What if her story could make people want to hear new voices, new ideas? What if Lovisa was discovering that she agreed with Nev that silbercows should have a voice in Parliament? What if she made it a political experiment, to figure out what words, what way of telling her story, would get other people to think so too? She was sixteen. That was still young, wasn’t it? She’d already wasted a lot of time. What if she started now? Who could help her? Gorga? Mara? Nev? How long would it take her to learn all she needed to know?

Staring up at the windows of the foreign queen, Lovisa was beginning to understand how much she wanted a bigger world than she’d ever been promised as a child. There were monsters in the sea who returned lost items, and silbercows she could talk to, and a pig wandering the Devrets’ heat ducts. There were smugglers pulling off questionable feats of engineering in the north, and glaciers calving icebergs into the sea, and problems here in Parliament, for people to argue about as if they cared. Some of them actually did care.

And she was thinking now not about what it would mean to her brothers if she did or didn’t testify against her father, but about what it would mean to her. What did any of this mean to her? What had her father done to her? Her father had lied to her, playacted. He’d pretended to be her ally against her mother, then betrayed her repeatedly. He’d killed a boy she’d brought home. He’d compelled her to do desperate and destructive things—set fire to a house, throw an explosive egg—to save other people. And now, finally, he’d put her in the position of having to decide whether to tell the truth about him, then live with the consequences forever.

I believe you think you love me, Papa, she thought, in your way. But I’m worthy of more.

She stepped into the light of the hotel’s entrance. The guards, recognizing her, glanced dubiously at the sodden lower half of her coat, then let her in.

—

She found the queen and Giddon in an upstairs library, sitting on a sofa together, eating cake that, inexplicably, had flaming candles stuck into it.

“Lovisa,” said Bitterblue in a glad voice, patting the space beside her. “We’re celebrating Giddon’s birthday. Have some cake.” Her eyes were wide and trusting. Bitterblue’s eyes had used to track Lovisa anxiously, as if Lovisa was about to do something desperate. Lovisa had known what Bitterblue had been thinking then. She’d understood why the queen had asked her questions to distract her, or created jobs to keep her away from a cliff’s edge. Lovisa was grateful, for the queen had been right.