The queen had not slept in eleven days. Not since the mirrors began lying to her. The one in the solar showed her standing with her hands unbloodied; the one in her dressing room reflected a crown that sat straight on her brow; the great hall mirror, oldest of all, showed her smiling. None of it was true, and so she had ordered them draped in black velvet, one by one, until the palace swam in a kind of useful darkness that at least did not pretend.
The Glass Throne had been built, legend held, from the shattered windows of the city that Aenara had burned to unite the lowlands. This was meant to be a warning — to the queen who sat upon it, to the court that surrounded it, to every petitioner who climbed those razor steps and pressed their forehead to the cool translucent floor. Power was fragile. The woman who wielded it could not afford to be. Queen Thessaly had believed this once, in the abstract way one believes things before they are tested.
She believed it differently now, sitting in the dark with her hands in her lap, listening to the sounds of her city going to sleep without her. Somewhere below, her spymaster was negotiating the terms of a betrayal she had already decided to allow. Somewhere further, her daughter was learning the names of stars from a man who did not know his daughter had married the queen's eldest son. Everything was arranged. Everything was terrible. Thessaly folded her hands and waited for morning, as queens do, as they always have.
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