Chapter 1

Liana’s POV

I had been practicing my speech for three days, and I was halfway through the best line when the carriage wheel cracked.

"Your Majesty, Marenne does not come to Aurelan with an empty hand. We come with ships, with harbors, and with people who have never once broken their word to a friend. We come with—"

The carriage dropped on the right side with a crunch that threw me off the bench and into Nora's lap. My hat went one way, my notes went another, and the basket of lemon biscuits emptied itself across the floor.

"Ow," said Nora, who was tall and had taken most of my elbow in her ribs. "That was a good line, my lady. I'm sorry it ended like that."

"Is anyone dead?" I asked from somewhere near her knees.

"Not yet."

On the opposite bench, my brother Felix lifted the hat he had pulled over his eyes an hour ago. He looked at the tilted floor, the biscuits, and me, and then he yawned. "Are we there?"

"We are in a field," I said, pushing the curls out of my face. They had come loose from their pins again. "Does it look like we are there?"

"It looks like a good place to stop." He swung the door open and stepped out as though the accident had been arranged for his comfort.

Outside, the road was a pale ribbon cutting through hills so green that they hurt my eyes after a lifetime of grey harbor water. A few cows watched us without much interest. Our driver, Bram, was crouched at the back wheel with his cap in his hands, shaking his head like a man at a deathbed.

"Spoke's gone, Your Highness, and the rim's split. She won't last more than a mile or two."

"How far is Halvern?"

"Eight miles, near enough."

I pressed my fingers against my eyelids. We had already lost a day to rain at the border, and the letter in my bag said the king would receive me on the seventeenth. It was the sixteenth.

"I will go and charm someone into lending us a cart," Felix said, straightening his coat. He gave me the look that meant he was pretending to be lazy so I wouldn't notice he was worried too. "And don't rehearse while I'm gone. You said 'ships and harbors' four times. A person who isn't nervous says it once."

He walked off across the field with his hands in his pockets. I sat down on the edge of the road, and Nora sat beside me and handed me a biscuit that had survived.

"Eat," she said. "You get talkative when you're hungry, in a way that makes kings want to leave the room."

I laughed, louder than I meant to, and a crow flew out of the hedge. Then I remembered the letter, and the laugh went out of me.

It was from Lord Wess, my father's chief counselor, and it was four lines long. The first told me when to arrive. The second told me to be agreeable. The third said the winter treaty must be signed before the first snow, or Drevan would march on our northern harbors. The fourth said my father sent his love, which I knew was not true, because my father hadn't been able to hold a pen for two months.

I remembered the council meeting where they chose me. I'd been behind a pillar, looking for a book, and nobody knew I could hear. Lord Wess had said, "Prince Felix is the heir. We cannot spare him. Send the princess. She is the one we can spare." Nobody said it unkindly, and that was the worst part. They said it like I meant nothing.

"They think I'll trip over the carpet and come home with nothing," I told Nora.

"Then don't." She held up one finger. "All you have to do is to walk in, smile, and say the thing about the harbors once, the king signs, and Lord Wess has to eat his hat."

"He doesn't wear a hat."

"Then he can eat someone else's."

It was a hay cart that finally took us to Halvern, driven by a farmer's son who couldn't stop staring at Felix's coat. The cart smelled of dried clover, and my good blue dress collected so much straw that Nora gave up brushing it off.

We came over the last hill in the late afternoon, and for a moment I forgot to be nervous. Halvern lay below us, a town of grey roofs and thin chimneys with a river bending through it. Beyond it stood Highmere Palace, built of pale stone that had gone gold in the sunset. And behind the palace lay a lake so wide and flat that it held the whole sky. I could see the towers upside down in the water.

"Mirror Lake," the farmer's son said proudly. "They say it shows the face of anyone who's lying."

"Then I'll avoid it," Felix scoffed jokingly.

I said nothing. My stomach had turned over in a slow, cold way I hadn't felt in years.

Just like when I was six. I'd been chasing a gull along the harbor wall at home when the stones ended. I remember going down and looking up at a circle of white light that kept getting smaller. Then my mother's hand closed around my wrist and dragged me out. She died three winters later, and I never went near deep water again. Because with her gone, no one was ever going to be there for me if ever happened to drown again.

"You've gone pale," Nora said quietly.

"It is nothing, I am fine." I assured her

She held my hands in a squeeze and I didn't argue, which was one of the reasons I loved her.

A thin man in a dark green coat was waiting on the palace steps with his hands folded. He bowed exactly as low as the rules required and not a hair lower. "Princess Liana of Marenne. I am Odo, steward of Highmere. You are expected, although we thought you would arrive by carriage."

"We did," I said, climbing down with as much grace as I could manage, which meant I only caught my heel in my hem once. "It's in a field. It disagreed with the wheel."

He looked at the straw in my hair. "I see."

"It's a beautiful palace," I went on, and I heard myself starting to ramble and couldn't stop. "The stone is exactly the color of honey, and I know we're a day early or a day late, and my father sends his regards to His Majesty, and I have a speech, really, but I can wait for it, whenever he has a moment—"

"His Majesty is unavailable," Odo said.

I stopped. "Oh."

"The Dowager Queen will receive you when it suits her. Rooms are ready in the east wing, and dinner will be brought to you. The household keeps a quiet routine."

"Is the king ill?"

"His Majesty is unavailable," he said again, in precisely the same voice.

Felix caught my eye over the steward's shoulder and raised an eyebrow. It meant, We've just been told to go away without being told to go away.I lifted my chin and said nothing more.

My room had a bed hung in pale green cloth, a fireplace so clean it looked as if no one had ever lit it, with a bowl of apples right at the center. Nora attacked the trunks as if she were declaring war on every wrinkle.

"The servants wouldn't even look at us," she muttered, shaking out a nightgown. "Rather they stared at the floor like it owed them money. Something is wrong in this place, my lady, and the way the man earlier said 'unavailable.' It sounded like a word he'd been handed and told not to explain. I feel bad to see you are the only one who took this entire alliance to heart."

"I hate to say it Nora, but you are right."

"So what do we do?"

I sat on the bed and looked at my hands. Three days of rehearsing, a broken carriage, and eight miles of hay, and the king couldn't be bothered to be in the same building. I thought of Lord Wess smiling behind his desk. I thought of the snow that would come in two months.

"We wait," I said. "People from Marenne are wise and discerning as to avoid tripping over a carpet."

"You already tripped over the carpet, in less than an hour that we arrived my lady"

"Once. It was a small trip." The dimple in my left cheek appeared, though the smile didn't reach my eyes. "Go and see if the kitchen has anything besides apples."

When she was gone, the room felt too still. I went to the window, and the lake was right there, wide and silver in the last light, with a long wooden dock reaching out from the shore like a finger. It was beautiful, and I hated it, and I hated even more that I was afraid of something so beautiful.

I'm twenty-one, I told myself. I stood in front of the whole council and said I would go. How could I possibly be afraid of a pond?.

I would not meet the king of Aurelan as a woman who flinched at water. It was a small thing, and no one would ever know, but I wanted it. I took my shawl and went down the back stairs, the way the servants did, so no one would ask where I was going.

The garden was empty. Gravel paths wound between neat hedges, and the air smelled of cut grass and cold stone. I passed a dry fountain and a row of rose bushes where someone had wrapped every stem in a strip of cloth. At the end of the lawn the ground sloped down to the water, and the dock waited there, grey and weathered, longer than it had looked from above.

The lake was perfectly still. The sky lay inside it so cleanly that I couldn't tell where the shore ended and the reflection began.

"It's just a lake," I said out loud, which made me feel foolish.

I stepped onto the dock. The boards creaked under me, a little soft, and I kept my eyes on the post at the far end and counted my steps the way I used to count stairs as a child. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. At twenty I looked down by accident and saw a second Liana staring up from the water, small and pale, with her hair coming out of its pins. For one terrible second I was six years old again, and the white light was shrinking above me.

"You are not six," I whispered. I breathed in through my nose, the way my mother had taught me, and walked the last steps to the end. The rope on the post was rough and dry under my fingers. The lake did nothing at all.

A shaky laugh came out of me. "There. I'm here. You didn't do anything."

I turned around, quite pleased with myself, and started back toward the shore.

I took one step, and then another. On the third, the board under my left foot went soft in a way boards should not, and a dry crack ran through

the quiet like a snapped bone.

I had just enough time to think very clearly. Before there was nothing underneath me at all.