"I think our country sinks beneath the yoke; it weeps, it bleeds, and each day a new gash is added to her wounds."

—From Macbeth,
By William Shakespeare

"HOW DO YOU know if... if someone likes you? Romantically, I mean?" She pressed her cold hands to her now-flushed cheeks, feeling embarrassed by the question. Where was her regal dignity, her ladylike demeanour?

Shania snorted in a most unladylike manner and spoke. "Who are you and what have you done with my cousin?"

"It was a perfectly innocent question." Jovana picked up a biscuit and bit into it. "You need not be so incredulous about the matter."

"Apologies." Shania dabbed at the corners of her lips with a cloth napkin. "But I have never once seen you care a whit about men! Even during your engagement you told me you were practicing magic because you wanted to bleed out Alastair with magic and slowly watch him die."

"I was not that bloodthirsty," she argued even as she knew it was a lie. Jovana had not thought about Alastair in years, not since she remembered that he had likely died in the fire that had been set in the capital after the Atlan invasion. "I simply... did not like him."

"I hesitate to give you romantic advice then, for fear of the life of your next suitor." Shania smiled.

The queen rolled her eyes. "Forget I asked, then."

Jovana stirred her tea, imported from the far-off lands of Qin, before sipping it as she listened to Shania launch into a story of some mischief that her oldest daughter had gotten into, in an effort to distract her from her troubles. Her cousin's hands flew through the air as she gesticulated to demonstrate exactly what Adaira Chretien, who was named after her aunt, had done.

"I don't know where she gets that spirit from," Shania said knowingly, a twinkle in her brown eyes.

"Certainly not from you," Jovana teased, taking a swallow of her tea.

"So..." Shania cupped her hands around her drink, warming them. "When are you going to settle down and have children that could possibly burn down an entire palace?"

Jovana flinched at the word burn. "I—I don't know."

Shania reached out, touching her arm. "Are you alright, 'Vana?"

She forced a quick smile at the old childhood nickname in spite of the anxiety suddenly, irrationally coursing through her body. To combat it and slow her breathing, she fixated on her surroundings. The drawing room was one of the most luxurious in the manor by Mordanian standards. Red drapes obscured the windows, melting into the deep violet carpets, patterned with the Durand insignia: a scroll and hammer. Drops of rubies hung from the chandeliers, sparkling and refracting in crimson all over the room. A tapestry of the late Queen hung on the wall, her commanding stare and piercing eyes making Jovana feel even more unsettled.

"No. No, I'm not alright. It's just—the other night, there was an incident. I was training with some... blood, when it all of a sudden lit on fire."

Shania's brown eyes widened and she dropped her cup onto its saucer, tea sloshing over the sides. "Are you serious? How could that have happened? Blood spontaneously lighting on fire?"

Jovana threw her hands in the air. "I've been asking myself the same questions, cousin. Yet I have come up with no answers. It could be that an Atlan sorceress—whom I am close to having in my custody due to circumstantial evidence—is responsible. But I am not sure that she has any motive to have set the fire—and really, such a small fire? What effect would it have other than frightening a few people?"

"You're right." Shania rested her chin on her palm. "It almost reminds me of... Well, do you remember when we were little? The Levesque children would accidentally break people's noses when it was someone they disliked. The Clement children would unintentionally make other children wet the bed. And us... well, the Dusangs would accidentally make someone have a nosebleed. It's like... accidental magic, controlled by emotions before you realize what you are doing or have a way of manipulating it in a specific way. You just do what feels natural."

"What do you mean by that?"

Panic gripped her body and she tried to work through it as she had for the past fifteen years. As she had when Ilyas Durand declared himself lord and master over her, when her already-small circle of friends slowly narrowed, when her leash was ever tightened, Jovana did her best to breathe deeply and think logically. What is the most reasonable and practical route for me to take right now? But reason and logic, her ever-present defences seemed to crash down around her, when the entire order of her world, everything that she knew to be true, was proving to be false.

"I just mean... never mind. It is a foolish thought." Shania picked up her tea again with shaky hands, taking a hearty swig.

Jovana rang a bell and called for whiskey to add to the drink. She summoned a fortifying grin though it felt more like a grimace. "What is it? There are no foolish thoughts between us, you know."

"Very well." Shania put her cup down on the table and reached for Jovana's hands. "I think you might be Atlan."

Her heart plummeted, her vision blurring. The chandelier's candles flickered, on the verge of blowing out as a window slammed open. Swirls of snow gusted inside. She scarcely felt the cold, scarcely saw the darkness that encroached on the room. "Why would you say that? I am the queen of Mordania!"

"Jovana..."

She tore her hands from her cousin's grasp, tears springing to her eyes as she gasped for air, for space.

"Jovana, listen to me! Please, you know me. I would never say such a thing just to hurt you or tarnish your reputation. I only want you to realize the truth based on what little of it I know."

She paced, wanting to tear her hair from its up-do and the laces out of her corset, willing to do anything to feel free again. Free and able to breathe. The truth was supposed to set one free, wasn't it?

"Then tell me." Shania was silent. "Tell me!"

"Very well."

And so she told her, in fits and stops, the whole story. How she had possibly discovered a doppelgänger king, a traitorous noble, and an apparent bastard heiress to the Mordanian throne. And when it was over, Shania held her as she cried. As her world fell to pieces with no one but herself to pick them up, and no way of knowing how exactly everything ought to fit back together.

///

WHY WOULD ILYAS Durand have done it?

Why would he have cuckolded the king of Mordania?

Why would he have tricked the queen?

Questions swam through her mind, slow as molasses and just as sticky, unable to get anywhere until they were sinking and drowning and fossilized. She had no more answers by midnight than she did when she had first heard Shania's confession in the afternoon. Jovana had sent her cousin home, needing space and time to process. But what was there to process?

She was the same person that she had always been—and yet she was not.

She was the Mordanian Queen—and yet possibly an Atlan one, too.

She was everything she had always been and she was nothing at all.

By the time the clock struck midnight, she went back to the meeting room to see if Holly Brown had been able to prove her innocence. That encounter felt like a lifetime ago now as she moved with numb, leaden limbs that refused to cooperate. Why would her body listen to her? Why should it obey, why would it not rebel against her when she was half-Atlan, half her enemy? The thought made her want to laugh; it made her want to cry.

"Your Majesty," Carlyle said as she passed him in the hallway.

She had the inane urge to throw herself at him and see what happened. To fold her much smaller frame into his larger one disappear into his embrace. But she did not. Logic and reason still had to rule her world even if that world had been overturned from its axis.

"Captain Lambert," she greeted him between stiff lips. "Please, accompany me to the meeting room."

He did so. Even though he said nothing, did nothing but obey and follow her, she still sensed his presence like a soothing cloak wrapped around her, like a fire roaring in a brazier on a cold winter's night. It was a comfort.

"Holly Brown," she said when she reached the meeting room, seating herself on her makeshift throne. "You stand accused of arson. Do you dispute this charge?"

"Yes, she does" came one unexpected voice: that of Ilyas Durand.

He was sitting on the other armchair, across from hers. Reminding her that her throne was only makeshift—that he still held all the power.

"Holly Brown has not been given sufficient time to prove her innocence." Ilyas looked her in the eye, something deceptive lurking in his blue ones. "I demand that you give her at least until the end of the week to do so."

Kaiden Thorne's gaze darted over to the Lord Regent. She knew that the two had made some sort of deal, one she was too exhausted to investigate. What was she doing here but to rubber-stamp all the decisions made by the Lord Regent? What was she here for but to submit to another's will?

"Very well," she said finally. "I will see to it that she has another week. Good night, Lord Regent, Lady Holly, King Kaiden. I must retire now. You are all dismissed."

She made the long trek back to her rooms and considered it a win when she did not collapse crying until she fell onto her bed.  Carlyle Lambert had followed her all the while and she appreciated his company more than she would ever say.

When she finally made it to her bed, the tears still did not fall. She was too shaken, too hollow for that. Blue and red flannel sheets scratched against the exposed skin of her hands and neck, and the pillow was soft against her face. She curled into a ball and stared up at the canopy of her four-poster bed, the moonlight pouring in through the gossamer material. It was the only beautiful thing in this room—the only thing that did not have a real function. No one really needed yards of silk for their bedroom, especially not in a place like Mordania where it was so cold for the majority of the year—

Her mundane thoughts came crashing to a halt as she choked on a sob. All at once the tears came and they did not stop, an entire deluge of saltwater seeming to make its way down her face. Her body ached with weeping, wrenched by the information that she had been given today. Jovana felt betrayed by her cousin, even though Shania had really been the only one to tell her the truth, the only one whom she could rely on. How awful was that? The Lord Regent had broken her so, that learning the truth about herself was not liberating but like another bar in her cage, another secret trapping her in place.

Eventually, exhausted by sorrow, she drifted into a restless sleep. All night, she had the comforting sense that she was being watched over and guarded.