I thought about my mother sewing the dress. Three nights, her eyes red, her hands shaking with something I had read as anxiety about the ceremony, about the possibility that Kael would say no. She had known. She had known what I was before I knew, had suspected it since my birth and been certain of it since my power first flickered at age twelve during a fight I'd gotten into behind the training ground. She had watched me grow up with a Sovereign's power coiling inside me like a cable under tension, and she had sewn the dress and let me walk into the Hall and said nothing.
Because telling me would have made me visible in ways she couldn't control. Because a girl who knew she was a Sovereign walked differently and that walk had a signal that something like Aldric could read.
Because my fa
