Chapter 2

ALORNA

I did not wake so much as arrive. One moment there was cold and current and no bottom to fall through, and the next I was lying on something that was not quite ground, in a place that was not quite dark.

Roots hung above me like ribs. Somewhere close, water dripped in a slow, patient rhythm, counting something I could not name. I tried to sit up and found my body strange to me, heavier in some places, lighter in others, as if it had been packed away and only partly unpacked.

"You are awake sooner than most," a voice said.

I turned toward it and found a shape sitting where the roots grew thickest, a woman, or something wearing the idea of a woman, with eyes like still water and hands folded in a lap made of moss and old bone. I could not have said where she ended and the roots began.

"Where is this?" My voice came out cracked, unused, as if I had not spoken in years instead of minutes. "Am I dead?"

"You were," she said. "For a while you were very thoroughly dead. Your sister saw to that."

The word landed in my chest like a second push off the tower. "Victoria."

"You say her name the way most people say a wound." The woman tilted her head, studying me the way I imagine a cat studies something it has not decided whether to eat. "I am called the Hollow Mother, by those who bother to call me anything. I felt you go into the river. Grief has a taste, when it is fresh enough. Yours was interesting."

"I don't understand." I pressed my palm flat against the strange ground, needing something solid to hold onto. "How am I here? How am I anything?"

"Because I chose to catch you." She said it simply, the way someone might say they had caught a falling cup before it broke. "Souls slip past me every day, more than you would like to know. I do not stop for all of them. I stopped for you."

"Why?"

"Because you did not go into that water asking for mercy." Something moved behind her still eyes, not quite a smile. "You went in already planning your return. I find that rare. I find it useful."

I did not like the word useful. It sat wrong, the way Victoria's smile had sat wrong that last morning, dressed up as kindness while something else moved underneath it.

"What do you want from me?" I asked.

"Nothing you are not already willing to give." She rose, and the roots seemed to bend out of her way without being asked. "I can give you a body the world will not recognize. A face no one has mourned. A name with no grave attached to it. You will walk back into that court as someone new, and no one, not your sister, not your prince, not your own father, will know the woman standing in front of them once wore your skin."

"And in return?"

"Your old name." She said it lightly, the way one might set down a small, ordinary price. "You will not use it again, not to anyone, not for any reason, until you are ready to pay whatever it costs to take it back. That is the whole of my price. It sounds small. Prices that sound small rarely are."

I thought of Victoria's hands on my shoulders. I thought of the word *sister*, and how little it had meant in the end. I thought of Brian somewhere above me in a castle that did not yet know I was gone, mourning a woman he had not even had the chance to lose yet.

"I accept," I said, before she had finished offering.

THE HOLLOW MOTHER

I have made this offer more times than I can count, in more forms than mortals have words for, and I have learned to watch how a soul answers, because the answer tells me more than any grief ever could.

Most weep first. Most ask if there is another way, as if I keep a second door hidden somewhere behind the first, one with a kinder price on it. There is not. There has never been.

She did not weep. She did not ask.

I liked her immediately, the way I like storms before they break, the way I like a blade before it is drawn. There is a particular kind of soul that arrives at my door already sharpened, and hers had been sharpened that very morning, on a tower, by someone who shared her blood and her face.

"I accept," she said, and something old and patient in me settled, the way a trap settles once the weight has finally stepped onto it.

I did not tell her the whole truth of what she was agreeing to. I never do, not because I enjoy the deceit, though I will admit I do not entirely mind it, but because the whole truth would frighten most of them back into the river, and I have grown tired of watching interesting souls drown twice.

"Then it is done," I told her, and reached for the shape of her face the way a sculptor reaches for clay that has not yet decided what it wants to become.

She did not flinch as the change began, which told me everything I needed to know about the woman I had just agreed to remake.

"You will be no one," I said, watching her old features soften and blur beneath my hands like wax too near a flame. "You will be everyone. No one will look at you and see her. No one will look at you and see anything but what I choose to let them see."

"What does that mean?" Her voice had already begun to change, deepening, shifting, becoming a stranger's voice in a stranger's throat.

I did not answer her. Some questions are kinder left unfinished until the moment they can no longer be avoided.

Beneath my hands, her face kept dissolving, cheekbone and jaw and the particular tilt of her eyes all running together like a portrait left out in rain, and somewhere underneath the fear I felt rising in her, I felt something else too. Something that was not quite fear at all.

Something that was almost hunger.