WINGS OF THE TWICE CROWNED

The cold was in my feet and it wasn't going away.

I kicked at the blankets. Kicked again. My feet were right there, I could see the shape of them, but whatever signal I was sending down was not arriving. I lay back and stared up at the ceiling and opened my mouth and the sound that came out was nothing. A scrape. Less than a whisper. I tried again. Same thing.

The fire across the room was still going. Logs still lit, light still jumping on the stone. Normal fire doing normal fire things like my body wasn't refusing to work six feet away from it.

My hands were on the coverlet.

I know this because I could see them. That's the only reason I know. I couldn't feel them.

The door opened.

Lyris didn't run. She never ran anywhere, my sister, not because she was calm but because she had always moved like wherever she was going was already hers. She crossed the room in her sleeping robe, hair loose, no candle, and came to the foot of the bed. Stood there. Looked at me.

The way she looked at me.

"Sera." Real quiet. "How do you feel."

Not a question. The way you say something when you already know the answer and you're just deciding whether to pretend you don't.

I tried to say something back. She watched me try.

"I know." She got the chair from beside the window. Dragged it over, sat down, folded her hands together in her lap. Completely comfortable. Like this was just a late conversation, like we were two sisters who couldn't sleep. "Five years. I want you to understand I was careful. Fae bodies reject it if you move fast. Yours especially you're strong. Took longer than I planned."

Ashbloom. The word just sitting there between us. I had never heard it before.

"The reason you never conceived." She said it so level. "That wasn't a side effect. I asked for it. Specifically. Cael needed the five-year petition to be available. The Council needed to already have doubts about your reign." Short pause. "It made the whole thing cleaner."

I was looking at her face and trying to find something. The girl who grabbed my hand outside our mother's room when she was eight years old. The face that went to pieces at the burial and had to be held up by two of the maids. This was the same face. Exact same face. I kept waiting for it to be different and it was not different at all.

"Why." One word. It was all I had.

She looked at me like the question had stopped being interesting to her a long time ago. "Because this was never supposed to be yours."

The door opened again.

Cael.

He was dressed. That's what hit me first. Full jacket, buttoned, like he had been somewhere in the palace sitting and waiting on a particular hour. He came and stood beside Lyris's chair and looked at me in the bed and did not say anything.

I looked back.

Fourteen years of that face. Every version of it the one he wore in Council when he was choosing his words, the one at dinner when something was funny, the one from the morning of my ascension when he had touched my face with both hands and said he had been waiting his whole life for this. I had believed it. I had stored it. I had taken it out and looked at it on hard nights as evidence of something real.

The version he was wearing right now I had never seen before. Patient. Flat. A man standing in a finished room.