The First Crown

Straw and Starlight

Lilliana

Doors that were usually kept shut for draft and discipline stood open to the sun. The great hall, so often cloaked in sober shadow, threw gold across the flagstones. Servants laughed without glancing first over their shoulders; the scullery girl sang a rude rhyme in the corridor and no one cuffed her for it. Even the hounds snored on their backs with their paws in the air like heathens.

Evelyne claimed the wide solar as though it had been built for her alone. She lounged in the window seat with her slippered feet tucked under her, sorting ribbons from a tin. “This blue makes me look tragic,” she announced, pinning it to her hair and tilting her head toward the glass. “The kind of tragic that makes men write ballads.”

“You wouldn’t like the end of any ballad ever sung,” I said,