touched by the omnipresent soot of deep winter. They arrived late, delayed by another fit of anger from Keifer, and the great arching windows sent pillars of light into the night. Ren and Halley came through the doors a step behind Lieutenant Raven, and the music struck them all of a sudden, as if they had been deaf up to that moment. Behind them. Eldest ignored Raven’s older sister Hawk as she explained that they hadn’t vetted the building yet due to the sudden plans and pleaded for the royal family to wait in the coaches. They swept up the stairs to the Porters’ private box, where a handful of ancient Porter mothers already waited. In the next box over, their middle Moorland cousins acknowledged the princesses with slightly cool nods-they were still angry with Keifer for slapping Cullen.
The opera was Barren Winter, which had been banned for two generations. The princesses settled into the Porters’ box as the opera’s opening lines reminded the audience that Ren’s great-grandmothers had split their royal daughters into two families. Ren’s grandmothers married Michael and took rule of Queensland. The younger sisters took Rafael as a husband and were given the newly annexed island of Southland to rule.
Ren started out bored. She knew the story well, the events having triggered the War of the False Eldest, and the repetitive nature of the lyrics annoyed her. Ann Kinsen, however, gave a brilliant performance as Michael, her powerful alto sweeping Ren up in the story of a man’s sterility destroying his family and country. As the younger sisters grew more strident in their demands that their children be considered heirs of the childless elder sisters, the more tortured Michael became by his affliction.
It was Queen Titia, however, who made the opera painfully real and personal. Nana Titia had been a woman forever undecided. To wear the red shawl or the blue one. To sit next to the fire, or near the lamp. To take the fish, or eat the lamb. She wavered on the smallest of details, always with a twittering laugh to cover her awareness of her own weakness.
There on the stage, with her embarrassed polite laugh, Titia dithered about delivering a secret offer to share a noble husband, an option that would have saved Eldest from visiting the disease-ridden cribs in a desperate attempt to produce an heir. Titia hesitated when action would have prevented pregnant Beatrice’s murder and thus the entire war. She wavered as Michael begged for divorce, which would have allowed him to escape the sense of responsibility for the growing tragedy that ultimately led to his suicide. She vacillated instead of stopping Cida’s bloody revenge at the war’s end, letting their imprisoned youngest sisters and nieces-including the infants-to be beheaded in one gory afternoon.
With a downcast look and a soft laugh, she refused to make any decision that would have saved her sisters, her husband, and a full score of innocent children-girls that could have been Ren’s mothers if they had lived.
In a stunned moment, Ren realized that the true source of tragedy hadn’t been Michael’s sterility, but Tit-ia’s indecision. Ren thought of her nana, how rarely she smiled, how she often ^stared out the windows of the palace crying, how she lived into her nineties knowing she destroyed almost everything she loved. For her poor heartbroken nana, for the grandmothers she never knew, for her might-have-been mothers that had been killed in anger, Ren wept.
Ren’s elder sisters and husband heard her crying. They shot cold looks at her-silent orders for her to cease her sobbing. Finally, Keifer leaned against Eldest and whispered his displeasure. A hard look, a flick of his fingers, and she was bundled up to be taken home.
Oh, she hated them so that night, for not weeping, for not being touched by this horrible tragedy that happened to their family, for scolding her with their silent disapproval, for sending her home like a screaming infant. She stood on the front steps, weeping openly now, waiting with a guard for the royal coach to be brought around.
She would get back at them somehow. She would make them pay. Only Halley would she spare, for Halley followed her outside to find out why she was crying.
“They should have spared the children,” Ren said as she took the handkerchief that Halley offered. “If they hadn’t split the family, those would have been their own children that they killed. The children would have been our mothers.”
“Their mothers and father had been executed.” Halley scowled at her. “Do you think you could take that hatred to suckle at your breast?”
“They had done nothing wrong!”
“If we had aunts that executed our mothers for fighting over a just cause, would we calmly accept them as our new mothers, or would we rebel?”
“Merrilee was just seven months old.”
“And Livi was seven, and Wren was seventeen. Which ones do you spare? Where do you draw the line?”
“It wasn’t right,” Ren insisted, hunching her shoulders.
They fell into silence, recognizing that they couldn’t agree on this issue. It snowed in huge, slowly drifting clumps, like goose down falling to earth. The coach appeared at the corner. Halley nodded to her and started back up the stairs.
At the theater door Halley stopped, and bluntly announced, “I hate him.”
“So do I.” Ren knew she meant Keifer.
“I don’t want to be married to him.”
Ren scoffed, “We don’t have a choice. The royal family is never going to split, not after last time.”
Halley glared at her.
In the silence between them rose Michael’s poignant aria lamenting the death of innocent children.
There was a muffled noise, like a distant cannon being fired. Then a roar of noise and light whiting out her senses as the explosion smashed Ren down the steps. She landed in slush, bitter cold on her face and hands, flames already furnace-hot across her back.
Six years later, a memory, broken free by her nightmares, suddenly surfaced. The moment before the explosion, Halley broke the silence and said with heartfelt spite, “I wish Keifer was dead.”
The murder of their sisters held them all prisoner. Trini wore the scars of Keifer’s cruelty as if they were still fresh. Lylia rushed to be an adult, to fill the void that their sisters’ deaths created. Odelia retreated in the opposite direction, trying to dodge the responsibility that made them targets. Ren resisted all suggestions of marriage-until she met Jerin.
Halley, though, had been consumed. She abandoned everything to find their sisters’ killers. It had mystified them all, the way she devoted herself to the search.
Sitting on the window seat, trying to forget her nightmare. Ren remembered Halley’s last words, and realized the truth. Halley’d wished Keifer dead, and in that instant, he died-and with him, all their sisters.
Halley was searching for someone other than herself to blame.
“You’re thinking of the bombing.” Raven had knocked, and entered at Ren’s call, finding her on the window seat, still stunned by the insight to Halley’s soul.
“Yes. I think I finally realized why Halley vanished.”
“Any idea as to where?”
Ren shook her head. “No, and if I’m going to offer for Jerin, I need to find her soon.”
Raven looked pessimistic. “I have been searching for her, discreetly, not that any of my people could bring her home against her will if they found her.”
Ren snarled a curse, getting up to cross the room to the washbasin. “I can’t offer for Jerin without Halley. I can’t put word out to Halley that I need her back to make an offer; if I did, the world would know.”
“It might be the only thing to make her surface.”
The newspaper story of the attack on Odelia should have brought her running. Ren could think of only one reason why Halley hadn’t reappeared when Odelia was wounded.
“It would add fuel to fire the rumors about her.” Ren splashed cold water onto her face; it dampened old tears that burned anew. She leaned over the bowl, water dripping from her face, blinking away the salt fire in her eyes. “Plus our enemies will then know that she is traveling without royal guard.”
Raven held out the hand towel. “I’ll set more people on finding her. Quietly.”
Ren scrubbed dry her face. “Would it put you short on finding the Prophets?”
“Oh, yes, the cannons. We found the ship they used to transport them from Heron Landing. The Onward. The cannons were unloaded, here in Mayfair, the night before we arrived.”
Ren started to smile, then remembered Raven’s theory on how they could find the ship. “The crew is dead?”
