Frieda’s face was blank, lips flat, eyes on Briar’s in calm, cool detachment.

She was not surprised to see Briar.

Meanwhile, Briar couldn’t get a full breath.

“What are you doing here?” she heard herself ask.

Köning gave her a strange look. “She is Princess Clara of Bavaria, Your Majesty.”

No. No. That wasn’t possible.

“Frieda.” Briar said her name again, and she watched Frieda flinch but cover it by ducking her head to the side.

Phillip pressed against Briar, warm and sturdy. “Frieda? Your Frieda?”

Briar could only exhale sharply. None of her muscles would work. Her eyes locked on Frieda, unbelieving.

“Frieda—”

“Princess Clara,” Matilda cut in, stepping closer to her daughter. She spoke to Briar, but her voice was all iron and raised to hit those around them. “I suppose it is time to announce my daughter’s history. Prince Electors, would you care to hear the tale?”

Those who were not nearby quickly drew closer, and Briar was only vaguely aware of them.

Frieda straightened, meeting their eyes, defiance and resolve perfectly balanced on her face.

She had always been more in control of her emotions than Briar or Ben. More able to see the path forward, whereas Briar would react in sorrow or anger first, and only realize a more sensible course of action later.

So it was almost instinct for her to see Frieda’s calmness and emulate her. That was what Briar had so often done. Frieda is not upset; I shouldn’t be.

But that response was rusted and creaked through her chest, hauling with it pain, such pain it bubbled and rose and threatened to drown her inside out.

“You have many questions, I assume, Queen Aurora?” Matilda still only spoke to Briar, though her performance was clearly for all around. “It is simple, and a situation you yourself are quite familiar with: We believed that our future ruler would be more well rounded if she grew up among the people, left to her own devices.”

Briar shook her head. Again.

No. No, it couldn’t—

“It creates unparalleled strength, wouldn’t you say?” Matilda’s smile was sly. “Well. Formerly unparalleled. And my daughter’s strength is taken even further, as I had her grow up among not only the people, but the people of our enemy, just so she would understand them in a way no other ruler ever would.”

Dozens of things raced through Briar’s mind, thoughts and emotions and horrors.

“You—” she stammered, unable to look away from Frieda. “You abandoned your daughter in the homeland you attacked?”

“She will be empress,” Matilda said, and she was holding Frieda’s arm now. Frieda, who was staring at the floor. “Growing up among people who are not her own allows her to understand this empire in a way no one else does, extensively, expansively. That it was also the village where your family chose to exile you—well. I am curious as to King Stefan’s reasoning for just happening to choose the village where my daughter resided, but oh.” She put a hand to her lips in faux shock. “Oh, we cannot ask him, can we?”

That snapped the sensations of the room back on Briar, as though she had broken the surface, able to breathe. But each breath was jagged and raw, air no comfort, and on each blink she saw the throne room in Hausach, blood on the floor—

Nearby, the Prince Electors were listening, and the shock on their faces matched the shock on every face around. This was the first any had heard of the mysterious Princess Clara’s past. Ben had said not much was known of her, that Matilda had kept her private.

This was why.

Because she had grown up in Austria. Alongside Austria’s own exiled princess.

How? How? It was impossible Matilda had known where Briar—Aurora—had been hidden. Even Maleficent, with all her magic, had been unable to find her until that last night. And if Austria’s enemy had known all along where their vulnerable princess was, why hadn’t Matilda eliminated the issue? Had Stefan known Frieda—Clara—was in Hausach? It was all too convenient, too well planned, too heavy with the twist of fate.

Desperately, Briar wondered if Matilda was lying. Maybe Frieda wasn’t her daughter—

But Frieda chose that moment to look back at her. And they had the same nut-brown eyes, Matilda and Frieda. The same rich dark hair, the same frame to their jaws, the same long, thin noses.

Matilda was Frieda, only aged and cruel.

It wasn’t possible. None of this was possible. Nothing had been possible from the moment her aunts had told her that she was Princess Aurora, and everything that had happened since was caught up in the avalanche that was impossibility.

“Frieda” was all she could say again, wheezing.

The crowd was abuzz now. Prince Electors pressed in, doing their best to cut into the conversation properly, but there was a growing mania around the spreading news. All knew of Briar’s past, her childhood in Hausach—this was even more enticing than that. Another princess grown up in poverty and anonymity, only this one in a kingdom not her own, among people not her own.

Briar let the Prince Electors shuffle in around her. She stayed, listening to their questions, to Matilda’s self-aggrandizing responses—how hard it was to send her only child off, how rewarding to know it would shape Clara into an unrivaled leader.

She heard, too, Frieda’s responses. How honored she was to have been given the chance to become a leader the likes of which the empire had never known. How proud she was that her mother had had such selfless forethought as to send her daughter off in anonymity and poverty.

Briar had seen the bed of straw where Frieda had slept in the orphanage. She knew the frigid, hungry nights Frieda had spent huddled with the other children for warmth during winter. She remembered how she had begged her aunts to let Frieda stay with them, but they had enough trouble feeding the four of them; how could they take on one more mouth? Flora especially had refused outright.

Had Flora known who Frieda was? Had any of her aunts known? It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible—

“Frieda!”

Ben shouldered past Briar. While she had been standing in frozen shock, what had he been going through? The same, likely, but he was awake now, and he outright pushed aside a Prince Elector to get in front of Frieda.

A Bavarian soldier shoved him back.

The crowd went still, propriety a knotted mess.

A squire had pushed a Prince Elector and approached a princess uninvited.

He didn’t care. He wouldn’t, of course, and he looked at Frieda so pleadingly that Briar’s heart broke.

She wasn’t looking at him, though. Her eyes were on the floor, and Briar watched spots of red bloom on her cheeks. For the first time since this had begun, Frieda didn’t look resolved and steady.

She looked real.

“Frieda, it’s me. It’s Ben.”

Frieda nodded at the soldier.

Who grabbed Ben by the arm and made to drag him out.

“Hold!” Phillip jumped in. “Release my squire. I will deal with him.”

The soldier hesitated, eyeing Matilda.

Frieda, though, gaped at Briar. Her lips formed the word Squire?, her eyes glossy. She would know how much that meant to Ben. She would know—

But Frieda shook it away and set her face back into that stoic, emotionless mask.

That was what broke Briar.

That Frieda could stand there, with Ben inches from her, and say nothing. She owed him more than that. He deserved more than that.

Rage bubbled up. Hot, tight fury.

They hadn’t chosen this. None of them had chosen any of this—

She would not be powerless, and yet all around her was nothing but reminders of that powerlessness, reminders that even now, she was at the mercy of others, as were those she loved.

Phillip took Ben’s arm, gently, but Ben spun away and shoved into the crowd, vanishing without a word.

“I apologize, Queen Matilda, Princess Clara.” Phillip turned to the Prince Electors. “Princes. I take full responsibility for my squire’s acts.”

“Quite,” one of the Electors said. But few lingered on it too long; they faced Matilda and Frieda with interest, fascination spiking again.

“Let’s go,” Phillip said to Briar. They walked away, Köning staying behind to offer further apologies. This situation had made her look weak. Had made her party look weak.

As had been Matilda’s intention.

But Briar couldn’t bring herself to care. She was spiraling more and more as they wove through the banquet room, down the long, twisting halls—and there was Ben up ahead, running for a door—

“Ben!” Phillip shouted.

Ben stopped, back rigid, shoulders pulsing with each tight breath.

They hurried to him. Ben didn’t turn, one hand on the doorknob, head dropping to his chest.

Briar touched his arm. He jerked like she’d hit him, then whirled on her, his eyes bloodshot and tearing up with confusion that Briar had no way to soothe.

“What—” Ben started. “How? How was that her? How is she here?”

“I don’t know,” Briar said, and her own eyes teared as well. “I don’t know. I’ll find out.”

“I thought she’d left because you left. I thought she’d left because I wasn’t what she wanted anymore. I thought a hundred different things, but I never once thought this. She was so furious at you after you left and we found out who you were, Bri. She was livid at you. And all along, she was like you?”

His voice broke and he scrubbed the back of his hand over his mouth, fingers shaking.

Briar shook her head. She had no words. Nothing at all but her own pain, so similar to Ben’s, and they were united in that, at least.

“We need to talk somewhere private,” Phillip said softly, indicating the open hall around them, the doors to the banquet room not far behind.

“No.” Ben cleared his throat. “No. I, um, I have chores. In the stables.”

Phillip stepped forward. “Ben—”

“No.” He ripped open the door and was gone, racing out into the bright white light of the afternoon.

Phillip started to follow. Briar put her hand on his wrist.

“Let him go,” she whispered. “He needs answers, and I do, too.”

Phillip turned to her, looking determined. “We will figure this out. You need answers? Let’s gather your vassals and the fairies, and plan.”

She could not put words to the gratitude that overwhelmed her—that he knew what to do, what she needed, without much prodding. The only one she could truly trust.

The banquet did not end for another two hours, during which Briar’s vassals stayed in her stead, to keep a presence. Briar knew she was already behind, forced to catch up, but she could not be in that room again with Frieda…no, Clara.

Finally, they gathered in the sitting room of her suite, the fairies, vassals, and Phillip.

Briar sat on a padded bench before a window, Phillip next to her, her hands clamped on the beaded edge. She had told all present, quickly, who Clara was. Who she had been to Briar, in Hausach. The fairies knew immediately who she was when Briar had said Frieda; the vassals had needed an explanation, one that grated on Briar’s throat like jagged knives.

Now, secrets bared, Briar waited.

The vassals were tense in their chairs, talking harshly to one another, comparing notes on information they had heard during the final hours of the banquet.

The fairies clustered by the door that led into her bedchamber, hissing at one another, until Flora spun away from her sisters with a growl.

“I always knew that girl was trouble!” Flora shot toward Briar, finger in an accusing point. “I never liked her, not one moment while you were children. Oh, I should have put my foot down the second you two met. I knew, I knew she was trouble—”

“Now, Flora.” Fauna flew up and took Flora’s hand, guiding her back down from where she’d nearly drifted up to hit the ceiling. “There is no sense in dwelling on what happened. Frieda is here. We must move forward.”

“You did not know who she really was?” Briar pressed, her mouth dry.

Flora gave her a look of such horrified shock that Briar went silent. “Of course we did not know! You think we would have allowed you within five paces of Matilda of Bavaria’s daughter? Stefan would have had our heads!”

“So he didn’t know, either?”

“Surely not!” Flora shrieked.

“Then—” Briar wilted. “How did we end up in the same village?”

“Trickery from Bavaria,” Flora said with confidence. “They accused us of subterfuge in arranging where you were exiled merely to shift the blame off them. This reeks of Matilda’s cruelty!”

Briar didn’t voice the problems that had occurred to her from that exact solution: that Matilda would have likely just killed Briar when she was a child, rather than let her grow, if Matilda had truly known that Briar was in Hausach.

There was something else at play.

“Don’t you think on her more, Aurora!” Flora said, but she was barely looking at Briar, too lost in her own rage. “She is not worth the energy. She will be dealt with. Oh! She will be dealt with—”

“We can hardly deal with her, dear,” Fauna tried.

Only Merryweather was watching Briar. Watching, standing by the bedroom door, and when Briar’s eyes landed on her, whatever she saw in Briar’s face made her own screw up in frustration.

She took out her wand and shot a stream of glittering magic up at her sisters.

It hit them in the sides of their heads, and they chirped in unison, “Merryweather!”

Merryweather did the same to the vassals, who were arguing with one another, and they, too, jumped in startled shock. It was effective, though, and yanked all attention to her, until Merryweather gestured at Briar.

“What do you wish to do?” she asked. Simple. Calm.

Briar couldn’t hold her aunt’s gaze. She looked at the floor.

She wanted to sleep.

She wanted to go home, to Hausach, and sing in the tavern, and pretend none of this had happened.

Briar could do none of those things, so she did what she had to do.

She squared her shoulders and leveled her chin. “I want to find out how much truth there is to Matilda’s story. What really happened with Fri—with Clara.”

“She has kept the tale secret until now,” Köning said. “It is unlikely she will let slip details unless she wants to.”

“Then press her to tell whatever she is willing to tell,” Briar said. “She wants to brag about how this was a great plan of hers—let her brag. Fawn over her, compliment her. Find out what she did to her daughter and why Frieda was in the same village as me. Find out how much of this was orchestrated and how much was chance and—” She stopped, catching her runaway breath, and steadied herself. “Find out more. Please.”

Köning gave her a small smile. “Consider it done, Your Majesty.”

“And for the campaign?” Merryweather asked. “How do you want to proceed with the Prince Electors? What do you want to present to them?”

Flora and Fauna settled next to Merryweather, all three watching her now. There was a weight in Merryweather’s question, in the looks they gave her, but Briar was too exhausted to make sense of their urgency, whatever it was they were trying to get her to say.

“Present to them?” Briar asked. “Why would anything need to change in that regard?”

“The Prince Electors are besotted by Matilda’s story,” Lord Lehmann said. “It is all anyone was speaking of as the banquet ended. She planned this. She planned all of this. That conniving bi—”

“Yes. Quite.” Köning eyed Briar in a way that silenced Lehmann from cursing, and Briar fought not to roll her eyes, as if hearing Matilda called no end of colorful names would be anything short of curative right now. “But what do we do? The basis of our campaign is Queen Aurora’s history with the people. Now that is no longer the novelty we had hoped. We still have the size and strength of Austria and Lorraine combined, but will it be enough to counter whatever other surprises Matilda brings? For we cannot grow complacent that she is done with her schemes.”

“We go harder with our plans to discredit Matilda,” another vassal said. “Remind the Prince Electors of the lengths she’s willing to go to in order to enact her will, regardless of whether she would be empress or her daughter would. With either on the throne, the Holy Roman Empire will descend into bloodshed and violence.”

“Already, Matilda has begun comparing Clara’s exile to Aurora’s,” Köning said. “Notably, in saying how our queen needed someone to ultimately save her from her peasant life, while her daughter stood on her own.”

Briar rose to her feet, her posture still regal and stiff, but she felt her control fraying. “It was not my peasant life that Phillip rescued me from. It was a curse. It was magic. It had nothing to do with my life in Hausach.”

Köning gave an apologetic shrug. Other vassals dropped their gazes.

“This is the game, Your Majesty,” one said. “Attempting to unseat and discredit other candidates.”

“It would be good, moving forward,” Köning interjected, “to perhaps downplay King Phillip’s involvement in your rescue. Where once it was a show of our strength, if Bavaria uses that as proof of your weakness, we may consider wedging distance between you and that piece of the narrative. Spin it that you rescued yourself.”

It wasn’t a narrative. It was her life. All of this was her life, and as the vassals resumed talking about how best to frame Briar’s existence, she sank back to the bench, only half listening. Phillip put his arm around her.

She wanted to be angry again. She wanted to rage and storm around this room, to release these emotions.

But she was so very tired. The weight of months of sleeplessness was piling on her all at once.

“What do you wish to do, Your Majesty?” Merryweather asked again, her voice coaxing.

Briar had nothing left to give now. “Whatever my vassals believe is best.”

The fairies shared a look. Were they disappointed? Let them be.

The vassals stood from their various chairs and bowed, acting on the unspoken dismissal in Briar’s finality. She liked that power, at least, that she could end a meeting with merely her intent.

They filed out, the fairies lingering only enough to look like they wanted to speak more.

Briar shook her head. Silent, begging, Not now, please.

A thought crept up from the recesses of her brain. “Oh—”

The fairies paused, hope sparking.

“It is possible,” Briar started, pinching the skin over her nose, “that I temporarily loaned you to King—no, Zauberer Johann of Mecklenburg.”

She heard Flora say, simply, “Pardon?”

“He has interests in magic, and it was a way to foster goodwill with him.” Briar scrubbed her face and looked at Merryweather. “If you can speak with Johann, it would mean the world to him. He seems rather…‘Lonely’ isn’t the right word. On the right path but with no one to guide him.”

Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather gaped at her. Briar’s face heated as she wondered what she had said wrong.

“He truly is harmless,” she tried again. “A child of—”

“Of course.” It was Fauna who gave her a wide, wondrous smile. “Of course. We would be happy to speak with him.”

And even Flora nodded, smiling, and as they shuffled out the door, Briar was left with a sense of having done at least one thing right this day.

The door closed. She heard the lock click, and it wasn’t odd; her bedroom in Austria was usually locked as well. But something about that click on the back of Flora’s concern over the food being poisoned had Briar’s neck prickling with awareness.

It is a game, all of it, Phillip had said.

She shivered and turned to him where he still sat next to her, the late-afternoon sun throwing the room into sinking gold.

“Would you like me to speak with Ben?” he asked.

She considered. “Is that a conversation for a prince to have with his squire?”

“I like to think I can count him as a friend now, too. I—” His head tipped, eyes wandering. “I never had much luck with close relationships. Until you. And you brought him. The circumstances of us all meeting were odd, yes, but I am very glad we were brought together.”

Briar stood, needing to move, working the picks out of her hair, freeing the twisted strands and fighting back a headache that was pulsing in her skull.

“No,” she decided. “Do not speak to him yet. Nothing has been found out. He deserves answers.”

“You deserve answers, too, Briar.”

She looked back at Phillip, still seated on the bench.

It was easier to think of all this in terms of how it affected Ben.

Because if she thought, truly, of how it affected her, of Frieda’s callousness in just standing in that banquet room, of seeing her friend, a friend she missed so much it was a permanent ache in her soul, barely look at her, and only then with emotionless nothingness, as though that was what they were now, nothing, when in fact, they were so very, very alike…All the terrors that plagued Briar, the fears and worries over going from peasant to princess—Frieda felt them, too. They could help each other. They were the same. And yet Frieda had stood there….

Briar pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, trying, failing to stop tears from falling.

Phillip was there, his arms coming around her, and she buried her face into his chest, the soft rub of his shirt, the scratch of buttons digging into her cheek. His arms bracketed her, and she dug her fingers into the creases of his spine, holding on, holding on as she gasped and tears fell.

“It’s all right,” Phillip whispered, his head arching down to rest alongside hers. “It’s all right, Briar. I’m here.”

It was an echo of what she had said to him the day of the attack, the day of their wedding.

I’m here. It’s all right.

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” she said into his shirt. She pushed back to see him, needing him to know this, to believe it. “I wouldn’t leave you like she did him. And then to stand there, not even looking at him. If it were you, and I had not seen you in months, I…I wouldn’t have been able to keep myself from you. I wouldn’t do that to you, Phillip.”

“Briar.” He cupped her jaw in one strong hand. “You don’t have to—”

“But I do. Because I sat there while the vassals planned to cut out your part in the rescue, as though what you did could ever be forgotten. As though you aren’t an integral aspect of who I am. I want, no, need everyone to know how much a part of me you are. I know you do not like the accolades for your deeds, but to erase you entirely? I can’t abide that. Can you?”

His face went from beseeching concern to a flash of the discomfort he showed whenever anyone spoke of what had happened with Maleficent.

“Honestly,” he whispered, “I am happier not to speak of it at all.”

Her chest seized. “Why?” she asked finally. “Why do you wish to forget it?”

They were alone. He could answer truthfully. He might.

Phillip leaned his forehead against hers. “It is done. It is done, and I should like to never think on it again. There are more important things—such as preparing for your campaign, and what you wish to do when you see Frieda again.”

That tightness in Briar’s chest worsened. “I don’t want to talk about that anymore. Not now.”

“Well.” There was a smile in his voice. “Again, the pair we make, hmm?”

A smile rose unbidden to her lips as well.

He knotted up their hands and held them in a tangle between their chests, and it whittled Briar’s focus down to that contact, the heavy silence of how very alone they were, finally.

And she should have used that solitude to get him to speak of what had happened to him the day of their wedding, why he could not sleep, what was weighing on him. But he was right—she had weights she did not want to speak of, too.

“Phillip.” She said his name because she could not think of any way to phrase what was irrepressibly taking root in her stomach.

The air between them became charged, whether from him or her, she couldn’t tell.

His grip on her fingers tightened. She saw him swallow.

She looked up at him from where their foreheads touched, and saw his eyes were shut.

“Don’t go back to your room,” she whispered.

His lips parted, a strangled burst of air. “Briar—”

“I know”—she was gasping, her heart bruising with every thud—“I know with everything that has happened, and everything still happening, that our lives are chaos, but I don’t want to wait for things to settle. I don’t want to wait for fate to decide when we get to be together. You are the one thing I can choose, that we can choose, together. I love you. And I do not know what I would do without you. But if you still want time, I—”

He laughed. An abrupt, resonating chuckle that slanted into a growl.

“Briar,” he said. “Is there truly a part of you that thinks I would leave this room if you want me to stay?”

Heat dripped down her body. A slow, determined rain.

“I want you to want to stay,” she told him. “Not because you know it is what I want. But because you want it, too.”

He walked her backward a step. Toward the door to her bedchamber.

Her heart tensed.

Their foreheads were still together, and she freed her hands to grab the thick muscles of his neck, holding on for dear life.

“Briar,” he whispered her name again. “We are fools. Honorable, self-sacrificial fools. Or at least, I am. Yes, I want to stay.”

She grinned. “I didn’t want to presume,” she said, breathy and ardent.

“Say you love me again, and there is very little I would not want to do with you.”

It was half greedy, half groveling, and it tugged at the base of Briar’s stomach, her legs weakening.

“I couldn’t be too forward,” she said. “For all I knew, you had that lady’s maid to meet again.”

“Ah.” She felt the twist of air in Phillip’s smile. “I had all but forgotten her. Thank you for reminding me. I don’t want to keep her waiting.”

“No, you don’t. She’s been waiting quite long enough.”

Her back hit the wall beside the closed door. She rocked in the jolt of it, and they froze, the ensuing silence hung with gravity that moored them both in place, forcing her to feel even more strongly the beating of his pulse in his neck, the intensifying heat in the air caged between their bodies.

“Briar,” he said again, tone turning pleading. “I should like to have made this more worthy of you. Flowers everywhere—”

“Could you not be so honorable, for a few moments, at least?”

She expected him to speak again. To buffer the space, the building tension, with words, and part of her wanted to keep that buffer as well. She wanted him and he was here and they were alone and of all the impossible things that had tumbled into her life, those things rammed into each other with the greatest, most destructive impact.

But he didn’t say anything.

He kissed her, a questing, worshipful movement of his lips, and when she responded with an immediate arch up into him, tongue pushing into his mouth, he answered her question.

Yes, he could not be so honorable.

He could do it very, very well, in fact.

She found the doorknob next to her, twisted, pushed the door open, half consumed by Phillip’s mouth dropping onto her neck—no, fully consumed, utterly consumed—he had lifted her and was walking her into the room, and all the mismatched pieces of who she was could not sustain themselves in the radiance his mouth demanded from her skin. She felt made into a fallen angel, knowing distantly that she was bound for ruin and grief, but in this moment, she was cherished, transformed into a being of light and liquid gold by the way he worked his lips up her neck, to the curve of her ear, then back down again, down and down.

He could do that to her, the spectacular presence of him reshaping her until the awful parts slunk into the shadows cast by all the rest, and she hoped she was doing the same for him—she hoped, and hoped, until she could not gather thought at all, and then it was her and him and nothing else.

Blissful, incandescent nothing else.