Then, like a slow spring flood, everything came back—how Lora bandaged my feet and guided me to her own room, begging me to rest. How my sobs echoed in the small space until I collapsed on top of Lora’s quilt, which smelled of dough, and sank back into nightmares. How my face and throat are sore from weeping, how my feet burn, and how that pain pales in comparison with the gulf now yawning in my chest.

Lora takes pity on me and lets me stay in her room, where I spend the first day and night after my father’s death. Huddled under the blanket, I listen to the cheerful murmuring of the servants on the other side of the wall, the talk of roasting birds, the Queen’s herb preferences. My world has been torn apart, while all the Gerling estate knows is the wedding of Roan and the Queen’s daughter.

The Queen. When the dormitories clear of chatter and the wind outside settles, I swear I hear her pace the halls above me.

At some point—I’m not sure what time it is—I rise from my bed with the vague desire to walk. Mechanically, I pull on my dressing gown and wander the halls, sticking to the servants’ corridors so as not to cross paths with the guards who patrol Everless at night. It feels better to move, to concentrate on the motion and the chill and not on thoughts of Papa.

Lora’s bindings on my feet are coming loose, spots of red appearing through the white. I sink down by the wall to rewrap them, but fail. My hands are shaking too hard. The stone walls and floor are freezing through my nightgown. Was Papa this cold when he died?

“—killed? All of them?” A voice whispers. I glance up and down the hallway, but it’s dim and empty, lit only by flickering oil lamps.

“—cut down on the road like dogs,” the voice comes again. Male and somehow familiar. With a shock, I realize I’ve slumped down right next to what Roan used to call the whispering wall—the spot where, due to some quirk of the architecture, you can press your ear to the wall in the servants’ corridor and whisper to someone in the main hall. Or hear them.

I press my ear to the wall.

I think it’s Roan’s voice on the other side.

“Yes, but the Queen doesn’t want anyone to know,” a female voice pleads. “Roan—you should have seen how they came after us. The bleeders would have killed me, killed us all, if it hadn’t been for Caro. She went out to speak to the bleeders, and somehow convinced them to let the rest of us go.” Her voice cracks. “The Queen sent men after them once we got here, but who knows.” She pauses, and I hear a hurried, muffled good-bye and good night.

Enraptured, I press my ear closer to the wall—but there’s silence again. The voice could have only been Ina Gold . . . and she was discussing death. No, killing. My mind turns, wondering what she could have meant by it. Then, I remember the notches in the Queen’s carriage and the royal servants’ blood-soaked hems. There’s only one conclusion to draw: the Queen was attacked on her way to Everless.

How many were killed? What horrors does the Queen bring, along with Papa’s death?

Images of death and violence tear through me and, like a flash flood, the memory of my father’s death sweeps me away. Renewed, the pain is a physical thing, like something inside has fractured. I pull my knees to my chest and begin to sob, burying my head between my legs to muffle the noise.

“Hello?” someone whispers. Roan.

I should go back to the dormitories—but Roan’s hello feels like a rope thrown to a drowning person. Tenuous, and maybe leading nowhere, but I can’t help grabbing on.

“Hello,” I whisper back, my voice thick with tears.

“Why are you crying?” he asks.

I can’t speak about Papa, not even to a disembodied voice in a wall. Not yet. So I tell him another version of the truth: “My heart is broken.” Hopefully, Roan will think I’m some lovelorn maid, crying over a suitor left behind in a village. I just want to hear his voice.

“I’m sorry,” comes Roan’s reply. He pauses, then adds, “I understand.”

“You do?” I ask, my voice shaky. “But you’re . . .” I stop myself midsentence. Foolish. Privately, I don’t understand how Roan—how any Gerling—could want for anything, or understand heartbreak, especially when they are marrying the Queen’s daughter.

“No, go on,” he urges from the other side. “I’m what?”

“A—A Gerling,” I say haltingly. Anyone could tell that, from his accent. It isn’t giving myself away to say so. I hope.

He laughs softly. I wish I could lean into the sound, wrap it around myself like a blanket. “Guilty as charged,” he says. “But we Gerlings have hearts too, you know.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t seem that way,” I say softly.

Roan sighs, the sound of his breath running down the walls to me like a small waterfall. “I know,” he says at length. “It was so much easier, when we were younger. There was no such thing as heartbreak or death, or anything bad then.”

No, I think. My heart broke when Liam ran us out of Everless. But I say nothing.

“You sound like a kind girl. Whoever broke your heart is a fool.” I close my eyes—if he only knew the truth, he wouldn’t say that. “Can I do something to make you feel better?”

A smile tugs automatically at my lips. Roan’s voice is like a salve. “Just keep talking,” I whisper back to him. “What do you mean, it was so much easier when you were young?” I add the last bit, hungry to know that he hasn’t forgotten me.

“Hmm.” I can imagine the look on Roan’s face right now, a slow, mischievous smile as he rifles through the memories of his wild childhood. Our childhood. “Well, life was all games. I mostly ran around the grounds with the servant children, you know. I didn’t—don’t—disdain them like my brother and parents.”

“My . . . cousin always told me that he used to tease her,” I say, choosing my words carefully. “Liam, I mean. He’d call her a witch.” I can hear the bitter notes in my own voice.

“I don’t doubt it.” He sighs. “My parents put an end to us mixing with the servants after the fire.”

My heart contracts, suddenly fearful, but I press him. “The fire?”

He pauses. “I think we were playing capture the week-coin—no, fox and snake—when the old forge caught fire.”

He says nothing more, but his words snag at my memory. “Fox and snake?” I whisper.

“Oh.” He laughs. “A game one of the servant girls invented. One person plays the fox, and the other the snake. And the fox hunts the snake all over.”

Goose bumps rise on my arms. The servant girl was me.

Before I can answer, there’s a muffled voice on his side, in the distance. “Someone’s coming,” he whispers, “and it wouldn’t do for me to be seen talking to a wall. But I hope your heart mends, and soon.”

“I hope so too,” I whisper back, though what he says is impossible. “Good night,” I add, but it seems he’s gone, and then the hall is silent once more. A drop of sweetness mixes into the grief inside me. It’s only a drop in a sea, but in that moment, it feels like everything.





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