“Restore the throne without giving it up.” Safi barked a laugh of her own. It was thick with cold and hate.

Another defeated shrug. “I cannot deny it. My family worked centuries to improve Cartorra. Our borders are safe, our people are fed. Why would I give all of that up? Better to blend our bloodlines into one.”

“So that was why you wanted me to bear Leopold’s child. Our heir would be…” She searched her memory for the title Vaness had always used. A title she’d thought absurd, and yet clearly Henrick took it seriously. “Well Chosen,” she finished.

“Well Chosen,” he repeated.

“But why not betroth me to Leopold from the start?” Safi had to yell now. The wind whistled with speed, bending trees and covering the world in white. “Why did you marry me?”

“Because I … wanted Leopold to marry for love.” He looked strangely pained as he admitted this. Embarrassed even. “I did not know he loved you, or I would have done things differently.”

Snow gathered on Henrick’s shoulders, on the holly, on Safi’s arms still stretched long. And strangely, thunder rolled. A false, unnatural thunder that set her Truth-lens to frizzing. None of this made sense. Well Chosen and forgotten rulers—so many lives had been sacrificed for that?

“Why do you care about the Earth Well?” She waved the branch at him. Snow swept off. “No one remembers whom it chose to rule—if that ever truly happened.”

“So I thought too, until I met your mother. Laia remembered. Laia believed, and she’d spent years gathering proof. Old Sightwitch Sister records, old stories the rest of us had relegated to myth.”

“So you killed her.”

“I am not proud of what I did, but in the end, you are correct: I understand the bonds of family, Safiya, and I I did what I had to do to protect my own.”

Safi’s fingers, numb and stiff upon the branch, squeezed until she felt splinters. Wind battered against her, and the thunder pulsed wrong, wrong, wrong against her chest. There was so much Uncle Eron hadn’t told her, and for what? Secrets hadn’t helped anyone; they’d only cursed himself, his sister, and now her too in the end.

Ever so slowly, Henrick lifted his hands. Not in supplication but in surrender. “Please tell Paskella I love her.”

Safi glared. “You can tell her yourself.” She swung the branch at his head, not hard enough to kill. Only hard enough to neutralize. It cracked against his skull, jolting shock waves up her arms. He slumped, a heap of flesh quickly vanishing beneath the snow. She would come back for him. Eventually.

After claiming his crown and then his newest golden chain to control Hell-Bards, Safi turned away from this powerless man who could do no more harm. And away from the holly berries now hidden beneath a storm’s vengeful snow.