“She would have let that girl be killed,” I say earnestly, as if I could make my mother see the injustice, the ugliness of Valka’s intention. “And she had the brooch all along!”

“And you betrayed her!”

That silences me. Even if it was Valka who betrayed the girl, knowing she was innocent, picking her out because she was the easiest target of all the servants there. And did it out of spite, to get back at Emmanika for yesterday’s altercation.

“Do you know,” my mother goes on in a low voice, “how hard I have worked to keep the throne for your brother? Almost, we were exiled! We nearly lost it all—and you would have grown up a nothing in a foreign court, and then even less, if we could not prove our usefulness. I have kept you both here, kept your power and title for you, and this is what you do? Do you know what it has taken to make an ally of Daerilin—do you understand that it is his support that kept our throne? And now you have destroyed his daughter, publicly revealed her as a liar and a thief! All for some nameless servant.”

I stare at the ground. I am sorry, sorry for what my mother has gone through in order to hold onto the throne. But is that all that matters to her? Holding onto power, regardless of everything else? Isn’t the point of ruling to also take care of those below you—as Emmanika tried to tell Valka? Although she’d also counseled Valka not to make a scene—and that is precisely what I did.

“Know this,” my mother says softly. “You have chosen your future. I must keep the throne for your brother, and if that means you fall for your stupidity, then fall. There is no one here who will catch you.”

Her words cut through me. I dip my head, but I cannot keep the tears from leaking out of my eyes. “Mother,” I say, my voice breaking. “Please. Valka would have—”

“Get out.”

I manage to choke back my sobs just long enough to close the door behind me.

I stand in the shadow of the courtyard watching a pair of servants hastily load trunks into a carriage. A torch burns before the hall, and in its light the carriage appears like a great, hulking beast, hunched over and lying in wait.

Foolishness, that. A carriage is just a carriage, after all. I rest my cheek against the rough wooden wall beside me. There is Valka now, walking sullenly behind her elderly aunt and traveling companion. She casts one fierce, angry glance about the empty courtyard before clambering up. Daerilin will remain here through the summer, as he promised, but Valka has been disgraced past reprieve. There will be no stay through the summer months for her, no betrothal to announce in the fall.