The Kaiser steps down from my mother’s throne, his footsteps echoing loudly in the silent room as he comes toward me. I can’t look at him, unable to take my eyes off the trail of ash Elpis’s body has left in its wake, but he grabs my chin and forces me to look up so that all I see is his face, red and sharp and cold.

“It’s a shame,” he whispers so that only I and the guards holding me can hear him. “You would have made such a pretty kaiserin.”

I swallow my tears. They’re for Elpis; the Kaiser doesn’t deserve to see them. If the guards weren’t holding me as tightly as they are, I would throw myself at him and do whatever damage I could before I was stopped—claw his eyes out, smash his head against the stones, grab the guard’s sword and stab him through the heart—there are so many ways to hurt someone in a matter of seconds, and I would invent a dozen more. But the guards must feel my desperation, because they hold me tight, like I’m a threat.

I do the only thing I can—I spit. It lands just below his eye, shiny and wet.

The back of his hand hits my face. The force of the blow should send me to the ground again, but the guards keep me standing.

“Take her away,” the Kaiser says to my guards. “Set her execution for sunrise so that everyone will witness it. I want the world to know that the Ash Princess is dead.”

THE KAISER DOESN’T MAKE MISTAKES often, but he made one when he didn’t kill me. He thinks it’s smart to wait until there’s a larger audience, a more Astrean audience that will be further broken by seeing me killed. I see his logic but there is a flaw in his plan.

I was ready to die for my cause, before. I was ready to greet my mother and Ampelio in the After and watch my country rise again without me. But now I can’t get the image of Elpis’s ashen body out of my mind. I can’t forget the way the Kaiser grinned as he watched her die. As much as I long to see my mother again, I am not ready yet.

I am not done with this world, and I am not done with him.

The guards led me down into the dungeons beneath the palace, a maze of cramped, dirty cells my mother never used during her reign. She thought them too cruel a fate even for criminals, sending them instead to work off their crimes in the Outlands.

These are the same cells Blaise and I explored as children. My feet recognized the path; I could see the layout in my mind as clear as any map. Blaise must remember them, too.

They locked me in a cold cell separate from other prisoners, with no blanket, or food, or even a set of clothes not covered in blood. It’s so cramped that I can’t lift both my arms, and it’s the sort of dark that only exists in nightmares. The heavy lock creaked as it was slid into place, and their boots echoed down the hall.

As soon as I was alone, the laughter began. I couldn’t control it and I didn’t care to. There’s no one to hear me this far below ground, and if there were, let them tell the Kaiser all about it.

Let him believe I’m mad. It won’t be the biggest mistake he’s made tonight. Somewhere out there, Blaise and Heron and Artemisia are getting word of my arrest and they’re putting together a plan to get me out. I know that as certainly as I know my name.

The Kaiser should have killed me when he had the chance.

* * *

—

I don’t know how long passes before my laughter dies down, or how much more time inches by before the footsteps break up the silence, these much softer than the guards’. Too soft to be Blaise’s. Artemisia’s, maybe? I scramble toward the bars and try to see down the hall, but it’s too dark and I don’t dare call out a name.

A candle’s dim light turns a corner, coming toward me and growing brighter, illuminating the girl holding it. I have to stifle a cry of surprise when she stops in front of my cell door, face inches from mine.

Crescentia might have survived the Encatrio, but it didn’t leave her unchanged. Her once soft, rosy skin has turned chalky, and even in the candlelight, it has a gray sheen, except for her neck, which is coal black from jawline to clavicle and rough as unpolished stone. Her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes have all turned from pale gold to a blinding, brittle white. Before, her hair fell past her waist in waves, but now it ends bluntly at her shoulders, frayed and broken at the edges. Singed.

But it isn’t only the poison. The girl standing on the other side of the cell bars isn’t the one I’ve known for the past ten years, the one I pretended to be a siren with, the one I laughed and gossiped with. That Crescentia was pretty and sweet and always smiling, but this girl has red-rimmed eyes and an expression like ice. No one could call her pretty now—fierce, striking, beautiful maybe, but never pretty. When we met, I thought she looked like a goddess, and she still does. But it’s no longer Evavia I see; it’s her sister Nemia, the goddess of vengeance. Before, Crescentia looked at me with love, like we were sisters, but now hate rolls off her in palpable waves.

And I don’t even blame her for it, though I can’t regret murdering the Theyn.

“Do you want to know why I did it?” I ask her when several moments pass in silence.

Her flinch is nearly imperceptible, but it’s there. “I know why you did it.” Her throat is raw and burnt and every word seems to pain her, though I can see how badly she tries not to show it.

She doesn’t know, not really, and I want her to understand. “For the last ten years I’ve lain awake at night with my mother’s dying scream in my ear, with your father’s cruel eyes haunting my nightmares. I thought he would kill me, too, sooner or later. The only way I could sleep was if I imagined killing him first. Poison wasn’t ideal, I’ll admit. A dagger would have been symmetrical; his own sword would have been poetic. But I worked with what I had.”

I watch her face carefully for a reaction as I speak, trying to shock her, but she barely even blinks. She reads me like one of her more challenging poems, and I know she sees through my apathy. It’s not surprising. We’ve always been able to read each other well. The difference is that for the first time, her mind is closed to me. I am looking at a stranger.

“Not killing you was the only time my father defied orders,” she tells me after a moment of quiet, her voice cold. “The Kaiser wanted you dead. My father passed it off as strategy, and he wasn’t wrong, but that’s not the real reason he spared you. He told me once that he looked at you and saw me. That turned out to be the biggest mistake he made.”

I remember the Theyn pulling me away from my mother’s body, even as I clutched her dress as tightly as I could. I remember him taking me to another room, speaking with his soldiers in a halting, violent language I didn’t understand at the time. I remember him asking me in terrible Astrean if I wanted something to eat or drink. I remember crying too hard to answer him.