Duja swallowed hard. “Laya will learn. I’ll teach her.”

Maiza hesitated. She said carefully, “Since the accident, the princess has shown more of an interest in practicing control. That’s a good sign, at least.”

The accursed accident. Three years before, and Maynara still spoke of nothing else. In the council room, Duja’s critics hammered on her regime’s negligence and waste. How could she justify herself? Twice in twenty-two years, an entire wing of the palace had to be rebuilt. Both times, they’d paid for the reconstruction from the funds allotted to shipbuilding and the rice harvest and the kadatuans’ dedicated chests. The blame fell, as it always did, on Hara Duja. Laya had been a child of fifteen then, wide-eyed, remorseful, and easy to forgive.

If the council had allowed them to move on, it was because they’d gotten lucky. Since the first fire all those years before, the eastern wing had stood uninhabited, and no one had been hurt in the second wreckage. Laya claimed to have learned her lesson, but sometimes, Duja wasn’t so sure. Her daughter was eighteen now, and she was expected to take Duja’s place frightfully soon. She could no longer afford to make such irreparable mistakes.

If Laya wanted to inherit the throne, to call herself Hara Laya one day, she had so much left to learn.

Duja set her jaw. She had known of her daughter’s callous nature since she’d been a little girl, yet how many years had she wasted? “I should have taken greater care with her. After all, I knew better. I saw firsthand what happened with Pangil.” She often avoided saying his name, as if the slight omission would keep the memories at bay.

Maiza shook her head vehemently. “You mustn’t think that way, Your Majesty. Laya is nothing like him.”

Him. Pangil, Hara Duja’s older brother. The fire starter, the spirit who haunted the palace, the man who was once Maynara’s beloved heir. He’d laughed as the eastern wing burned, not yet knowing that his own mother had been trapped inside it. Another accident, he’d claimed, back then.

Subconsciously, Duja rubbed the faint scar on the side of her neck, dark specks that stood out against her brown skin in the morning light, the ghost of a burn Maiza had healed many years earlier. Her brother was prone to accidents.

“Yes, Maiza, you’re right.”

She closed her eyes, and Maiza began chanting in the low, somber cadences of Old Maynaran. The pain in her muscles subsided, flushed out of her body in a great wave. The stiffness wouldn’t trouble her for the rest of the day, and the enchantments should stem the tremors until the following evening. Any reprieve the shaman could grant her was only temporary.