PRINCESS SIGRUN OF WINDSMOOR
[Five Years Ago...]
"Take a deep breath, yer highness. Yer wound tighter than a fresh-strung bow, and it’s doing no favors for yer skin," Rita's warm, scratchy voice murmured behind me.
She bent into my field of vision through the reflection of the vanity mirror, her weathered hands smelling faintly of lavender and the heavy lard soap used in the palace scullery.
She was a round, comforting shape in a sea of rigid Southern aristocrats—a woman who had wiped my running nose when I was a toddler and held my head when the palace fevers took me at ten. She didn't possess a drop of noble blood, but she possessed the only maternal warmth I had ever known in the cold, hyper-political expanse of the Windsmoor court.
"I am perfectly fine, Rita," I lied, my voice ti
