them—Storme’s eyes found her through the crowd of leeches and servants. He glanced at her and then away again, and then his eyes skittered back to her face, and all of Ayla’s lingering doubts disappeared.
Storme looked like she had just sunk her fist into his stomach. Only his eyes were visible above the white mask, but that was all she needed. When Storme saw her, those terribly familiar eyes went huge. He stopped dead. One of the other servants bumped right into him and still he did not move, not for a long, aching moment, not until he seemed to realize that the queen was crossing the courtyard without him, and then he finally dropped his gaze and kept moving. More than anything, that single moment of eye contact confirmed it. This man was her brother.
If she’d had any remaining doubts, they disappeared within hours, because Storme wouldn’t stop watching her.
She knew, because she’d been watching him.
Once, so long ago that sometimes Ayla wasn’t sure whether it was a real memory or just something she’d dreamed, her father had showed her a Maker’s notebook. It was filled with drawings of funny mechanical trinkets: music boxes; clockwork birds; sundials the size of a fingernail; a spherical silver puzzle with a different solution for each phase of the moon. The designs were detailed, intricate, drawn with black ink on paper so thin it was half translucent. When you were looking at one page, you could see through to the next. Two images atop each other, one difficult to make out but still there.
That was what it felt like looking at Storme.
Every time Ayla dared to glance over, she saw two Stormes superimposed on top of each other: one was the Storme she was actually seeing, the Storme who was sixteen years old and dressed in jade-green wool, everything about him strong and shining and rich, luxurious, like he’d wanted for nothing in the past seven years. Then there was the Storme Ayla knew (had known), the nine-year-old boy with eyes too big for his face, all his bones showing because he was growing too fast. The Storme who had shoved her into the outhouse and left her there, and died. She’d seen it. Heard it, at least. Believed it to be true. But that scar.
This Storme—the Storme who followed silently behind Queen Junn—bore the same scar. The exact same one, down to the cleft in his eyebrow.
Because he was alive.
He was alive, and real, and here, somehow, somehow, after so long.
What happened to you? Ayla thought desperately, as she wrenched her eyes away from him for the thousandth time in the past few hours. How did you survive? How did you make it out of our village? How did you end up in Varn?
Why did you leave?
She’d heard him die. Alone in the terrible dark. She’d found his body. What she thought was his body.
For seven years, she’d thought he was dead. That was the only possible explanation. Because—because if he hadn’t died, he would have come back. He would have come back for her.
He would have.
Ayla trailed listlessly behind Crier as they accompanied Hesod, Kinok, and Queen Junn through a tour of the palace, the gardens, the grassy bluffs. She didn’t even try to pay attention, just kept her eyes on the back of Crier’s head and concentrated on not losing her footing in the mud. She and Storme were the only humans in their small party. Vaguely, Ayla remembered one of the head scullery maids trying to make Ayla stay behind with the other servants, and Crier saying, “The handmaiden will remain at my side.”
So the handmaiden, shadowlike, caught between memory and reality, remained at her side.
There were certain things you heard when you grew up in the streets of human villages. With the gutter rats, the whisperers. Stories of the Mad Queen, the Child Queen. Some said she’d killed her own father to take the throne. Some said she bathed in human blood. She was a legend, or a horror story. But now that the Mad Queen was in front of her, Ayla wondered how those stories had even begun. As much as she hated to admit it, the Mad Queen didn’t act like a monster. She did not seem cruel, arrogant, or violent. When she spoke to the humans in her company (and they weren’t just servants—the queen had human guards, and Storme) her voice was commanding but respectful, almost soft. During the tour of the palace, she