The first day, he crossed the floor so many times he wore a track into the dirt. Rae’s mind—turning over and over what the apprentice had said—paced alongside. Again and again, she heard the apprentice’s harrowing words—abandoned, brother; again and again, she considered the horrifying new meaning of air.

A twin she had never known. The king as her brother. Herself as “air.” These were terrifying, heart-rending things: Even thinking them, she could not catch her breath, her lungs suddenly heavy as clay.

Two of these things she could not admit at all. In the very marrow of her bones, she knew them to be false.

“The king is not my brother,” she whispered to the wolf.

“I am not meant to take the crown,” she insisted to the stones.

But the third… Rae closed her fingers over her palm. That absence she knew as true. If she could see all the way back to the moment before Mop had found her, see through the haze of infanthood and the glare of sunlight and mica-bright rocks, she knew she’d find another beside her on the cliffs. She’d felt it always in the edges of her consciousness, a part of herself she knew to be missing.

Almost always, Rae thought, looking at the wolf. He’d made that absence less.

Desperate to tell the king he was mistaken—I do not want his crown! I am not air!—she leapt to the door whenever she heard a guard passing: “Please, will the king see me?” But they said nothing to her at all. Sometimes their faces took on an odd expression—a look like they had eaten something disagreeable—and they might pause to tighten a bootstrap, or, hemming, shift their breastplate a little, but they never turned their heads toward her door.

This morning, though, as she perched trying to peer through the gap, one guard flinched when he heard her call, Please! Hesitating, glancing up and down the corridor, he approached and put his cheek by the little window. His moon-hollowed eye was framed in its opening. Rae started: She recognized him at once.

“I do not think he will see you,” he said gruffly.

“How can I convince him I mean him no harm?”

The shadow under his eye grew a little darker. “He has let the other children go,” he offered instead of an answer.

“All of them?” Rae felt a shade of relief.

“Not the…” The guard hemmed, wavering, then finally added, “… apprentice.”

“She shouldn’t—” Rae started to protest, but he, hearing a noise in the corridor, strode quickly away.

She was not happy to know the girl—Alba?—was here, too. Why would she not be freed with the rest? Guest, that advisor had called her—but he’d not sounded kind as he’d said it. Was she in a room in the palace? In a cell like this? “Alba!” Rae called through the gap. “Apprentice?… Alba?”

She pressed her ear to the stones, she listened at the little window, but only the echo of her own voice, a muddy -ba, -ba, -ba, answered.