Chapter 2

For years, I tried to forgive Edmund. I told myself he'd been cut off from his resources in Kingston, that he'd been as penniless as I.

But now, the truth was laid bare. Edmund felt no remorse. Not then. Not even now.

Yet, for Andy, I smothered the fire in my heart. "You mistake me, Your Highness," I said, wiping blood from my eye. "I see you have been out of spirits. I only wished to please you, as you desire."

He trembled with a cold, towering rage. "What a way to please me. Since it's come to this, I'll grant your wish. I hope you won't regret it when the time comes."

That very day, Edmund went before the King and petitioned to restore Charlotte as Crown Princess.

The King consented. But for the Crown Prince's perceived caprice, Edmund was confined to his quarters for a fortnight of reflection.

When the fortnight ended, Eastwatch Palace was transformed. Silk draped every archway, minstrels played in the galleries, and the great halls thrummed with the chatter of nobles.

Andy, peering from my window, pointed at the ribbons fluttering outside our chambers. "Mama," he asked, his small face etched with confusion, "the servants say Papa is taking a new wife. But does he not already have you?"

My eyes stung. I coaxed his medicine into him, then pulled him into a fierce, silent embrace. "It no longer matters, my love," I whispered into his hair. "All I want is for you to grow strong and safe."

I had lost a child once before.

Six years ago, shortly after I married Edmund, I became pregnant.

When I was eight months gone, the small tavern we ran was set upon by highwaymen. The terror sent me into early labor.

I battled through a night that seemed to have no end, only to deliver a babe who drew no breath.

Afterward, a darkness swallowed me. I refused food and drink, cradling the baby for three days and nights.

Edmund never left my side. His eyes were hollow with a shared grief as he made his vows to me. "Evelyn," he swore, his voice rough, "we will have a child of our own one day.

"I will give you a wedding befitting a queen. Our children will be around us. We will grow old together by our own fire."

In time, Andy came to us, a promise fulfilled.

But when Andy turned four, Charlotte arrived at our doorstep in the Northwilds, an imperial decree in her hand, demanding Edmund return to Kingston as her rightful husband.

That was the day I learned my husband was the Crown Prince.

I hated him for his silence while my adoptive father died. I resolved to leave.

Yet my heart betrayed me. I begged him instead, begged him to renounce it all and to stay with me in the Northwilds as a simple man and his wife.

Edmund stood before our cottage for three days and nights, until exhaustion finally claimed him.

My resolve crumbled. I agreed to follow him to Kingston.

But scarcely had we arrived when he took Charlotte to court as his Crown Princess.

Not long after, Charlotte ordered someone to push Andy into the palace's ornamental pond in the dead of winter.

The water was a knife's edge of cold. Although Andy was saved, his intelligence remained forever at the level of a four-year-old.

Mad with grief, I seized a dagger and stormed Charlotte's chambers.

Charlotte merely offered a thin, triumphant smile. "Evelyn," she cooed, "you are nobody. A cookshop girl who smells of grease and smoke, a foundling with no family name.

"Even if I confess to pushing that bastard boy in, what will you do? Edmund would never cross my father for your sake."

Blind with rage, I lunged. I just want to kill her and die with her.

In the end, Edmund burst in then, placing himself as a shield before her.

When my blade arced down, Edmund caught it with his bare hand. His eyes, looking at me, held disappointment. "Evelyn," he said, the words like a judgment, "you have sunk lower than I believed possible.

"To discredit Charlotte, you would harm your own son? And now, when your scheme fails, you resort to murder?

"If I do not punish this, what will you dare next? An attempt on the King himself?"

His voice turned to ice. "Take her. Thirty lashes. See that they are laid on with purpose."

The guardsman who wielded the whip was in Charlotte's pocket. Those thirty strokes nearly ended me and left me barren.

After that, Edmund never came to my sickbed.

For a month, I drifted in a haze of pain and fever on that rotting pallet, forcing down spoiled gruel just to cling to life.

Any lingering warmth I held for Edmund died in those long, cold nights, extinguished one by one.

A month later, with the help of a guardsman named Charles Rivers, I escaped Eastwatch Palace.

I fled Kingston with Andy, returning to the only home I'd ever known, the Northwilds.

But six months later, Andy was seized by a wasting fever. The treatment would cost ten gold coins a day.

It was then I heard the rumors: Edmund was scouring the kingdom, half-mad in his search for me. His decree was public: if I returned, he would raise me as his Crown Princess.

For Andy, I walked back through the gates of Eastwatch.