Jane caught me practicing my curtsy in the dressing room that afternoon, one foot tucked behind the other, saying "Your Majesty" to a bedpost.

"Ellie."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're bowing to furniture." She leaned in the doorway with a ribbon in her teeth. "Come here. Your hair's a disaster."

I sat. She took the pins out and started over, and I watched her in the mirror, her mouth tight with concentration, a smear of ink on her thumb from copying the Dowager Queen's letters. Jane was the only person at court who knew. She had covered for me so many times that the old woman had started sending broth to my room for a headache I didn't have.

"You look nice," she said, finishing.

"You say that like it's bad news."

"I say it like I hope he deserves it." She pulled out the last pin and put it back in the same place. "That's all."

I decided to hear only the first half. I'd had practice.

The great hall of Velmere had a thousand candles lit that night, and I counted none of them, because I was standing at the Dowager Queen's shoulder holding a grey wool shawl she'd demanded and wasn't wearing. My rose silk was the one he'd said made me look like a secret. I'd saved four months of wages for it. My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

Eleven months. Eleven months of the study behind the tapestry, and his hand on mine under the tablecloth, and soon, my darling, be patient. I'd been patient. I had been so patient I'd stopped noticing there was nothing to be patient about.

King Casimir stood up and the music stopped.

"My lords and ladies," he said. "I have joyful news."

I lifted my chin. I had practiced that too.

"After long counsel, I have agreed to marry Princess Isaure of the Northern Reaches. The wedding will be held at midwinter."

For a moment I honestly thought I'd misheard. I looked at the Dowager Queen, who was nodding, and at the Northern ambassador, who was beaming, and at a lord near the pillars who had already started clapping. Then everyone was clapping. It rolled down the hall like surf.

Beside me, Lady Perpetua Vance leaned in, smelling of lilies.

"What a shame," she murmured. "You looked so ready."

I kept my face the way it was. I'm not sure how. There was a little crack in the stone floor by my left foot and I looked at that.

"Elowen," said the Dowager Queen, not turning around. "Wine."

So I fetched her wine.

I fetched it twice more over the next hour. I stood behind her chair while the ambassador described the princess's accomplishments, embroidery, Latin, a good seat on a horse. The king danced with a duchess, then a countess, then a girl of fifteen whose mother hovered at her shoulder like a hawk. His eyes crossed me three times. They kept going every time.

Jane found me near the end, at the pillar by the east door. Her fingers were freezing when she took my elbow.

"Come away. Please."

"He'll want to talk to me."

"Ellie."

"He'll want to explain."

She looked at me for a long moment. She had a way of folding her mouth when she was holding back something unkind, and she did it then. Then she let go.

"I'll wait up," she said.

The corridor behind the hunting tapestry was where we always met. It was narrow and cold, with a torch that never quite caught. I stood against the wall and looked at the crack in the floor, which had a bird shape if you tilted your head, and I waited. An hour, I think. Maybe more. There was music, far off, and then there was less.

He came with wine on his breath and color in his face.

"Elowen. I'd hoped you'd gone to bed."

"You said soon."

"Did I?" He frowned, really trying to remember. "Well. It was soon, wasn't it? It's only that it turned out to be something different from what I'd thought."

"You promised me."

"I promised you comfort." He said it the way a physician says it's nothing to worry about. "You gave it beautifully. I'm very grateful. But you're a clever girl, you must have always known a queen couldn't come from a lady-in-waiting."

I had a whole answer. I'd rehearsed it in the dark for most of a year.

"I thought you loved me," I said. That was all that came out.

He sighed. It was the sigh of a man whose child has dropped a cup.

"I was fond of you. Please don't make this ugly." He straightened his cuffs. "A carriage will take you to your family's estate in the morning. There's a purse. It's generous."

"Casimir."

"Good night."

The tapestry swung closed behind him. The painted hunters went on chasing their stag.

I don't remember choosing to go. My feet did it. I went past the guards, who looked straight ahead, and past the gardens, and down the old stairs behind the east wing that nobody used anymore, to the chapel where the roof had fallen in a hundred years ago. There was a broken wall. I sat on it in my rose silk and I cried like a dog, loud and ugly, with my mouth open, because there was no one to hear.

"If you're going to do that, do it somewhere else. You're ruining my favorite spot."

I screamed.

A man sat three feet from me on the same wall, one boot propped on the stone, peeling an apple with a very small knife. A long red ribbon of skin hung off his wrist nearly to the ground. He was dressed all in black, plainly, and he had a face too sharp to call handsome and eyes the color of a coal that has just stopped glowing. I hadn't heard him come. I hadn't heard anything.

"Your spot?" My voice was a wreck. "It's a ruin."

"It was a crossroads before it was a ruin. I'm sentimental." He still hadn't looked up. "The acoustics are splendid, too. I heard all of it, you know. Both parts. The hall and the tapestry." He ate a slice of apple. "You cry beautifully. Most people sound like geese."

My face went hot. "You were listening?"

"I was nearby. It's different."

"Who are you?"

"Ah." The knife paused. He looked at me properly, then, and the cold in the chapel seemed to go down a degree. "That depends who you ask. The priests say the Adversary. My mother said Vexley."

I laughed. I didn't mean to. It came up out of me like a hiccup.

"Of course. Of course you are."

"You don't believe me."

"I believe you're someone from the feast who's had too much wine." I wiped my face with the back of my wrist. "Go back to the party."

"No one will come if you scream. They never do, down here."

"Then I'll scream anyway."

"By all means." He set the apple on his knee, opened one hand, palm up. "But watch first."

The peel on the ground lifted.

It came off the stones like a thread being drawn upward, and curled in the air, and went blue at the edges and then all the way through. A thin steady ribbon of flame hung between us with no smoke and no sound. At the same moment every candle stub in the chapel lit. Dozens. On every sill and ledge, little yellow tongues, in a room that had been dark for a hundred years.

It was a few seconds before I noticed my breath was smoking in the cold. His wasn't.

"There we are," said Vexley, and closed his fingers. The flame went out. The candles stayed.

I didn't scream again. I found that out about myself.

"What do you want?"

"A wife."

It was such a ridiculous thing to say that I nearly laughed a third time.

"There's an old arrangement," he said, mild as a man mentioning the weather. "A crown, someone who wanted it very badly, and a clause that needs a mortal to break it. Freely given. Not tricked, not bought. Someone with a good reason to hate the king." He ate another slice. "You're rather qualified."

"You want me to marry you."

"I want you to consider it."

My teeth had started chattering. I hadn't noticed when. "What happens to him?"

"To Casimir?" The smile did something odd and didn't reach his eyes. "Everything he's ever taken for granted."

For one breath I wanted it so badly I could taste iron.

Then I thought: this is how it goes. A woman loses everything in a single night and her mind invents a monster so that her grief has a face. It seemed like an exact description of what was happening, and not a very comforting one.

"I need to think," I said.

"I'd worry if you didn't." He stood and brushed nothing from his sleeve. "A mortal who says yes in the first hour regrets it by the second. The third garden. Before first light. If you come, we'll discuss terms. If you don't, I'll find another girl with a grudge." He glanced down at me. "I'd rather not. You have good lungs."

"The third garden is chained shut."

"Is it?" That smile again. "How fortunate for us both."

I blinked, and the wall was empty. No smoke. No sound. Only the little bone-handled knife on the stone where he'd been sitting, with a curl of apple skin still stuck to the blade.

I didn't want to pick it up. I picked it up. It was warm, the way a hand is warm.

I put it in my sleeve and went up the stairs, slowly, because my knees had started shaking and I didn't trust them. The palace was loud with music from somewhere far away. Nobody saw me. When I reached my room, the door was open, and my trunk had been hauled into the middle of the floor and half packed. Someone had folded my good cloak. Someone had put my winter boots on top.

There was a note pinned to the lid in the steward's cramped hand. I read it standing in my ruined silk, with the knife still warm against my wrist.

The carriage would be at the east gate at six, not nine. By order of Her Majesty. A maid would come to help me dress at half past five.

I looked at the window. It was black, still, but it had that thin, watery look it gets before the sun. I tried to remember when the sun came up this time of year. Seven? Ten past?

Six was before that. I knew exactly how much before.