Chapter 1

ALORNA

The morning I died, the sky over Valdoria was the color of a fresh bruise.

I stood on the tower balcony in my wedding blue, the one I chose because it matched Brian's eyes, and watched my breath turn to smoke in the cold. Below me, the river had frozen hard enough to walk on, if anyone were foolish enough to try.

"You're up early," Victoria said from the doorway.

I did not turn around. I knew the sound of my sister's steps the way I knew my own heartbeat, light and quick, like someone always a little late for something.

"I couldn't sleep," I said. "Three days until the wedding. I keep thinking I'll wake up and it will already be over."

"How lucky you are." She came to stand beside me at the rail, wearing green, the color she always wore when she wanted to be looked at. "To have everything decided for you. The prince. The crown, eventually. Some of us have to fight for scraps."

"You've never fought for anything in your life." I said it lightly, the way sisters trade old insults, not knowing it was the last joke I would ever make.

"Father loves easily." Something moved behind her eyes, there and gone. "It's you people find hard to walk away from. That's worse."

I finally looked at her. There was a stillness in her face that did not belong there, a careful blankness, like a woman rehearsing calm. I had seen that look before, the night before the ring went missing.

"Are you angry with me?" I asked. Not because I needed the answer. Because some old animal part of me had started, very quietly, to worry.

"Why would I be angry?" She smiled, warm at the edges, the kind of smile that had fooled tutors and priests and our own father for twenty years. "You're my sister. I want you happy."

"You don't sound like you mean it."

"I always mean it," she said, stepping closer, close enough that I caught the wine on her breath, sharp for so early. "I have meant everything I have ever said to you. Every single word."

I did not understand that sentence yet. I only felt the cold press deeper into my spine, an instinct with no name.

"Where are the guards?" There were always guards on the tower stair. This morning the corridor behind her was empty.

"I sent them for wine. To celebrate." Her smile did not move.

The wrongness in the air had a name now, and it was standing four feet away, wearing my sister's face.

"Victoria." I stepped back from the rail, toward the door, toward witnesses. "Let's go down. It's cold up here."

"It is cold," she agreed. "It's always cold at the top of something."

Her hands found my shoulders with a strength that did not belong to the sister who fainted at the sight of blood.

"I asked Father for the betrothal first." Her voice had gone flat, stripped of performance. "He said you would make the better queen. Kinder. Wiser. As if kindness ever built a kingdom."

"Victoria, please." The rail was at my back. I had not felt myself retreat into it.

"I am so tired of being the one who almost had things," she said, and there were tears in her eyes now, real ones, which was somehow the most frightening part.

"You don't have to do this." My hands found her wrists, not fighting yet, still hoping this was a nightmare that would end if I stayed calm enough. "We're sisters. We can fix anything."

"No," she whispered, almost gently, almost like love. "We can't."

She pushed.

For one terrible second I hung in the gray air, weightless, my sister's face the last thing I would ever see. Then the cold took me, and the ice broke beneath me like something ending.

I did not remember hitting the water. I remembered the burning cold, her smile shrinking against the bruised sky, and one thought, clear as the ice closing over my face.

This will not be the end of me.

Then the current pulled me under, and the light went out.

VICTORIA

I did not plan to do it that morning. I want that on record, even if only in my own head. I climbed the tower stairs meaning only to see her one more time in that blue dress before it became the dress she married him in.

Then I saw her standing at the rail, already glowing with a future that was never going to include me, and something in my chest gave way, not all at once, but in one small crack that let everything through.

"You're up early," I said, and I meant it as an opening, not a verdict.

She talked about the wedding. Three days. I watched her mouth move and thought about the years spent watching Father's face light up for her and go careful and polite for me. I thought about the prince who looked through me at every feast like I was a painting he had already seen.

"Some of us have to fight for scraps," I said, and some small honest part of me hoped she would finally ask what I meant instead of laughing it into a joke between sisters.

She asked if I was angry. I told her no. It was not entirely a lie. Anger is too small a word for what I carried up those stairs.

"I always mean it," I told her, and God help me, I did. Every kind word, every cruel one, every year of smiling through a life built entirely around her.

I had sent the guards away myself, an hour before dawn, and told myself it was so we could talk in peace. I am no longer certain that was the whole truth.

When I saw the fear finally land in her eyes, some old and quiet part of me wanted to take her by the hand and walk her back down the stairs, and let the moment pass like every other moment I had almost wanted something and didn't.

I did not do that.

I told her about the betrothal, about Father's laugh, about kindness and crowns, and I watched her face try to find a way to fix it, as if I were a problem with a solution instead of a person with a wound.

"We're sisters," she said. "We can fix anything."

I have thought about that sentence every day since.

"No," I told her. "We can't."

I pushed her before the small honest part of me could win.

She went over the rail without a sound, and for one long moment I stood there watching the space where she had been, my hands still open in front of me as if I expected her to climb back up into them.

Then I heard the ice break far below, and I understood, all at once and too late, that I had just done the one thing in my life that could never be undone.

I stood at the rail in the gray morning, staring down at the frozen river that had swallowed my sister whole, and waited to feel something that felt like relief.

It never came.