possessed a hair from the head of Ilyana the Golden, the most beautiful woman in the world.

He immediately summoned the princess into his presence. “Bring me Ilyana the Golden!” the emperor bellowed. “I wish her for my wife. Bring her to me now!”

I’m going to stop there for the moment. That isn’t, of course, the end of the story. There’s a good deal more of it. It is, after all, “The Tale of Ilyana the Golden,” and Ilyana the Golden hasn’t even appeared yet.

But I’ll save the rest for later. There’s a twist coming, you see. A pretty fucking big one. I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.

Not when I’m about to tell you what really happened.

Part I

The Six Second-Rate Siblings

Chapter One

The Keep Nowhere Near the Borderlands

I’d been crouched behind the log for so long that it had begun to grow a carpet of spreading pellitory. The tiny pink and white blossoms were sprouting from every fissure in the wood. Another bud opened as I watched, the petals unfurling like it was having a good stretch and yawn as it came awake. Not many flowers want to colonize a dead tree, but pellitory is an opportunistic little bastard. I’ve seen it pop out of cracks in a granite cliff face at my touch.

My older sister Yudit stepped up next to me just as I was about to motion her over, and the pellitory withered and died. The flowers blackened and crumpled in on themselves, the leaves and stems rotting into a mass of green-brown goo. Our powers tended to cancel each other out; she killed off my flowers before they spread out of control, and I revived everything that would otherwise have withered in her wake.

I gave her a grudging nod of thanks for reining in the plant growth, then immediately felt bad about how grudging it was. Our dependence on each other wasn’t Yudit’s fault. Arguably, it was mine.

In any event, Yudit didn’t appear to notice a single one of the complex emotions crossing my face. Which was just as well. “Any sign of them yet, Jules?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

The abandoned keep up the hill was a brooding lump of dark, heavy stone, topped by the wide barrel of a single tower. It stood guard over a border that was no longer there, the notional line on the map swept dozens of leagues away by the tides of war and politics. Seventy years had passed since the last time a garrison had manned the battlements.

So it wasn’t especially surprising that the building was silent and empty. And had been so the entire night. No lights shone through the slim arrow-slit windows; no one approached the gates. Keeping watch on it was, perhaps, the most boring job we’d ever undertaken on behalf of the Kingdom of Tailliz.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Yudit shifted around, nearly bouncing with impatience.

“No one’s there, and no one’s coming. This is a waste of time.” She spat a bright green frog next to my boot. It gave a surprisingly loud croak, its throat puffing out to a grotesque rotundity. “Want to hear my latest love poem? It could use a critique.”

I absolutely did not. “What, right now?”

“We’ve got nothing better to do. Nicki, are you in?” Yudit glanced back at the youngest of my sisters. Nicki nodded and came closer, giving an attentive-sounding sniffle. She was still feeling the effects of the pellitory, which is also known as asthma weed.

I could never decide if her allergies were somehow related to her supernatural ability to make people sneeze, or merely an ironic coincidence. Our powers had been granted by a magic fairy, and I’ve long suspected the fairy was out of ideas by the time she got to Nicki, then heard her sneeze and said, “Snot powers, perfect, done and done. Time for lunch.”

“Roses are red,” Yudit began, “unless they’re white or yellow or pink. / Violets are violet, or sometimes, rather surprisingly, white. / Your ass makes me think / Of taking a bite.”

“The beginning might be overdetailed,” I told her.

“Accuracy is important.”