Lovisa didn’t understand it, but it didn’t matter. Grabbing the ash shovel, she ran to the window farthest from the front of the house. The shovel was solid and heavy in her hands. She raised it like a cudgel and smashed it through a windowpane, unconcerned about the guards. No one was going to investigate a tinkle of glass while the house was exploding.

As she brushed the jagged edges of glass away from the window grilles, someone—her father—tried the main library door and called her name. In a panic, she stuck one leg through the grille, then the other, then pushed, let go, dropped to the ground. The cold was shocking after the fire, the air so pure that she felt herself almost drowning in it. She ran, circling the back of the house. The house did not look right. Part of the second floor—the place where her mother’s study had been—was a black, gaping hole. She couldn’t think about it now; she kept running. When she reached the tree on the house’s other side, she threw her shovel down. Bark scraped skin from her hands but she climbed fast and hard, thinking of Queen Bitterblue and the need not to think about anything else. The trellis was easier to scale than the tree. The window opened smoothly. Lovisa dropped inside.

In the house’s warmth, she raced down corridors, straining her ears, wondering if it was only her imagination that the air here, far from the source of the fire, was smoky. She’d inhaled so much smoke already that it was hard to tell. Far away, she heard more shouts. Something else too, something she would have dismissed as wind in the eaves if she hadn’t had a horrifying suspicion that it was the crackle and roar of a house on fire.

Small fire, she thought, almost crying. I wanted a small, distracting fire!

No one met her as she ran to the attic stairs. No guards had been dispatched to this part of the house to rescue the queen. What must it be like to be trapped in that dark, smelly room, hungry and weak, as the walls grew hot and the air filled with smoke? Her parents had chosen that fate for another human being.

At the top of the attic steps, Lovisa opened the door and burst across the cavernous space, reaching into her shirt for the key. Her hands shaking hard, she unlocked the queen’s door, then pushed into the room to find the queen standing there before her, as if waiting. Queen Bitterblue wielded the letter opener in one hand like a sword, a calm, ferocious expression on her face.

“You,” said the queen, in Keepish. “I didn’t think you were coming.”