Page 23

"So, I'm talking to a Magical voicemail."

"Sure. If that helps you cope."

"It does."

She let that sit for a second, and then the humor went out of her, like a light switched off. I just knew it was time for me to ask the tough question.

So, I did.

"Who is the One Below?"

Margaret didn't answer right away. She got a faraway look in her eyes that was anything but dreamy. Then she spoke. Her voice had gone flat and careful, the way people talk when they're handling something that could still cut them.

"She was a Dragon Queen. Not me. She was the Queen before me..."

I waited. I could feel it coming, that particular kind of dread that shows up right before something rearranges everything you thought you knew.

"My sister."

The word landed like a stone dropped down a very deep well.

"She loved deeply," Margaret went on. "A Mate. Children. A whole life she'd built with her own two hands, the kind she wasn't willing to hand over to anybody, not even Fate. When her coronation came, she believed taking the crown meant giving it all up. So, she refused it."

"That's her," Aideen said, suddenly sharp inside my chest. "Martha. That's her."

"Who?"

"The memories. The Queen who loved. The Queen who chose her family. The Queen who refused. It was never Margaret. It was her sister, all along."

The memory hit before I could brace for it. It wasn’t gentle, the way Aideen's flashes usually were, but sudden and total, like stepping through a door into someone else's worst day.

A hall, torchlit more from tradition than necessity. A young woman standing in the center of it, hands shaking, a crown held out to her on a velvet cushion. She looked so much like Margaret it hurt.

Not older. Not different. Just far more frightened.

I felt what she felt, not just saw it.

Her heart hammering. The particular terror of a room full of people who loved her, waiting for her to become something that would take her away from them. A man at the edge of the crowd, dark-haired, solid, achingly familiar in the set of his shoulders, mouthing something like it's all right, whatever you choose. She didn’t believe him, not really, because how could it be all right if choosing the crown meant losing him.

Her hand hovered an inch from the crown.

Then dropped.

I felt her relief, fierce and immediate, followed half a second later by something so much worse. A thread, thin and cold, sliding into the space where certainty should have been.

Then the memory let go, and I was back at the table, gasping as if I'd surfaced from deep water.

We'd just spent four months attaching the right memories to the wrong Queen, because history– deliberately, carefully– had merged two sisters into one tidy, tragic story. That was why the tomb had said LAST TO REFUSE THE CROWN in the first place. Somebody, generations ago, had decided it was safer for the world to remember Margaret as the one who'd refused.

Easier than remembering what had actually happened to the one who did.

"The crown wasn't punishment," Margaret said. "It was part of the seal. When she refused it, she weakened the Door. And something reached her. Not possession, not exactly. Something from Below found her fear, her anger, her resentment that being Queen meant losing everyone she loved– and it fed on that, slowly, until there wasn't much of my sister left at all."

"So, she wasn't born evil."

"No."

"She was scared." The minute I said the words, a shiver skittered down my spine.