Below, the chamber was deep and cavernous, each duke’s resting place surrounded by gorgeously decorated screens, each wife and child laid out upon a sarcophagus. This was different somehow from the underworld she’d visited after the feast, alone and by the light of her magic—everything felt more alive now in the yellow torchlight. The warm flames danced over grimy statues, old clothing, elaborate carvings, and the rich and rotting carpets adorning the walls, blooming with color—the opposite of the monochrome world she’d entered by pale mage-light. The shadows leaped and multiplied, as if for every living soul at her father’s funeral there were another ten of the dead. The people of the castle shuffled into the wide chamber, each finding a place to kneel.

Constance knelt at the front of the procession, the cold floor hard against her knees, and watched with detachment as the cryptlings carried the Duke toward the long tomb reserved for him since birth. The family motto was prominently displayed across the arched screen: Without its roots the forest withers. The tree sigil on the screen doors was inlaid with gold leaf—and as the doors were opened, the metal glinted in the firelight. Within, her father’s last resting place: a bed of stone. The cryptlings laid him down with extreme gentleness, as if they were afraid to wake him.

On either side of the tomb, the Duke’s two wives—her own mother and Winton’s—lay in state, their bodies illuminated by the torches. As the old prayers wafted through the air, the incense burning to a thick and dizzying smoke, Constance felt her eyes drawn to her mother’s grave again; they flickered over her angular form. She’d been born in a land of sunlight and warmth, her family’s palazzo in Scarossa, a great island city at the southernmost point of Valorian, its lands stuttering into aquamarine. She remembered her mother dimly, remembered the brightly colored pictures, like jewels, in the atlas she’d kept in the secret place beneath her window. Remembered the other secret books she’d found after her mother’s death, the magical and the foreign, the glittering and the gorgeous. Had her mother truly wanted to spend eternity here in the dark and cold, among strangers?

Constance knew she had not.

Eventually, the cryptlings started to administer the last rites. The hush grew deeper as the black-robed mortician handed one of the younger cryptlings the holy oil. Everyone was remembering the Duchess’s funeral, Constance knew—including the cryptling. The poor boy’s hands were trembling. She glanced at her brother—his hands were clenched, his breathing short and fast. She rested her hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently in reassurance as the cryptling touched the oil hesitantly to their father’s forehead, lips, and heart.

Nothing happened. Of course. That girl was probably the only mage to be born in Duke’s Forest since I was.