The palace of Sareen shimmered with gold and dust. The air smelt of cardamom, old stone, and time itself. King Malek al-Rahim sat by the eastern window, his hands trembling over a carved ivory chessboard that had not been played in years.
He had been a lion once. Strong, proud, feared. Now his body bent like an old reed. His eyes had dimmed, and his breath came slow and uneven. The throne that once felt like part of him now sat heavy, as though it no longer recognized him.
The thought had not come all at once. It crept in slowly, night after night, like frost crawling across glass. For a week, Malek lay awake beneath the gold-leafed ceiling of his chamber, wondering how to save what remained of his kingdom and his bloodline.
Sareen was dying. The rivers ran thinner, the coffers were half-empty, and whispers of rebellion curled through the court. The palace felt quieter now, stripped of its warmth, every corridor echoing too loudly.
Lysara was still young. Too young to understand the tension coiled beneath the silk and ceremony. She laughed when she should not, ran where she was not meant to, and believed the world would always make room for her. Malek allowed himself that mercy. There was still time for her.
There was no such comfort where Maria was concerned.
His eldest had reached the age where futures were bartered behind closed doors, where daughters became assurances and silence was mistaken for obedience. Suitors should have come. Alliances should have been discussed. Instead, the court had learned not to ask.
He had made certain of that.
Maria had been kept from view, from rumor, from the careless gaze of men who would look too closely. Too many questions had been deflected. Too many invitations declined. Sareen's eldest princess had become a shadow in her own home.
It was protection, he told himself. Necessity.
But protection had its cost.
She was sharp-minded, gentle-spoken, and born with a power she should never have carried. Magic still lingered in her veins, the old fire of Sareen's first queens. Malek had seen it since she was a child. The way lamps flickered when she cried. The way flames bent, shimmered, and sometimes burned at her touch.
He loved her for it.
And he feared her because of it.
Because in the North, magic was a death sentence.
And King Aedric of Eldrath, the Iron King and Wolf of the North, was not known for mercy.
Malek had heard the stories. How Aedric had his generals executed for disobedience. How he burnt his enemies alive in their armour. How even his allies spoke his name with unease.
For seven long nights, Malek fought the thought he couldn't escape: the only way to protect his kingdom... was to give Maria away.
At last, he sent for his vizier, Samir, an old man wrapped in silence and wisdom. Samir entered quietly, his face half-lit by the torches.
"You called for me, my king," he said.
Malek didn't turn. He was still staring out the window, where the desert met the night. "Tell me, old friend," he said softly. "If a man throws his child to the wolves to save his people, is he a king... or a monster?"
Samir's gaze lowered. "You are both," he said. "All kings are."
Malek closed his eyes. His hands trembled on the chessboard. "Aedric is not a man who loves peace. They say his heart froze the day his brother died. They say he has no warmth left in him at all. They say his soul is stained and tainted."
Samir nodded slowly. "And yet he is strong. The North bends to him. No other king can offer you what he can: not armies, not survival. He may not love your daughter, but he will not ignore the value of the South."
Malek looked at him then, eyes red-rimmed and tired. "You've seen my daughter. You've seen what she is."
"I have," Samir said quietly. "But I've seen her strength. I've seen How she knows what she needs to be when she has to!"
Malek's fingers clenched. The words were true and cruel.
"And her life?" he whispered.
Samir hesitated. "Her life", he said, "is the price of a kingdom."
The old king sank back in his chair. The words hit like stone.
For a long time, neither spoke.
Finally, Malek reached for the quill. His hand shook as he dipped it into ink. The parchment before him waited, blank and merciless.
Each word came slowly, heavy with consequence, binding his daughter's fate to a man he had never met. A man the world called a tyrant.
When he finished, he sealed the letter in gold. The falcon that would carry it waited in the shadows, wings twitching, ready to bear the will of kings and the weight of buried magic.
Malek watched it vanish into the dark, toward the horizon where desert met ice.
And then he prayed.
Not to gods of war or kings long dead, but to time itself, that it might one day forgive a father for what he had condemned his child to endure.
Maria walked the inner corridors of Sareen with Lysara at her side, their footsteps softened by woven runners worn smooth by generations of kings and the daughters they had bartered away. The palace breathed around them, warm and familiar, scented with incense, citrus oil, and stone that had known her bloodline longer than memory.
This was her home. Not because it had been kind to her, but because she had chosen to be kind to it when no one else would.
Lysara spoke as she always did, filling the quiet with small, bright observations. A new mural finished in the west hall. A falcon she had seen circling the towers at dawn. Plans she made too easily, as if the world were still generous enough to allow them.
Maria listened. She always listened.
She smiled when courtesy required it and nodded when the moment demanded grace, but her mind moved elsewhere, measuring, weighing. She noticed the servants who lowered their eyes too quickly, looking to her for the orders the King forgot to give. She saw the guards who lingered at doors she was not legally meant to cross, yet they stepped aside for her all the same. Sareen hid her from rumor and foreign tongues, yet within its walls, the very stones seemed to lean toward her.
It always had. To the world, she was a secret; to the palace, she was the pulse.
Her father feared the world beyond these stones. He feared courts that counted daughters as liabilities and sons as continuations. He feared that a kingdom ruled by a woman would be tested more harshly, bled more quickly. And now, with sickness hollowing him from the inside, his fear ruled him more than wisdom ever had. He sat in his tower mourning the son he never had, while the daughter he did have was the only thing keeping his throne from toppling.
What he would not say, what the court would never dare utter was that Sareen did not weaken in Maria's presence. It steadied.
She was the one who signed decrees when his hands shook too badly to hold a seal. She was the one who settled disputes before they sharpened into rebellion, walking the markets veiled and unannounced to hear truths no throne ever could. She did not sit idle, waiting to be chosen by a man. She ruled, quietly, in the spaces his weakness left behind.
And Sareen answered to her.
"You're doing it again," Lysara said, bumping Maria's shoulder lightly. "The 'Queen-Face.' You always look like that when you're carrying the weight of the grain tax on your shoulders."
Maria looked at her sister, at the youth still clinging to her despite the years. Lysara was nearly grown now, her laughter softer, her steps more careful, but the world had not yet taught her how cruel it could be to women who refused to bend. There was still time. Maria intended to guard that innocence like a treasure.
"It's nothing," Maria said gently, though it was a lie. It was everything.
They passed beneath a high window where sunlight poured in, catching in Maria's pale hair and setting it briefly alight, a flicker of the old fire that lived in her veins. Lysara slowed, watching the way courtiers paused in the courtyard below, their gazes drifting upward with an almost religious reverence.
"They love you," Lysara whispered.
Maria's chest tightened, equal parts warmth and resentment. "They love Sareen," she replied. "And they love that I am willing to be its ghost so they don't have to face the truth of a dying King."
What she did not say was how bitter it felt to be the answer to every problem, yet still be considered a "risk." To be the spine of a kingdom that refused to let her wear the crown.
Sometimes, as they walked, Maria felt it, the weight of something older watching her. It wasn't the judging gaze of the court or the hollow stare of her father; it was a presence that lived within the very marrow of Sareen. He was there, a shadow woven into the sun-drenched stone, ancient and patient. While her father recoiled from the "curse" of the palace's old magic, Maria leaned into it, a secret smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. She loved the way the air grew thick and heavy with his attention, the way the temperature seemed to rise until her skin hummed with the same fire that burned in her veins. To her father, this presence was a ghost to be exorcised, but to Maria, he was the only one who truly saw her. He didn't want a submissive princess or a bartered daughter; he recognized the sovereign she already was. In the quiet curve of the corridors, she could almost feel his breath against her neck, an intimate, silent acknowledgment that while she might be a ghost to her people, she was the heartbeat of his world.
"Do you ever wonder," Lysara asked suddenly, "what waits beyond the sea? Beyond the ice of the North?"
Maria slowed. The question struck too close to a truth she wasn't ready to face. She thought of the rumors of the Iron King, a man who saw women as spoils of war.
"I try not to," Maria said.
Lysara smiled, unafraid. "I think I'd like to see it one day. A world where we aren't just shadows in a hallway."
Maria reached for her sister's hand, her grip instinctive, protective. "You will," she said, with a certainty she would fight to make real.
They continued on through sunlit halls and open arches, unaware of the letter already crossing deserts and ice. Unaware that her father had already traded her fire for his own peace, bartering her to a crown forged in winter at the edge of the world.
And beyond Sareen's walls, fate had begun to move.