Aurora gasped and spun around, the scarf on her head toppling to the side with the quick movement. Her mother was awake and struggling to push herself up onto her pillows, but her arms kept folding weakly under her own weight. Rora pushed past Kiran, rushing to her mother’s side to press her back, urging her to be careful.

“You are awake,” Aurora whispered, her throat choked with tears. “Oh goddess, I am so glad you are awake.”

Her mother’s too-bony fingers wrapped around her forearm, pulling Aurora’s hand down and against the queen’s cheek. “And you are alive.”

There was no stopping the tears then. Aurora could not fathom the pain she had put her mother through, the worry and grief her mother had suffered needlessly, because her plan went awry. If she had been brave enough to tell her mother the truth, if she had not kept so many of her fears about Cassius to herself—Aurora could not think of what might have been. There was no going back to fix her old mistakes; she simply had to do better moving forward. And this time, she knew that trusting people with her truth, the whole truth, was the only way they would possibly make it through.

Sometime in her crying, Kiran had slipped from the room, perhaps to inform the others of the queen’s waking. She took one of her mother’s frail hands between both of hers—it felt small and delicate, like a tiny bird.

“I have so much to tell you, Mother. Beginning with the fact that I love you so very much, and I am sorry I left you so worried.” She could not bring herself to apologize for leaving in the first place, not entirely, though she had plenty of regret and grief over the decision. She could have handled it better, left fewer people in jeopardy, prepared her mother in some way, perhaps. But she would not regret the things she learned and the ways she grew on that journey. She could not. “I had planned for you to receive a note explaining the truth of my disappearance, but things did not go as planned.”