“Good.” Una pursed her lips. “Then don’t make me give you orders next time.”

“Yes, Major,” Wren murmured.

Wren swallowed a surge of guilt. For Una, this mission wasn’t only about justice or pleasing the queen. It was about redemption. Although Wren wanted to reach out to her, she remained still, as if any sudden movement would shatter the tentative truce between them.

Slowly, Una’s face hardened into its usual mask, stern and impassive. “I’ll need to draft the report for the queen tonight.”

Wren wanted to mourn the lost moment, but the painful reminder of the queen bled her dry of any emotion but fear. She gathered up a fistful of grass and twisted it, desperate to ground herself in something solid. “You can’t.”

“I have to. My duty is to the queen above all else.”

“But what’s going to happen to us when she finds out? What about your promotion?” Una had been angling for the promotion to lieutenant colonel for months. A mistake like this would cost them both dearly. Una could face a reduction in rank—and Wren could be stripped of hers entirely.

Traced by the bruise-purple glow of dusk, Una’s expression was unreadable. “I don’t know.”

They sat in silence and watched the sun thin into a brilliant orange ribbon behind the mountains. On a night like this, not even Una’s warmth beside Wren felt much like comfort.

CHAPTER TWO

As they waited for their appointment with the queen, Wren’s every nerve unbraided to the rhythm of tick, tick, tick. Hung from the sheer stone walls of the North Tower were hundreds of clocks. Carved and painted cuckoo clocks, clocks on glass mosaics, clocks with swinging pendulums and clocks with churning gears, clocks in glass cases, clocks wrought from metal. Far too many clocks for any one person to have and stay sane. It was said Isabel commissioned them to surround herself with things that ran smoothly, things that were easily fixed, unlike nations.

The hall of the North Tower stood empty, save for Wren and Una. Ribbed vaults laced the ceiling like a corset, and stained-glass panels loomed above them, caged by their leaded frames. Wren hated this place. Its echoing vastness, how the dust swirling through the fragmented light looked like wraiths in the darkest edges of her vision. It held nothing but books and icons and the suffocating gloom of her aunt’s presence. The only thing bright and alive here was Una, limned in multicolored sunlight as it streamed through the glass.

Any other day, Wren’s breath might have caught at how easily Una could be memorialized here, another stained-glass warrior queen. Beautiful and fierce. But today, it filled her with dread, not wonder. She could only think about how Una belonged here and she did not.

“You’re staring,” Una said.