Maram shook her head and closed her eyes. She didn’t care about politics, not now. She cared about the legacy she had nursed inside of her, of the promises she’d made because she believed that legacy was real and valid. Of the choices she’d made, believing she could nurture her heart and the state both.

“Maram?”

Her head snapped up.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” She stared at her grandmother. “Mathis is not the ruler of this planet. You are.”

She called a serving girl to escort her grandmother to her chambers, then sank to her knees by the fire.

Her father had killed her mother. She had spent all her life trying to make him proud. Trying to make him love her. Be harder, crueler, more steadfast in the ways of the bloodline. Leave half yourself behind and perhaps they would bestow purity on you.

What, exactly, ran in her blood?

What sort of legacy was she inheriting?

She couldn’t stop weeping. She didn’t know why she cried. Perhaps for what her mother had endured. For what she had given up in the name of her people. For the death of Najat’s optimism and romantic spirit. Everyone remembered her mother as one of the conquered—but Najat had never appeared so to her.

Yabnati’l aziza …

Her mother had loved her, though people seemed to doubt it. Would Najat have cared who Maram’s father was?

The doors to her balcony rattled, then opened. For a moment she stared at the figure haloed by the lanterns outside, uncomprehending. The metalwork in her hair caught the brassy light of the lantern and seemed to gleam.

“Am I a stranger to you now?”

The cry that left Maram’s mouth felt jagged and broken. She lurched to her feet and threw herself at Aghraas, and the solidity of her form shocked her as it always did. Aghraas was a warrior, though she had never said as much. Maram had spent time cataloguing the scars on her arms and on her back. There was one just beneath her ear that had always frightened and perplexed her in what it implied. She felt the rumble of laughter in her chest as she pulled her into her arms.

“You’re here?” she whispered.

“Of course I am,” Aghraas said, some of the laughter still threaded through her voice. “I have come to take you away.”

Maram felt a thrill and a cold fear at the same time and pulled back. “Away? I cannot go away. I am the princess.”