Prologue: The Witch of the Willow

Serenia, 1621

They hanged Agnes Quin from the old willow at dawn, because the king wanted the whole kingdom to see it.

A crowd had gathered in the frost, farmers and tanners and washerwomen with their breath smoking in the cold. They had come to watch a witch die. Most of them had bought her remedies once. Some of them owed her their children’s lives. Not one of them spoke for her.

She had been kept in the king’s deepest cell for nine months before this morning. The jailers said she had been with child when they took her, and that the child had been born in the dark on a bed of straw, and that the king himself had come down the stairs with a lantern on the night of its birth and carried it away wrapped in his own cloak. The jailers said a great many things. Most of them were drunk when they said them, and none of them said them twice.

King Edric sat his horse at the edge of the square, wrapped in fur and silence. He did not look at the gallows. He looked at the ground.

Agnes looked only at him.

She stood on the cart with the rope around her neck and her hands bound behind her, and she was smiling. That was what the people would remember afterward, when they told the story to their grandchildren in low voices. The witch had smiled at the king as if she knew something he did not.

“Edric,” she said, and the crowd went still at the sound of the king’s name in a condemned woman’s mouth. “You took my land. You took my name. Now you take my life. But you cannot take what is already yours.”

The king’s jaw tightened. “Finish it,” he told the hangman.

“Hear me first.” Her voice carried across the square, clear as a bell in the frozen air. “Five daughters of my blood will rise when your line has grown cold and cruel. Fire and water, earth and air, and the last of them holding life and death in her two hands. They will come for your crown. And when they do, your blood will answer to mine.”

Something moved through the crowd then, a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. Overhead, the bare branches of the willow began to sway, though there was no wind.

The hangman glanced at the king. Edric’s face had gone white.

“Finish it,” he said again.

The cart rolled forward.

      *

That night the king did not go to the queen’s chambers, nor to the chapel, nor to the great hall where his lords sat drinking in silence. He went to the tower room where his court sorcerer kept his lamps and his glass and his long tables of things that had no names.

The sorcerer was a young man, or seemed one. He had served Edric’s father, and Edric’s father’s father, and in all that time no one at court could remember him looking any older than he did that night, dark-haired and lean, with eyes that changed color in the candlelight.

“It is done?” the sorcerer asked.

“It is done.” The king set a small iron box on the table between them. “You will make me something.”

Inside the box lay five stones on a bed of black velvet. A ruby, a sapphire, a topaz, an emerald, and a diamond. The king had taken them from his own treasury that afternoon, with his own hands, and told no one.

“She said five,” Edric said. “Five daughters of her blood. I want to know where they are, every one of them, on the day they are born. I want a thing that will find them.”

The sorcerer lifted the diamond to the light and turned it slowly between his fingers. “A thing like that can be made,” he said. “But a thing like that does not only find. It draws. Whoever wears it will feel them, and they will feel the wearer, and in time it will pull at them the way the moon pulls the tide.”

“Good,” said the king. “Let it pull them to me.”

The sorcerer set the stones into a chain of gold over three nights, and on the fourth night he bound a spell to it, and on the fifth he gave it to the king and asked for nothing in return. Edric thought that strange. He did not think about it long.

He told his heir the chain was a sacred relic. He wrote down the witch’s words and named them a prophecy, and he made it say that the five witches would save the kingdom, not destroy it, so that if his descendants ever found them, they would bring them home to the crown instead of running from them.

He never told anyone what Agnes had meant by the thing that was already his.

He never told anyone that the infant daughter his queen held up to the court at the christening that spring, the one with the gray eyes and the small round mark on her wrist, had not come from the queen at all.

And he never asked his sorcerer why a man who wanted nothing had taken such care over five small stones, or why, when the work was finished, he had kept one pearl from the witch’s confiscated crown for himself, and put it in his pocket, and smiled.

Chapter One: The Pearl Crown

The capital of Serenia, 1690

The royal wedding began before dawn with the breaking of fast in the Great Hall, and by the time the candles were lit Princess Araminta Rayne had already decided she would not cry.

She stood at the head of the long table in a gown of ivory silk so stiff with seed pearls that it could have stood up without her, and she wore the weight of her wedding crown like a millstone. Around her the hall buzzed with the low, eager noise of a court that has been promised wine before noon.

“Your Highness.” Her maid lowered her voice, though no one was listening. “The King requests your presence in the chapel at sunrise.”

Araminta nodded. She did not trust herself to speak.

The crown felt heavier than it should. It was an old thing, older than anyone at court, a delicate circlet of white gold set with pearls the size of a child’s fingertip. It had belonged to Queen Margot, her father’s mother, and before that to King Edric’s queen. The kitchen girls said it had been taken from a witch, seventy years ago, the witch they hanged at the willow, and that it had been cursed on the morning she died. The royal family had always laughed at such stories.

Araminta had laughed at them too, once. This morning she was not certain why.

“You look lovely, cousin.” Lady Genevieve approached in a rustle of emerald silk, wearing a smile that never reached her eyes. She was the King’s cousin and the court’s most dependable source of cruelty. “The whole kingdom rejoices today.”

“Does it?” Araminta’s voice came out hoarse. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Genevieve’s smile thinned. “Your father has made a brilliant match. Prince Darius of Eldoria will bring us the alliance we need against the northern clans.”

“And what do I bring him?”

“The richest lands in the south,” Genevieve said smoothly. “Not to mention your considerable charms.”

Araminta looked away, heat climbing her throat. She was seventeen, and this would be her second marriage. The first had been to a boy of fifteen, the son of a duke, who had died of a fever in the spring before they had spent a single night together. She had mourned him the way one mourns a stranger, politely and with a little guilt. Now she was to be given to a man twice her age, a foreign prince with a reputation for cruelty that had reached Serenia two years before he did.