Like the nestling, Tayreet had grown to strength in the heart of their sacred city, and like the nestling, she’d been sent down to their lost kin as a symbol of strength and war. High above a battlefield an arrow pierced Tayreet’s breast and knocked her from the sky. When the prince hunting her found her, her body had loosed its natural bird shape and taken on a human one.

The prince loved her from the first, and Tayreet him.

The nestling was always astonished that anyone might fall in love with their hunter, and her cousin had scoffed and tugged on a white braid.

“Not a real arrow, nestling,” her cousin said. “Love. Love knocked her from her lofty perch.”

How awful, the nestling remembered thinking.

In the center of the palace was a room with nothing but windows and mirrors. From there the nestling could see everything. They showed her life far away, across galaxies and in places hidden away by star dust. In the far corner of the room, wreathed in shadow, was a great mirror, many times as tall as she was. Consigned to shadows but for the great crack that ran through its center, she nonetheless sat in front of it for hours. Its gilt frame was carved with images of birds and lions and spears, and any time she stepped close she felt a pulse of life.

Until at last, one day, it woke and showed her the image of another girl. A princess.

She was young and stone-faced, cloaked in black. Around her forehead was a gold coronet, studded with a single green gem. Her small hand was engulfed by an elder woman’s larger one, and she didn’t move—she seemed to not breathe at all. A moment later, a procession passed in front of her bearing a coffin draped in green.

She didn’t see the princess again, not for many years, though she went to the mirror nearly every day. It showed her other things: the cost of war on the princess’s planet, loss of life, rebellion and the rebellion’s end. The nestling thought that, perhaps, the stone-faced girl had died. And then one day the nestling returned to the mirror, a woman grown, and found that the princess had grown too, and that she had a twin. Somehow, she knew which was the princess she’d seen all those years ago at the funeral and which was her double.

Please, the double said. Let me explain.

Nothing you say will fix this, the princess said, and though her expression was as stone-faced as it had been at the funeral, the nestling could hear a world of grief buried in that single sentence.

I was sincere, the double said.

A viper is never sincere.

Please, Maram. I took your place and risked my life for you.

Maram, the nestling repeated softly to herself, tasting the name for the first time.