Chapter 10 · free to read
Two books. The same three hundred pages of the same ten years, in what appeared to be the same hand.
He was right. He had kept a child in a cellar for a decade and called it patience. Every part of me that had scrubbed those courtyards wanted to let the wolves finish him.
In the Dowager's true record, every page began comfortably and ended cramped, because that is how a hand writes forwards. In three hundred pages of it, not one leaf ran the other way. The stolen copy was cramped at the top of every single page.
I did not save him. I saved the book. He knew the difference, and he bowed to me on his way out of the palace anyway — the first bow anyone in that place ever gave me.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.