The bells were ringing again when Camillia came through the cloth market with her sister.

A refugee cart was stopped at the end of the row, the ox lathered, the family on it grey with road dust, and a priest was already moving the gawkers along. It was the third cart that week. The war in the east had been eating the borderlands for two years, and the city had learned to walk past what it sent up the king’s road.

Camillia had a finished dress over one arm. Eva walked beside her, making a bread roll last.

"Tomas said he’d come by after the workshop," Eva said.

"Tomas says that every day."

"He comes every day."

Camillia almost smiled.

Then the market went quiet around them.

People stepped back. A stall holder pulled his cart in. Four riders came down the row, and the one in front wore royal colours.

The prince reined in beside her. He did not dismount.

"Three times," he said. "I’ve sent for you three times."

"And I’ve answered three times, Your Highness."

"To say no."

"I’m to be married in the spring."

"To a carpenter." Behind him, one of his riders laughed.

"Yes."

He looked down at her from the horse for a long moment. The market had gone very still. Eva had stopped chewing.

"Do you understand what I’m offering you?"

"I do," Camillia said. "The answer is the same."

The prince held her eyes a moment longer. Then he smiled, turned his horse, and rode on, and his men fell in behind him, and the market slowly started making noise again.

That was the fourth time. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

The fifth time, he did not ask.

The door hung off one hinge when the sun came up.

The table was overturned and one of its legs had broken against something. There was blood on the floorboards by the hearth, dried black by morning, and Tomas lay in it where they had made him kneel. They had made him watch first. His throat had been opened last.

Eva sat in the corner with her knees against her chest. She was fourteen. When Camillia reached for her, she flinched, so Camillia stopped reaching and sat down on the floor beside her instead.

At some point she took the cloth off the broken table and laid it over Tomas. She did not remember doing it.

A neighbour pushed the broken door, looked inside, and left without a word.

The prince had gone before dawn.

He had stepped over Tomas on his way out.

She went to the king because she still believed in something.

The throne room was long and cold and full of men. She stood at the foot of the dais in her best remaining dress, the bruises on her arms covered, the ones on her face not coverable, and she said it plainly.

"Your son came to my house with six of his men. They did what they wanted with me and with my sister. She is fourteen. Then they killed the man I was to marry. They made him watch everything first."

A murmur went through the court. A chamberlain stepped forward. "You will mind what you say of His Highness—"

The king raised a hand, and the chamberlain stopped.

Camillia kept going. She gave the night. The names of the men she had recognized. The hour the prince left.

Around her, two nobles whispered behind their hands. A lady near the dais turned her face away — not from the prince. From her. Somewhere on the left, a man checked the time.

The prince stood beside the throne in clean clothes, smiling. Not enough for the room to name it. Enough for her.

When she finished, the king was quiet for a moment.

"There is a war coming up my road," he said. "Do you understand that? The east is burning. This city holds because the people believe it holds. And you come into my hall, in front of my court, and ask me to put my own blood on trial on the word of a seamstress."

"It is not only my word. Six men—"

"Soldiers of the royal guard," the king said. "Who will say what soldiers say." He sat back. "Your man’s death was an unfortunate matter. These things happen in hard years. It will be looked into."

Then his voice softened.

"You have suffered. I see it. Grief makes liars of honest people, and I will not punish you for yours. Go home."

Camillia’s nails found her palms.

She looked at the king on his throne. At the prince beside it. At the lady with her face still turned away.

The law was not broken. It was working exactly as it had been built to work. For them. It had never once been built for her.

She bowed.

She went home.

She started sharpening.

She waited in the alley behind the grain market until the first of the six came out the back of the tavern to piss.

He was humming. He did not hear her cross the mud, and he did not get to make a sound, because her hand was over his mouth and the knife was already in under his ribs, and the humming stopped against her palm. She held him against the wall until he went heavy, then let him slide down it.

He looked surprised the whole way down. She waited until he finished, then walked out of the alley with the knife back up her sleeve.

The second died in a stable. The third in a guard passage off the barracks, where she waited four hours in the dark without moving. The fourth and fifth came out of a tavern together, drunk, and never reached the end of the yard.

It did not feel like justice. Each one felt like a door closing behind her. She kept walking.

The sixth man rode in parades.

The procession came down the cathedral road on the feast day, and the whole city came out for it.

The people cheered him. That was the part she could not bear. The second son on a white horse behind his father’s carriage, one gloved hand raised, and the crowd loved him, because the crowd had never been alone in a room with him.

Camillia stood in the front row with her hood down.

She wanted him to see.

The horse slowed at the cathedral square. She went under a soldier’s arm and crossed the open stones in three steps, and the prince looked down at the movement and knew her face in the last second, and she watched the smile fall off it before she drove the blade up under the edge of the breastplate to the hilt.

The square went silent for one breath.

Then it screamed.

She turned for the carriage. The king was inside it, and the king owed her as much as the son did. She got four steps. A spear haft took her legs out from under her, the stones came up at her face, a knee landed between her shoulders and a boot pinned her wrist, and the carriage door never opened.

Somewhere above the screaming, the prince came off his horse and did not get up.

They did not kill her in the square.

They dragged her down to the prison under the castle instead.

The cell was stone on five sides and iron on the sixth.

They chained her wrists to the wall with enough slack to sit and not enough to stand straight. The bruises from the square covered one side of her face. Far above, through the rock, bells were ringing — not the feast bells. The war bells. The east had broken while the city watched a parade.

She cried that night, for the first time since autumn. Forehead on her knees, quiet, so the guards would not hear it.

For Tomas. For Eva. For the woman who had stood in front of a throne and believed, for one last stupid moment, that the truth weighed anything.

At some point the crying stopped.

The prince. The king. The chamberlain. The guards. The men whispering behind their hands.

She sat in the dark and went through them, face by face, and the hate was the only thing they had left her, so she held onto it.

That was the night the dogs in the castle yard went quiet.

The two guards on the prison gate heard footsteps come out of the courtyard dark.

Bare feet on stone. Unhurried.

The older one raised his spear. "Who goes there?"

No answer. The footsteps kept coming.

"I said who—"

She stepped into the torchlight, and the challenge died in his mouth.

She was tall, and she was mostly bare. Black-red symbols curled over her pale skin, up from her hips, across her stomach and chest to her throat — script in no language either man knew, written on flesh like scripture. Dark silk and thin gold chains covered what they covered and moved when she moved. Behind her, folded like a cloak, were wings the colour of blood drying on glass. Two small black horns curved out of her hair. Her eyes were red, with a ring of gold around each pupil.

From a distance, her smile looked gentle.

The younger guard’s spear dipped without him noticing. "Bloody hell," he said. Then he grinned. "Are you lost, love? Because if you’re lost, I’ll walk you anywhere you like."

"Quiet," the older one said. His own eyes had not left her either. He had to push the words out. "This is the king’s prison. You can’t be here. State your business."

"Open the gate," she said.

The older guard’s hand tightened on the spear. "We can’t do—"