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  Dedicated to anyone looking for the reliable truth, especially the truth in their own lives.

  PROLOGUE

  Three little queens went riding into Meridan

  Three little queens who won’t ride out

  The price of war makes a strange inheritance

  Four little puppets all pretty and proud.

  —Children’s nursery rhyme

  THE KINGDOM OF MERIDAN,

  TWO YEARS PAST THE TREATY OF SISTER QUEENS

  The royal carriage tilted on two wheels as it careened onto the dirt path behind a pair of panic-stricken horses. Flames blew out from the suitcases tied to the back of the coach and ruffled in the wind like torn skirts.

  The driver was long gone—thrown to the ground by the two bandits sitting in his seat.

  One of them—the one missing both of his ears—leaned over the harnesses, trying to reach the reins, which were dragging at the horses’ feet. The other bandit had a permanently broken nose. He held his partner’s belt to keep him from falling.

  Doors on either side of the carriage flapped open and shut.

  A five-year-old girl with pigtails sat on the floor of the coach and cried. She held a dagger with two hands and whacked it at the cushioned seats for no reason. Suki.

  Three older girls waited for the carriage to topple back onto four wheels, then began climbing out.

  The bandits didn’t notice at first.

  A girl with blond hair pulled back by a green and black sash—the colors of Findain—climbed out first, holding her dagger in her teeth. She was athletic and nimble, as if she had experience moving on a lurching vessel. Cadis.

  On the opposite side of the coach, another girl exited. This one had short black hair cropped in the Corentine style and held her dagger backward along her forearm, in the way of assassins. She was lithe and made the least noise as she scrambled to the forward section of the carriage. Iren.

  The earless bandit cursed as the reins dangled just out of reach. The broken-nosed bandit, holding him by the belt, looked back and shouted, “Hey! Get inside!”

  The girls didn’t listen.

  As Cadis reached the luggage racks on top of the carriage, the last girl followed tentatively behind her, staying a bit too close. Like the others, she wore the light leather vest and vambrace of dragoon scouts made especially for one so small. Her chestpiece bore the royal seal of Meridan. Rhea. Her eyes flitted in too many directions. Her long curls flew in her face. The hand that should have held her weapon was used to keep the locks out of her eyes. The knife remained strapped to her calf.

  The horses crashed through a hedge.

  The carriage ramped over it.

  For a second everyone was airborne.

  The flames licked at the bags on the top rack.

  The carriage landed with a crunch on the rear axle.

  Cadis of Findain, with the green and black sash, landed on her stomach atop the coach. Iren of Corent had disappeared by climbing down the side of the coach to the undercarriage.

  Rhea of Meridan lost her footing and held on to the top rack. Below her, the dirt lot sped past. If she fell it would scrape for bone and mangle what it found.

  The broken-nosed bandit let go of his partner and grabbed the driver’s whip.

  “Back now,” he said. He whipped at Cadis. She kept her knife in her mouth and held up a forearm. The vambrace took the lashes with no harm.

  “Get back!”

  The horses raced madly toward a rounded wall.

  Cadis ground her teeth on the dagger and coiled her body, ready to lunge at the bandit.

  He whipped at her arm again.

  The back wheel of the carriage wobbled.

  Its axle broke.

  The Findainer planted her feet, just as the wagon jerked.

  She heard a scream coming from behind her. Someone shouting her name, “Cadis!” but she paid no attention.

  She had stepped on fingers as she launched herself at the broken-nosed bandit.

  The two of them tumbled from the carriage and smashed into the dirt—the bandit taking the brunt of the fall.

  Rhea wrenched back her crunched hand and fell. She hit the ground and curled in a ball as she skidded across the lot.

  The one inside the coach, little Suki, had been strapped to the seats. She kept crying and slapping the sideboards with the flat side of her dagger.

  The horses continued the blind stampede to the wall.

  The earless bandit finally grabbed the reins.

  Before he could straighten himself and yank the reins to stop the horses, a face appeared right below his.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Iren of Corent had climbed the undercarriage and now lay upside down, a foot above the dirt lot and even less distance from the pounding hooves of the horses. She held herself like a plank, her feet wedged on the front axle braces.

  The bandit yelped in surprise.

  The girl smiled. In one backhand motion, she swung the dagger and cut the reins. There would be no stopping. Iren closed her eyes and let herself fall. The carriage sailed over her. She hit the ground flat and spread her arms and legs to scatter the impact. When the horses noticed the impending wall, they whinnied and twisted a sharp turn to the right, planting the broken rear axle into the dirt.

  The flaming carriage toppled over.

  The little one shrieked from inside the coach.

  The earless bandit lost his footing, and the carriage’s motion sent him flying.

  The horses wailed and fell sideways.

  Burning satchels bounced in every direction.

  A cloud of dirt poured over the crash like a yellow fog.

  As the dust settled in the Royal Coliseum, the five-year-old from Tasan sat on the dirt floor, where she had landed after falling from the coach, and continued to cry. The other three princesses circled around her, swinging their daggers at one another’s faces.

  No elegance. No showmanship. Not even the prudence to stab the blades at the exposed wrists, where any damage would cripple further attack. No love for the craft.

  Just the pure hate of children forced to live together.

  Hiram Kinmegistus watched from the conductor’s trench, unamused and overheated in his academy robes. His shinhound sat beside him, licking a paw.

  The tutor, Marta, shouted instructions to the girls.

  “Suki, get up! It’s okay, darling. No need to cry.”

  “Rhea, close your position.”

  “Like Iren. Look at her lead foot. Her left one.”

  “Her other left one.”

  “Too aggressive, Cadis.”

  “Suki, for the love of anything holy, please get up.”

  The girls only ever seemed to aim for the eyes, but had no sense of the length of the blades, or even their arms. They flailed at one another like flustered geese.

  Near them, a broken carriage lay on its side, one wheel spinning in the breeze. Two horses, still attached by the harnesses, struggled to free themselves. Two men lay dead beside them.

  The tutor glanced at Hiram, the king’s man, standing in the trench with his arms crossed under his magisterial robes. He would report back to King Declan—from the look on his face, it wouldn’t be positive.

  The servants preparing the stadium for the upcoming Revels—washing the seats and hanging banners—qui
etly watched the princesses from the grandstands.

  Marta shouted, “Suki, please, stop crying.”

  Perhaps it was unjust to pick on Suki, the youngest, when she and Cadis and Iren were taken from their parents only six months ago. They were driven—each from their homes, their own families, their own countries—to Meridan as “wards” of King Declan. Suki was five now, while the others were on either side of seven. They were to be raised as sisters, equal to Declan’s own flesh-and-blood daughter, Rhea, as if such a thing were possible.

  Half the court of Meridan couldn’t tell if the Sisterhood of Queens was a gesture of ludicrous optimism, or a cruel joke that only Declan appreciated.

  Six months ago, when Hiram Kinmegistus had appeared at Marta’s garden fence and hired her to instruct the young queens, she had asked him exactly that. “Is this a political farce, Magister? Am I a tutor or a prison guard?”

  The magister loomed above her tomato plants like the specter of a reaping angel and smiled crookedly. “If you’d ever attended the Corentine Academy, Marta, you would know they are roughly the same job.”

  Rhea was the one to pull the first knife. Even before the wheels stopped turning on the wrecked carriage, she screamed, “You did it on purpose!” And she charged Cadis. “You crushed my hand on purpose!”

  Cadis was tallest and strongest already. She had sailed on ships back in Findain, with pirates. She blocked Rhea’s downward swing easily with her own knife and slashed quickly to counter.

  “Ow! You cut me, you bestiola!” Rhea dropped her blade and grabbed the bleeding slash on her forearm, just above the vambrace.

  “Yeah,” said Cadis. “That was the point.”

  “Actually, I don’t think that was the point of this exercise,” said Iren, tossing her knife aside, uninterested in explaining herself.

  “Besides, my boots slipped,” muttered Rhea. She let the words die off, disgusted with her own excuse.

  Cadis didn’t even bother to reply. She turned to Iren instead. “Do you think they just want us to make her look good?”

  Iren shrugged. She nodded at the king’s adviser in the conductor’s trench. “I think they want us to show off, to dance in front of them, make them feel safe.”

  Cadis held her knife in her teeth as she adjusted the green and black sash that held back her blond hair.

  As Marta approached the girls, she waved at her son. “Endrit, go free those poor horses.” The boy dashed from the far end of the grounds, where he had been using the maze of balance beams while the little queens didn’t need them. “And be careful,” said Marta.

  The horses scuffed with rising panic.

  “Now,” said Marta, “what was that?” She put her arms on her hip guards, a gesture common in drill sergeants. As an aside she said, “At ease, gentlemen.”

  The two previously dead men, lying beside the carriage, sat up, dusted themselves, and stood at attention.

  The girls were none too eager to explain.

  “Suki, please shut up,” said Rhea.

  “No!” said Suki, kicking dust.

  “Don’t worry about her,” said Cadis.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” snapped Rhea. “You’re not the leader.”

  “None of you is the leader,” said Marta, commanding their silence. From the corner of her vision, she spotted Hiram climbing out of the trench and marching toward them. She cursed under her breath. “Now stop bickering and tell me what happened.”

  “Cadis cut me,” said Rhea. She glared at the three girls who had been thrust into her life. Marta drew up Rhea’s arm. She gently pulled Rhea’s hand off the wound and examined it. Rhea winced.

  “What did I tell you about that left foot?”

  Rhea didn’t answer.

  “It was too far forward, throwing off her balance and hampering her ability to lunge or dodge tactically,” said Iren without any hint of reproach, just stating facts. They didn’t know her very well, but the other girls suspected that Iren spoke like a magister just to show off. She claimed she had an entire library back home in Corent. She’d read twice as many books as Rhea, which was about ten times as many as Cadis. They didn’t know if Suki could even read—all she ever did was slap the books away.

  “Very good, Iren,” said Marta.

  “Cadis was too aggressive,” said Rhea.

  “Only if my opponent could punish me for it,” said Cadis. “So I’d say I was exactly aggressive enough.”

  In the silent moment, as Rhea boiled in her own resentment, they could hear only Suki’s droning wail, the cleaning crews in the stands, and Hiram’s footfalls as he approached. His hound had no leash or bell and made very little noise as it trotted behind the magister.

  Just before he arrived, Marta whispered, “Please, children. Behave.”

  The three older princesses turned and acknowledged the king’s man with the customary half bow required of minors. Cadis was unaccustomed to the gesture. In Findain, the ruling earl was considered first among equals. A bow would be laughably formal to the ship captains and merchant lords of her father’s court.

  She bowed anyway.

  Hiram’s gaze was fixed on Cadis, perhaps for that exact reason, to see if the Findish—daughter of nothing better than a “gold noble”—would ever civilize herself.

  “Our queens,” said Hiram. He bowed only to Rhea, which made Rhea beam and straighten her pose. “I see Marta is preparing quite a show for the Revels.”

  “Yes, sir,” they muttered, finally embarrassed of their performance.

  “Go away!” shouted Suki. She grabbed a fistful of dirt and threw it in his general direction. Rhea kicked Suki’s foot, which only punctuated her sobs.

  “Marta, would you care to tell me your aim with this particular . . . endeavor?”

  Marta cleared her throat but remained stiff in her formal stance and salute.

  “Ah. I always forget,” said Hiram, grinning. “A good old soldier. At ease.”

  Marta widened her stance and put her hands behind her back. She had been a decorated officer of Meridan’s old wars, before Declan’s rise and conquest, but the king’s man still outranked her by several titles. He hadn’t won any of them on the battlefield, but Marta was trained too well to show any disdain.

  “You may speak, soldier,” said Hiram, waving with the back of his hand.

  “Sir, we thought it would be appropriate to show the girls working together as sister queens.”

  “So you threw them from a moving carriage?”

  Marta’s mouth made a straight line. “Not exactly, sir,” she said through gritted teeth.

  Hiram was a man in his prime—too young for the magister robes. Underneath he carried a baton, which he knew how to wield in lethal combat, but which he used to instruct the dogs in his kennel. In the inner linings of the robes were dozens of pockets, where the young magister carried rolled parchments.

  As Marta waited to explain herself, Hiram pulled out one of the parchments and checked to make sure it carried the note he intended. “Go on,” he said.

  “The king said he wanted something grand that showed unity among the queens.”

  Hiram raised an eyebrow. He knelt down and tucked the rolled sheaf into a canister hanging around the shinhound’s neck.

  “I don’t know where the fire came from,” said Marta.

  Hiram whispered something into the hound’s ear and sent it running toward the coliseum gate.

  When he returned to his feet, he was no longer interested in anything Marta had to say. “You two. Soldiers, attend.”

  The broken-nosed and earless soldiers scrabbled forward and struck sloppy salutes.

  “What’ve you got to say?” said Hiram.

  The soldiers remained silent. Rage coiled in Hiram’s brow. Were these men refusing to speak? Declan’s army was always hunting for new insults to throw at Hiram behind his back. He could sense the cleaning crew, pretending to work as they watched his every action. “Very well,” he said, ready to dismiss them bo
th. “Latrine duty, now.”

  “WHAT’S THAT, SIR?” shouted the earless soldier.

  Hiram stepped in front of the soldier and peered down his nose. “Could you hear me the first time?”

  “SORRY, SIR. WAR WOUND AND ALL THAT.” The soldier pointed to one of his missing ears. Hiram couldn’t tell if this was a jab at his own war record. He glanced at the broken-nosed soldier, who was still staring into the distance.

  “And what about him? Why didn’t he answer me?”

  “HE’S A LOWLANDER, SIR, BEGGIN’ YER PARDON. HE DON’T EVEN SPEAK DOG.”

  “Does he know what a latrine is?” said Hiram.

  “YESSIR,” said Earless, “BUT IN THE LOWLANDS I THINK THEY CALL ’EM HOME SWEET HOME.”

  The broken-nosed soldier betrayed himself with a knowing smile. Hiram caught a glimpse of it before the soldier could go back to pretending he didn’t speak the language. Hiram didn’t have the time to wrestle respect out of two lowly footmen.

  “Latrine duty, both of you, go.”

  Both soldiers knocked their heels, turned, and marched off to dig out the coliseum cesspits in time for the Revels.

  Hiram sighed. He’d have to speak to the girls.

  He entered their loose circle and cleared his throat. “Your highness queens, tell me, what—” Hiram stopped himself. He refused to shout over the din of a wailing child.

  Cadis knelt beside Suki and tried to console her with a story. “Suki, hey, Susu. Listen. Wanna hear about Miss Rusila? I’ll tell you a story if you stop crying.” Suki usually begged for Cadis’s tales of Rusila, the Maid Marauder—one of the great pirate legends of Findain. This time she shook her head and wailed even louder.

  Rhea stood with her arms crossed, exasperated.

  She was suddenly plagued by sisters and felt as pleased by it as a dog with drill-nose ticks.

  Iren observed, as she always did, as if the other girls were behind a museum glass.

  Hiram Kinmegistus waved Cadis away with a reassuring nod and lowered himself to be eye-to-eye with the five-year-old Suki. The three older girls backed away. Aside from Rhea, none of them had ever spoken with the magister. And even Rhea had always been in her father’s court, where the palace guards made her feel safe.