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Chapters (64)
  1. Front Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  6. Pronunciation Guide
  7. Prologue
  8. Part One
  9. One
  10. Two
  11. Three
  12. Four
  13. Five
  14. Six
  15. Seven
  16. Eight
  17. Nine
  18. Ten
  19. Eleven
  20. Twelve
  21. Thirteen
  22. Part Two
  23. Fourteen
  24. Fifteen
  25. Sixteen
  26. Seventeen
  27. Eighteen
  28. Nineteen
  29. Twenty
  30. Twenty-One
  31. Twenty-Two
  32. Twenty-Three
  33. Part Three
  34. Twenty-Four
  35. Twenty-Five
  36. Twenty-Six
  37. Twenty-Seven
  38. Twenty-Eight
  39. Twenty-Nine
  40. Thirty
  41. Thirty-One
  42. Thirty-Two
  43. Thirty-Three
  44. Thirty-Four
  45. Thirty-Five
  46. Part Four
  47. Thirty-Six
  48. Thirty-Seven
  49. Thirty-Eight
  50. Thirty-Nine
  51. Forty
  52. Forty-One
  53. Forty-Two
  54. Forty-Three
  55. Forty-Four
  56. Forty-Five
  57. Forty-Six
  58. Forty-Seven
  59. Epilogue
  60. Excerpt from The Sun and Its Shade
  61. The Night and Its Moon Playlist
  62. Acknowledgments
  63. About the Author
  64. Back Cover

Her teeth set with readiness as she stared into the shadows until she was one with them. She was numb to the high-pitched crack that echoed through the courtyard. She was dead to the gasps, the blood, the twisted faces of the children and matrons. She fixed her eyes so tightly on the dark space between worlds that reality fractured, breaking free as it drifted into the emptiness, like a star into the night sky. Its sounds ceased to register as it broke through her underclothes, her skin, her back, over and over again.

Four

There is a word for the space between moments. It’s a term for the quiet that echoes after each heartbeat, for the emptiness that exists betwixt things, though its name is one that’s been forgotten. The nothingness is much like the gap while one sleeps—when time catches on your last breath of consciousness and releases on your first moment awake. This spell might be minutes or hours or months that stretch into years, everything blurring together as if nothing has happened at all. The word is for the time that passes when no time is passing at all, and yet everything changes.

Five

“I’m ready.”

“You don’t have to be ready,” Nox said, maybe as much for herself as for her snowflake. “We can wait.”

“Wait for what? I’m as ready as I’m going to be.”

This was the fourth time Amaris had reassured her that morning while Nox worked on her hair. It was spring market day, and Nox was thinly veiling that she had more anxiety over the day’s arrival than Amaris. Nox had brushed and plaited the girl’s pearly hair into a half-knot, leaving the bottom half of her white tendrils to spill down her back. Amaris was now tall and slender, with the early hourglass shape of a young woman. She wasn’t old enough to have switched into the dresses that Nox was now forced to wear. If Amaris was lucky, she’d probably spend another year in the unisex britches and tunics worn by all children before the curse of adolescence. Where once a snowy baby had rested on Nox’s threshold in a basket, now stood a young woman in a white tunic. At least, the tunic was white on most of the children. On Amaris, the purity of her hair and lashes made the shirt appear rather dull and yellowed.

The years had come and gone. Agnes had announced to both Nox and Amaris that she was ready to call in the axe of a life debt that had hung over Amaris’s head for thirteen years, though she’d used less descriptive language. This eventuality had loomed from the moment the babe had been “gifted to them by the goddess,” as the matrons liked to cleverly word her unorthodox delivery.