weapons trained on unarmed children—that remained an open wound, still refusing to scar and heal. Treason, a magic spell, which, once cast, permitted soldiers to murder her family and servants indiscriminately.
Only her eldest brother, Tomman, had been named as guilty in the writ-of-summons, but Inis knew that was as ludicrous as if she’d been named herself. Tomman had done nothing wrong. One of Lord Ever-Loyal’s enemies at court must have whispered enough poison into the right ears to have Inis’s father removed from the playing board, no longer a threat, a worry, or anything else, other than garden mulch. They wanted his lands, or his influence, or the rare books he owned, and thought his life—the lives of his children—would be a fair price to pay.
It had happened to other families. Sometimes Inis wondered how many. But she didn’t think about it as often as she used to.
Memories of her brothers’ laughter, stilled in their slashed throats, her father’s refusal to kneel before they slit his, visited her with the same patternless frequency as rain on the heath. Aches came and went. She refused to be too grateful about the fact that she was still alive, thanks to the generosity of the Crown. The Queen’s royal compassion.
During the massacre, little Ivy had found Inis hiding in a wardrobe. She’d crawled in beside her, buried her face in the collection of their mother’s dresses. They’d wrapped stiff petticoats and jeweled sleeves around their heads so they wouldn’t have to hear the servants screaming.
Mother only survived, Inis later learned, because they had kept her alive specifically to make her suffer. They’d forced her to watch every moment of torture, every instant of death.
When morning crept in through the flame-licked windows, a rider brought the survivors’ pardon—with stipulations.
Leave the Hill. Go to the Far Glades.
Never return.
Inis had no desire to return.
The pardon was a gesture at apology, blaming the overzealousness of the Queensguard, who hadn’t been instructed on paper to kill everyone they saw. Yet those had been their orders, if not officially.
Eradicate anyone who might pose a threat to the Queen.
No one shed a tear when traitors were slaughtered.
The Ever-Loyals had grown up alongside the Ever-Bright princes and called them friends. Inis had spun fae tales with Somhairle while Tomman and Prince Laisrean dueled with sticks nearby. She and Ivy had provided surrogate sisterhood to the Ever-Bright family as it firmed its foundations.
Not one of the princes came to the Ever-Loyals’ defense when the Queensguard marched on them in the night.
Who was living in the Ever-Loyal mansion now, tending its blood-soaked earth? Whose hounds roamed wild on the grounds of Inis’s childhood?
Inis didn’t know and forced herself not to care. In the cottage that was the new home of House Ever-Loyal, she read to her silent mother and Ivy each night, an attempt to fill her sister’s head with better fodder for her dreams, and spent her days walking up and down the heath, even when rain broke suddenly and drenched her to the skin.
Good country air, breeding a strong constitution.
Her boots had holes twice mended by her own hands with scraps of unwanted leather. She sold their purple mourning silks. She cut articulated lacework from sleeves and organza petticoats from underskirts and sold those, too. She gathered piles of heather, dried them in bundles, filled the cottage with them. She opened windows and beat dust from the curtains. She went to town with their faithful manservant Bute on every errand, learning to haggle over the price of eggs and check loaves of bread to be sure they weren’t moldy before she paid for them. She no longer gave the village people a fine laugh at her expense. She cooked, cleaned, hated sewing but sewed anyway, managed their budget, kept track of Ever-Loyal’s banishment stipend when it arrived, and never asked the couriers for news from the Hill. She’d helped Bute repair damage to the roof thatching. They’d all gotten lice, but she was the one to get rid of them, going through Ivy’s hair, then Mother’s, with a fine-tooth comb out in front of the cottage. Because she couldn’t give herself the same treatment and couldn’t trust anyone to do it for her, she’d wrapped her head in lye-soaked rags to kill the vermin.
It had worked.
She didn’t smell good, but she didn’t care. The lye had burned her scalp, but she had no one to complain to.
She walked and walked until the blisters on her feet hardened to calluses. She grew