In the rotting throne room, Cecilia stood up straight.
The false Arthur was still talking, still laying out the girl she had been like evidence on a table. She let him. She had sat through worse speeches from better speakers. 'You are not him,' she thought, 'and you don't get to decide what I am.' Her power, pressed flat by the weight of the nightmare until now, began to rise. Not as an attack. As a fact. Crimson heat climbed off her skin and the dust on the floor around her feet began, very slightly, to stir. The figure in front of the thrones flickered at the edges, like a projection on a sheet when someone walks past the lamp.
In the dead cold, Seraphina kept looking.
