Rejected by His Heir, Chosen by His Crown

I found the room by losing my daughter.

Not badly — not the heart-stopping kind. Just that one grey afternoon I went looking for Wren and she wasn't anywhere she was supposed to be, not the kitchens, not the platform, not the deep gallery, and after twenty minutes of the particular low dread that is the standard weather of a mother, I asked Pia, and Pia got a careful look on her face that told me she'd been keeping a thing, and said, "She's down on the mains. She's fine. Sera — she's fine. Leave it a minute before you go down."

"Down on the mains doing what."

"Working," Pia said. "She's been coming for a month. Don't make it a thing."

I went down anyway, of course I did, because I am who I am, and I did the thing I had done her whole life, which was watch her from where she couldn't see me — and I want to set down what I saw, because it was the first genuinely hopeful thing I had seen in six years and I nearly ruined it inside of a minute.

Wren was up to her elbows in a burst junction on the fourth ring, filthy, furious, and completely happy.