Within the month her father had chosen her husband, selling her to the son of his most powerful baron in exchange for a peaceful end to his reign. Sitting in her chair in the moonlight, Attolia thought back over the year of her engagement, which she had spent, as custom demanded, with the family of her future husband. Surrounded by strangers, completely isolated from any ally, she’d listened as her fiancé and his father talked over their plans to destroy the king and to wring whatever power and riches they could from her throne, sucking her country dry to feed their appetites.

Sitting in her corner, quietly spinning thread on her spindle or embroidering the collars on her fiancé’s shirts, she’d listened to him as he struggled to follow his father’s convoluted plans, gloating at every opportunity for treason and character assassination. It was her fiancé who gave her the name shadow princess. As quiet and as dull as a shadow he called her, and it was true. Caught in an abrupt adolescence, she was too tall and ungraceful. Her face was long, and as she schooled it carefully to keep it free of expression, she looked plain and not bright. Beside her in the corner the other ladies cast down their eyes demurely and flaunted for her benefit the gold earrings and bracelets her fiancé left with them after his visits. A shadow princess he’d called her, and someday, he’d said, a shadow queen.

Attolia had had few trinkets of her own, but as she sat quietly moving her needle through the embroidery, she had thought very carefully about the royal jewelry that would someday be at her disposal. She listened to her future father-in-law’s plans and made plans of her own. She collected leaves, one by one, from the coleus bushes in the garden. They grew in hedges along the walks around the villa. She tied the leaves into a knot in one of her sashes and hung the sash in her wardrobe. Six weeks before she was supposed to return to the castle to prepare for her wedding, the news came that her father was dead. Her fiancé stopped in her rooms with a face so full of mock solemnity it was an insult and told her that her father had been poisoned by some unknown assassin. The princess felt her own face had turned to a stone mask. She fled to her bedroom and waited there for the tears to come, but none did. Finally she had decided that none were called for. Hadn’t he gotten what he bargained for? Hadn’t he reached the end of his reign without war?

She returned to the capital, where she was watched by her fiancé’s spies, but not closely. She was the shadow princess, dull and quiet. She waited with every appearance of passivity as a funeral was arranged for her father and a wedding for herself. Then, at the wedding feast, while the lords and ladies of her court looked on, Attolia poisoned her bridegroom.

He’d had a porcine habit of eating her food when he’d finished his own. When his wine cup was empty, he would reach without comment for hers, having noted if she’d sampled it first. She sat through her wedding feast with her lips stinging from the poison of the powdered coleus leaf that had touched them as she pretended to drink, then watched as he took her wine, as casually as he had taken her country, and choked on it and died.

The lords of Attolia had turned on one another then, searching for the assassin, and the queen had retired to her rooms and waited while the barons wrangled over who would be the next king. Late that night she was finally summoned to meet the man who’d managed through threats and promises to gain the allies to proclaim himself king. Her hands clenched still when she remembered the disdain of the servingwoman sent to fetch her. The barons had looked Attolia over, she remembered, the way she had seen men looking at slave girls, and one man had laughed when she had crossed the room to sit on the throne. That same man had ordered her to be ready to marry him in the morning. She’d nodded stiffly, her face impassive, and the captain of her guard had raised his crossbow and shot the claimant for her hand through the heart.

The response had its calculated effect. In the stunned silence that followed, she divided the property of the dead baron among his competitors and informed them that the next king of Attolia would be her choice, not theirs. She then retired to allow them time to absorb the new reality of her rule: the guards around them, the hostages she held, and the army she controlled.

They hadn’t called her the shadow queen then. The royal jewelry was the only resource she’d had, that and the knowledge she’d gained listening to the father of her fiancé as he’d tried to hammer into the head of his dull son the complicated intrigue necessary to seize the throne.

She had judged the men and women around her and doled her treasure out carefully. The golden bees—earrings the color of honey that were older than the monarchy—and brooches and fibula pins, ruby earrings and gold necklets and bracelets had all been dropped one by one into carefully chosen hands. Over the previous year she’d learned all she needed to know about her father’s most powerful barons, and while they squabbled about who might be the next king, she’d made herself queen.

She had kept her bargains with the officers in her army, promoting them outside their feudal hierarchy, making a new-model army that answered to her and not to the divisive barons. She’d used her new army to destroy her erstwhile father-in-law and again taken the property of her opponents to placate her barons and enrich her supporters.

The stone mask over her feelings grew heavier and heavier as she was forced to more and more extreme measures to hold her throne. Surrounded by people who hated or feared her, she trusted no one and told herself that she didn’t need to. Once, just after she’d seized her throne, she’d summoned an old nurse back to be an attendant, and the woman had refused to come to the palace. Enraged, Attolia had ridden out to the village where the woman lived, intending to see her arrested for refusing her queen’s faith in her.

The nurse, who’d been young when she’d served Attolia, had grown to middle age. She’d married and had children. She stood in the court of her farmhouse, looking up to her queen, and asked, “Where are my children? Where is my husband, Your Majesty?”

Attolia had not registered their absence, had not cared until the woman pointed it out.

The nurse stepped closer to the queen and explained. “Two men came to the house saying they would keep my children safe while I served the queen. Did you send them?”

Mute, Attolia had shaken her head.

“I did not think you had. For now, my husband has the children and hides with them, but will any of them be safe if I serve you? And can you trust me if you cannot keep them from harm?”

She had reached up to lay a hand on Attolia’s knee, a gesture of supplication, and comfort as well, and Attolia had shaken her head.

“Your Majesty, you are searching for your nurse, to trust with your life, but she’s gone. There is no one you can trust here.” Attolia had turned her horse and ridden away.

That year she’d had a gold headband made, set with rubies, to wear in her hair in place of the royal jewelry. It was a copy of the headband worn by the famous statue of the goddess Hephestia in the main temple in Eddis. Hephestia had ruled the old gods as Attolia intended to rule her barons, alone.

She had replaced the golden bees and the rest of the royal gems, buying them back from the people she’d bribed with them, sometimes buying replacements for pieces that couldn’t be recovered, but she continued to wear the headband every day to remind her subjects of her authority. At night it lay in a velvet-lined case near her bed.