Chapter 1 - The Hand on the TableThe crystal hand stood upright on a silver tray, its five transparent fingers bent as though they were about to seize the throat of someone who had not yet entered the room. Mara Finch carried it through the Hall of a Thousand Candles while the entire court pretended not to watch. This was the custom of Asterhall: when the king wished everyone to fear an object, he ordered servants to carry it in public and called the display a celebration.
Mara was twenty-three, the daughter of a woman who had polished the queen's mirrors until the night the queen vanished. Since then Mara had polished floors. A servant who asked questions was a servant who stopped receiving wages. She had learned that rule before she learned to read, although she had eventually learned to read as well, secretly, from the ledgers left beside locked accounting rooms.
Tonight the king had summoned guests to commemorate Queen Yselle's death. Twelve years had passed, and he had chosen the anniversary to announce that Princess Elara, now twenty, would accept the Crown of First Winter. He had also chosen, without explanation, to put the queen's enormous woven portrait directly behind the royal throne. It showed Yselle with her hands folded over a hundred tiny faces, each face a citizen she had sworn to protect. Mara remembered the original tapestry differently. In childhood she had seen the queen's left hand extended, open rather than closed.
"Do not touch the fingers," whispered Master Orin, the chamberlain, catching her wrist. "The king says it remembers promises."
"Then perhaps it should be the king who carries it," Mara said.
Orin tightened his grip until the tray rattled. "Your mother was dismissed for saying less."
The music stopped. Across the hall a line of guards marched toward Elara. She was standing beside a pillar in a dark traveling dress, her hair pinned back and her face pale with fury. She had refused the ceremonial silver gown and, apparently, the ceremonial husband selected by Chancellor Voss. King Aldren sat beneath the throne's gilded arches, gold chain heavy across a black coat. He pointed at his daughter as if she were an unsightly stain on the marble.
"Bring her here. She will be crowned before the witnesses."
"I told you I won't swear the oath without seeing Mother's sealed letters," Elara answered. Her words were quiet, yet they cut across the hall. "You keep telling me the truth would hurt me. Whom would it hurt more?"
Aldren's jaw moved once. The tapestry behind him stirred although the windows were closed.
Mara saw a black, bristling shape rise from the floor between the princess and the advancing guards. It resembled a thicket made from feathers, glass splinters, and shadows. Every masked guest retreated, revealing the chamber's red and black checkered floor. Elara threw an arm up. The thing lunged at her, but a ring of pale water exploded around her waist and climbed, bead by bead, into a dress of brilliant silver. A crown of crystal formed above her hair. She gasped, not because the magic hurt, but because she recognized its touch.
"Mother?" she breathed.
A sword flashed. A guard swung at her shoulder. Elara twisted aside. The new gown struck the floor like falling rain, and a sharp blue line passed through the air where the blade had been. Mara watched the crystal fingers on her tray close by an inch. She was holding an instrument, not an ornament. Whatever had changed Elara had awakened the hand too.
A huge face seemed to emerge from the threads of the queen's portrait. For the span of a heartbeat Mara thought the dead queen had opened her eyes. Then something cracked behind the woven cloth, and Aldren rose, abruptly leaving the throne. He retreated to the wall. He did not call for Elara. He did not ask if she was injured. He found a seam in the tapestry and slipped his shoulder behind it, moving with the familiarity of a man who had used the passage many times.
The guards pressed Elara against a column. She raised both hands. Spears of silver light curled around their weapons and bent the blades toward the ceiling. One man fell; another screamed. Elara looked as frightened as any of them. She had never been taught this magic. She had only ever been taught not to question her father.
A shower of broken crystal formed in front of her face. In every shard was the same woman's reflection: long dark hair, silver crown, silver gown. But one reflection moved before she did. It turned its head to the portrait and whispered through glass, soundless but unmistakable: Do not let him close it.
Mara's fingers froze around the tray. Beneath the transparent hand, tiny letters illuminated one after another, letters she knew from the margins of her mother's forbidden notebook: A WITNESS MAY BE SILENCED, BUT NEVER UNMADE.
The queen's portrait split from forehead to hem. Aldren's crowned face appeared in the narrow black opening. On the opposite side of the hall, behind the terrified princess, someone stepped out of a curtain of silver dust wearing Elara's exact face.
Before this night, Mara had spent an hour arranging the silver cups for the royal guests. She knew which duchess demanded her wine warmed, which lord would send a plate back if the bread looked too brown, and which bishop liked to speak of charity while asking whether his donation could be deducted from the crown tax. At the service door she had watched kitchen boys scrape untouched meat into baskets. It would not be given to the river children; a court rule required that the guests' leavings be burned. A hungry city had built an etiquette elaborate enough to make waste appear respectable.
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The queen had disliked that rule. Mara did not yet know what the hand would demand, but she already feared the answer hidden inside its fingers.
And the crystal hand pointed at both girls.
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