I saw in the hungry way Henry sought Victor’s attention and favor that Victor’s love was rare, and rare things are always the most valuable. In turn, I became even more what Victor wanted me to be. Lovely. Sweet. Brilliant and quick-minded but never as smart as him. I laughed at Henry’s jokes and plays, but I saved my best smiles for Victor, knowing he collected them and secreted them away.

I had become this girl in order to survive, but the longer I lived in her body, the easier it was to simply be her. I was twelve, on the cusp of leaving childhood behind forever. But we still played like children. I was Guinevere to their Arthur and Lancelot, acting out the dramas Henry lovingly cobbled together out of pieces he stole from great playwrights of eras past. The trees were our Camelot. All our foes were imaginary and therefore easily defeated.

One day we were playing a variation of kings and queens. I lay in a magical sleep upon my forest bed. Henry and Victor, after much travail, had found me. “She is the most beautiful girl in the world! A sleep like death has claimed her. Only love can awaken her again!” Henry declared, raising his sword to the sky. Then he leaned over and kissed me.

I opened my eyes to find Henry looking at me in shock, as though he could not believe what he had done. I dared not look at Victor. I squeezed my eyes shut again, not reacting to Henry’s kiss.

“I thought perhaps it would— I thought it would wake her,” Henry said, stumbling over the words. He sounded frightened.

“She is not sleeping.” Victor’s voice was as brittle as morning-frosted grass. “Here, see? No life in her veins.” He lifted my wrist, which I kept limp. “She is dead. But we can trace the pathways her heartbeat would have used in life.” Victor drew a finger along the blue veins in my pale arm, up and up to where my sleeve started. My arm twitched at the contact.

“Be still!” Victor whispered, catching my open eye. “Here, I have my own blade, sharper and subtler than your sword. We will see if she bleeds now that she is dead.”

“Victor!” There was no laughter in Henry’s voice. My wrist was tugged away, and I was pulled out of my corpse character and into Henry’s arms.

“You cannot do that!” he said.

“Just a small cut, to see what is under the skin. Do you not wonder?” Victor’s anger this time was not a storm raging out of control. It was darker and deeper, like the bottom of the lake—cold and unknowable. It was a new type of anger, and I did not know how to soothe it.