A glimmering streak in a dark ponytail.

Sophie—becoming a unicorn.

Claire shook her head, trying to clear her mind of the memory, and set the paintbrush down. She wasn’t ready to draw anything permanent yet. She tugged the pencil out of her hair, sat down on the floor with her back against the wall, and sketched a silver line across a scrap of parchment that had been left for her to test out the paints. And as she moved across the wild blankness of the page, confidence swept over her, and she began to feel calmer. This was something she knew how to do.

Letting her pencil fly across the page, Claire began to draw without setting out to sketch anything in particular. Her mind was filled with sharp points and jagged edges. Sketching was the best way of smoothing them out to make sense of what was happening. It was how she’d spent most of the nights when Sophie was away in the hospital and their home felt particularly empty.

She drew a zig and then a zag and finally another zig. It could be the top of a mountain range or … She added a few lines and began to shade it in: a crown.

Claire felt prickly with frustration. She was so close to it. Well, to the first part of it, anyway. The Love Knot Tine was only a few yards away, resting out there in the lobby for anyone to see, and yet it felt as far away as the moon.

She drew another line, thick and heavy—as heavy as the crown must be to wear. Claire could hardly tolerate a headband, the way it pushed on her temples, so she could only imagine how heavy a metal crown must feel.

She added a few more lines to her drawing, her pencil speeding along faster than her thoughts. Usually, magic was in the material, and Claire helped guide it out, but now it almost seemed as though the pencil were dragging her forward, and she let the image, whatever it was, spill onto the paper. A story unspooled within her that felt like a forgotten memory:

“I don’t want to wear it,” the princess complained. “It’s heavy, and it makes my head hurt.” Plus, it was noisy. Whenever she was around the crown, she could hear the hum of the meteorite it had been forged from.

“My sweet star, you’re never going to have to wear it.” Her mother, a woman with a sparkling veil pinned to a small tiara nestled in her hair, dropped a kiss on the girl’s forehead. “That’s your brother’s burden to bear.”