The queen took a small breath. “Your mother met with an accident Thursday night, Lovisa. She fell down a flight of stairs. They think she dropped a lamp and slipped on the oil, then hurt her neck and suffocated.”

Lovisa was electric with disbelief. “Are you saying my mother is dead?”

“Yes.”

“And she died in an accident?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe it,” Lovisa said. “I don’t believe it. How did she suffocate?”

“If you break a certain part of your neck,” said Bitterblue, “you lose the ability to breathe. They think that’s what happened.”

“It can’t be,” said Lovisa.

“Apparently it’s true. I’m so sorry, Lovisa.”

Lovisa was grasping around with her hands but she couldn’t find anything to hold, just pieces of straw. “Don’t be silly. There’s nothing to be sorry about. She didn’t love me.”

The queen said, “Lovisa—”

“Don’t you tell me that she did,” said Lovisa, her voice rising. “That was not love.”

“I would never, ever tell you that,” said the queen. “I believe you. But you are worthy of love.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Lovisa cried, then pushed herself up and stumbled to her bedroom. Her mother had tried to pull her away from the burning house. Lovisa had hit her with a shovel, as hard as she could. That was the last exchange Lovisa would ever have with her mother.

She crawled under her covers and stopped thinking.

—

Dinner was late because of the queen’s visit to the Magistry. Lovisa ate hers in a chair by the fire because there wasn’t enough room around the table and because she didn’t like the careful, sympathetic looks people kept shooting at her, as if something terrible had happened to her and there was something she should be crushed about.

Suddenly, to her humiliation, tears began to roll down her face. Then she was sobbing, gasping for breath. She spilled hot tea in her lap and shouted as it scalded her skin.

The people in the room moved calmly and swiftly, as if her outburst were the most routine way for a person to behave. Someone—Nev—brought her into Nev’s tiny room, checked her legs to make sure she wasn’t burned, applied a salve. Someone else—Nev’s grandfather, Saiet—tucked her into bed, pulling a soft, Nev-smelling blanket up to her chin. Someone else—Nev again—brought her unfinished dinner and a drink into the room and left them on the bedside table, in case she wanted them.

“Can my mother come to you later, Lovisa?” Nev asked. “She’s a healer, you remember?”

“I’m not sick,” Lovisa said.

“Can she come?” Nev said again, firm as always, but gentle too. Worried.

Oh, who cares? Lovisa thought. More useless mothers. “Fine,” she said.