“You won’t be sorry, Your Majesty,” Sebastian vowed, pulling his red bandana from his back pocket and tying it around his head, something he always did before my lessons. “With a little more practice . . .” He hesitated, as if trying to convince himself and not me. “With a little more practice, you’ll be riding like a champion.”

I bit the inside of my cheek at the thought of me as a champion rider. “That sounds . . .” My lip quivered ever so slightly. “. . . wonderful.”

Sebastian’s face lit into a huge, triumphant grin as he dipped his head once quickly before straightening and spinning on his heel, his shoulders high.

“Oh, and Sebastian?”

He stopped and turned back around. “Yes, Your Majesty?”

“Will you please just call me Charlie?”

Sebastian’s brows crumpled, uncertainty clear in every feature.

But it was Zafir who answered. “No.” His voice was like iron. Unyielding. And then he looked down on me from his horse, and his gaze was equally obstinate. “He will not, Your Majesty.”

brooklynn

Brooklynn stood on the street, staring up at the scarred sign that hung above the door. She hated the pang that coursed through her, the ache of nostalgia that betrayed her as she questioned whether being here was wise or not.

Still, wise wasn’t her reason for coming. And neither was nostalgia.

She had a job to do. An important one. Longing had no place in her world. . . . Not today, anyway.

She tamped down the emotions and shoved her way through the battered wooden door. Even the weathered brass of the door handle beneath her fingertips was entirely too well-known to her.

Inside, she scowled at the man behind the counter. He looked older now than she remembered, more haggard. The skin around his eyes was lined and leathered, as if he were a man accustomed to a life of hard labor. As if he’d spent years working in the fields rather than inside the walls of a butcher’s shop. She watched as he rubbed his grizzled beard, graying in places it surely hadn’t been before.

It was his eyes, though, that held her attention as he noticed her standing there—they were as sharp and focused as ever, and filled with spite. She’d always hated that physical similarity between them: the dark brown of their eyes.

He wiped his hands on his stained apron, and Brook was reminded why she’d never been bothered by the sight of blood. She’d grown up with it.

“I need a minute,” he grumbled in Englaise to the older man behind the counter with him.

“I’m almost off work,” the man responded in a firm voice, as if he was accustomed to having this conversation. “Five minutes. And then I leave, whether you’re finished or not.”

Brook watched as her father’s face drained of all color. She could tell that he wanted to scream, that his rage was bubbling so close to the surface that even she was cringing inside as she waited for the explosion that was surely coming. But when he answered, his words were quiet. Controlled. “It’s my store, Anson. Do I need to remind you again? You work for me.” The muscle at his jaw flexed, jumping spastically. “I make the rules here.”

Anson just shook his head, as if the notion was absurd. “But I shouldn’t have to remind you that I have rights now.” And then he repeated, “Five minutes.”

Her father untied his apron and threw it on the floor as he stormed into the backroom, leaving Brook to either wait or follow.

She was comfortable with neither, but she was already here, and they had only five minutes. She might as well get this over with.

Casting an apologetic look at the older man, she slipped behind the counter and went through the doorway that led to the chilled room where her father was holding a cleaver and slicing—pointlessly—into the remains of a carcass that had clearly already been carved, its usable meat already packaged.

“Can you believe him? Six months ago he was mopping blood off the floors and discarding entrails. He wasn’t even permitted to speak to me. Now I have to pay him a wage he doesn’t deserve and allow him to interact with my customers. Now, he thinks he can tell me what to do.” He hacked into a section of rib cage and pieces of bone and flesh sprayed outward. “This is your fault. You and your queen!”

Brooklynn walked toward the familiar carving-block work surface and ran her fingertip over a section in which she’d carved her name when she was just a girl, back when she still made all of her B’s backward. The wood had been new then, shiny and polished, yet her father hadn’t chastised her for marring it. He’d simply marveled at her handiwork, boasting that his daughter might have a future as a woodworker or an artist.

He’d never imagined she’d become a soldier.

Or that she’d turn against him.

“You need to tell them to back off. What you’re doing is foolish,” she insisted, ignoring his complaints about the New Equality. “All you can hope to accomplish is to get yourselves killed.” She glanced up to watch his reaction.

His face twisted into a sneer. “Is that what your queen tells you? That we can’t gain enough power to overthrow her?” He took a step closer, still clutching the bloodstained cleaver in his fist, and Brook recognized that both his language—the all-too-familiar guttural intonations of Parshon—and his stance were meant to intimidate her. “If I recall correctly, we wouldn’t be the first to challenge a queen . . . and win.”

Brooklynn’s eyes narrowed at the close-minded coward who stood before her. She drew her fingers away from her childhood carving, disgusted that she’d allowed herself to remember the man he’d once been. It was hard to imagine why she’d so desperately yearned for his approval for so many years, why she’d craved his notice.