Two days ago, Cosima pulled carrots from the dirt behind her mother's house. Now she stood on a crimson carpet in a stone hall the size of a barn, while a king told her to pick a husband or a wife by the end of the month. Stained glass threw colored light across her hands. The calluses on her palms looked wrong in that light. Her mother Eleanor was not beside her. Eleanor was in a cell beneath the floor, because the king had decided Eleanor was a thief who had stolen a princess nineteen years ago. King Dominic sat forward on his throne. His beard was trimmed close. His voice was patient, the way a man is patient with a child who has not yet learned the rules. He said her real name again. She had only heard the full version twice in her life. Once from the men at the farm door. Once here, an hour ago. He told her the alliance her birth-parents had broken would be sewn shut through her marriage. He told her his four eldest were waiting outside. He said she would meet them today and choose within thirty days. "I don't know them," Cosima said. "I don't know any of you." "Then learn," the king said. He lifted a hand. A steward set a heavy red book on a table beside her. Gold trim. Four names inked across the open page in a careful column: William. Severin. Bryce. Rosalie. A blank line waited under the last name. "You will sign here when you decide. Your mother stays where she is until you do." He let that sit. "Choose well, and she walks out. Choose badly, and that is also your answer." A guard walked Cosima out a side door into a courtyard. She kept her mouth shut, the way Eleanor had taught her around strangers who wanted something. At the center of the yard stood a tall wooden post with four carved arms. Each arm pointed toward a different path. A sword above one. Scales above another. A raven. A rose. Four siblings, four directions, and no way to tell which one would free her mother and which one would keep Eleanor underground forever. She could hear voices down at least two of the paths. Someone was laughing. Someone else was not. Cosima pictured the carrot rows. She pictured Eleanor's hand on her arm at the door, holding on. Then she let the picture go. She would not pick blind. She would walk every path before she signed that book. She would learn which sibling could be moved, which could be lied to, and which one would have shoved her mother into that cell with their own hands. Thirty days. Four strangers. One name at the bottom of a page that had not yet been written. She started down the path under the rose.

The path under the rose led to a wing of the castle where the air smelled of beeswax and cut flowers. A servant opened a door and told Cosima these were her chambers now. The room was larger than the farmhouse. A four-poster bed stood against one wall. A trunk of clothes she had not packed sat at its foot. Cosima stood in the doorway and did not step inside. She thought of Eleanor in a cell somewhere below her feet, and she thought of the four names in the red book. She had picked the rose path because a rose seemed least likely to cut her. She did not yet know if that was true. The housekeeper arrived first. Lizbeth Thorne wore a ring of iron keys at her belt and a plain apron. She walked the room once, opened the wardrobe, checked the water pitcher, and turned to Cosima. "You eat at the hour the bell rings," she said. "You answer to no one in this room but yourself. If a maid comes in without my say, you tell me." She paused at the door. "Court is full of kind hands. Watch the ones that reach for you first." Then she left. Cosima sat on the edge of the bed and did not know what to do with her own arms. Princess Rosalie came an hour later, alone, without announcement. She carried a folded gown over one arm. Her hair was the color of wheat and her eyes were steady. "I'm Rosalie," she said. "One of the four. I thought you'd rather meet me here than in a hall." She set the gown on a chair and sat across from Cosima without asking. She asked about the farm. She asked what Cosima had grown, what she had eaten that morning, what her mother's hands looked like. Cosima answered in pieces. She let the quiet do half the work. Rosalie did not push. After a while, Cosima reached up without thinking and touched the chain at her neck, the way she always did when she was tired. Rosalie's eyes followed her hand. "May I see it?" Cosima drew the pendant out from under her collar. A teardrop emerald in a silver setting, vines around the stone, small marks etched into the edge. Eleanor had put it on her as a child and told her never to take it off. Rosalie went still. "Where did you get this?" Rosalie asked. Her voice had dropped. Cosima told her the truth, that her mother had given it to her, that she had worn it as long as she could remember. Rosalie did not touch the pendant. She looked at the marks along the edge. "These are old letters," she said. "My tutor showed me drawings of them once. They belonged to the first queen of Eradonia. There's a story that her line carried a stone like this, passed from mother to daughter." She lifted her eyes to Cosima's. "My father has never seen this on you. Has he." It was not a question. Cosima closed her hand around the pendant. She had walked the rose path to learn one sibling. She had learned, instead, that the necklace under her shirt was older than the king on the throne, and that Rosalie had known what it meant the second she saw it. The choice was no longer only about a husband or a wife. It was about who in this castle she let see the stone next.

After Rosalie left, Cosima slid the pendant back under her collar and sat with the gown on the chair. A bell rang somewhere down the hall. A maid came to say the king expected her at the family table that night. Cosima did not know how to sit at a king's table. She did not know which fork to lift or when to speak or how to address a man who had her mother in a cell. One wrong move and the court would know she had been raised in a kitchen, not a nursery. Then the king would have his proof that she was no princess at all, and Eleanor would stay below the stones. Lizbeth came back at dusk with a basin of water. She did not knock. She looked at the gown, then at Cosima's hands. "You've never eaten with a king," she said. It was not a question. Cosima shook her head. Lizbeth set the basin down. "Then listen. Sit when he sits. Lift what he lifts. Speak when spoken to. If you don't know a word, repeat the last one back as a question. People love the sound of their own answers." She tied the laces of the gown without asking. "Hands in your lap between courses. Don't reach. Don't thank the servants out loud. They'll know you meant it." Cosima walked the hall behind a steward and counted her steps to keep her hands still. The dining room held a long table and five faces she had to learn. William sat at the king's right, sword belt visible under the coat. Severin sat across, posture exact, amber eyes already reading her. Rosalie gave a small nod. Bryce slouched at the far end and watched her like a man who had decided nothing yet. King Dominic waited at the head. Cosima curtsied the way Lizbeth had shown her in the doorway, low and brief, and waited for him to sit before she did. The first course came. She lifted the spoon the king lifted. William asked where she had grown up. "A farm," she said. "North." He nodded once and did not press. Severin asked what she thought of the capital. Cosima said, "The capital?" Severin's mouth moved at the corner. She answered her own question about traffic and grain prices for a full minute. Bryce cut his meat and said nothing. Rosalie steered the table toward weather. Then the king set down his cup. He spoke of the duties waiting for her: a public audience in six days, a treaty signing, a tour of the northern holdings William had pulled back from. "You will stand beside the one you choose," he said. "The kingdom will see a princess returned. See that the kingdom sees a princess." He watched her over the rim of the cup. Cosima held his eyes and said, "Yes, Your Majesty." Her voice did not shake. He looked away first. Back in her chambers, Cosima sat on the edge of the bed with the laces still tight. She had not been caught. The king believed her. That was the trouble. He believed her enough to put her in front of a crowd in six days, on the arm of a sibling she had not picked, with Eleanor still under the stones. She had bought herself the table. She had bought herself the audience too. Lizbeth came in to unlace the gown and said, "You did well." Cosima said, "He gave me six days." Lizbeth's hands stopped a moment, then kept going.