Winter had not saved her at all.
* * *
“You are distracted today, Your Highness.”
Winter pulled her gaze away from the servant girl who was a constant fixture in her tutoring sessions. The one who kept her eyes lowered and her hands clasped in her lap. Who said nothing. Who was but a tool for Winter’s education. Over the past year, Winter had made the girl laugh and swoon, dance and touch her nose, fall into a deep sleep. She still did not know the girl’s name.
“Your Highness?” said Master Gertman. “Did you hear me?”
Winter smiled at her instructor. “I apologize. I’m still … a little upset, I think, about the servant. The other day.”
“Ah, yes. I heard it was the same girl you kept from jumping from the throne room when you were young.” Master Gertman laced his fingers together. “It is not for you to worry about, Princess. Tragic things happen sometimes, even here in Artemisia.”
Tragic. Tragic. Everyone said it as though the word had meaning.
But was the woman’s death the tragedy, or her life?
She looked again at the servant girl, waiting to be manipulated. She had a good life here in the palace, didn’t she? Winter never did anything awful to her during her trainings, never hurt her or forced her to hurt herself. She gave her pretty illusions to see. She fed only happy emotions into her brain.
For her service, the girl and her family were richly rewarded. It was better than anyone in the outer sectors could hope for.
Wasn’t it?
But looking at her now, Winter noticed, for the first time, a strained whiteness around the girl’s knuckles.
She was tense. Maybe even frightened. Of Winter? Of the tutor? Of one of the other pupils who trained here throughout the day?
Winter’s entire world was spinning and it occurred to her with sudden clarity that this was wrong. Her training sessions. The thaumaturges. The entire Lunar gift. The power that the strong, like she and the queen and Aimery, held over the weak. Like this servant girl. Like Jacin.
Like Winter’s father.
It was exactly what he had tried to tell her all those years ago.
“Try again, Princess,” prompted the tutor. “You did so well last week.”
She looked at Master Gertman again. “I’m sorry. I’m a little faint. I haven’t been feeling well, and … Could you repeat your instructions, please?”
“Just a basic glamour, Your Highness. Perhaps you could try changing the color of your hair?”
Winter reached up and grabbed a handful of her thick black curls. She could do that. She’d done it plenty of times before.
The servant girl inhaled a bracing breath.
Winter released her hair and ran her fingers over it instead. Beauty was usually the goal of simple glamour, and usually she would call up the glamour of the most beautiful woman she knew, the most beautiful woman anyone knew. Her stepmother, Queen Levana. The most beautiful woman on Luna.
The difficult part was making herself seem older. In order for a glamour to be effective, you had to believe that you looked as you wanted others to see you. And while Winter found it easy to change her tight curly hair or the hue of her brown skin or to make herself taller or shorter or thinner or curvier—making herself mature, with all the grace and experience of her stepmother, required a mental focus she was still developing.
She was getting better, though. Master Gertman praised her often.
Someday, she would be powerful.
Someday, she could be as strong as a thaumaturge.
She stared at the top of the servant’s head.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I can’t.”
The tutor frowned.
Rubbing the back of her neck as if she were embarrassed, Winter gave him a faint smile. “I’m just so tired. And distracted. Perhaps we should try again another day. If that’s all right, Master Gertman?”
His frown did not disperse. The servant made no movement, nothing to suggest she had even heard Winter or cared the slightest that the princess would not be manipulating her today. It was as though she weren’t there at all.
Finally, Master Gertman leaned back and nodded. “Of course, Your Highness. You should go rest. We’ll try again next week.”
She stood and smiled as prettily as she could. The tutor looked briefly flustered. “Thank you, Master.” She curtsied before leaving his office.
Jacin was still waiting in the hallway, just where she’d left him. He scrambled to his feet in surprise. “Done already?”
Winter shut the tutor’s door behind her and held Jacin’s gaze. His eyes caught the light of the enormous windows that lined the corridor wall. Her friend was becoming handsome indeed, and he would never need a glamour to improve upon that.
Her palms were suddenly warm and growing damp.
Her unexpected resolve frightened her, but she knew she wouldn’t change her mind.
“I’ve come to a decision, Jacin.”
He cocked his head at her.
All the best people—Jacin and her father and Sir Garrison Clay and the servants who smiled kindly in the hallways and did not seem at all bothered that they did not have perfect unblemished skin or dark, thick eyelashes—they did not use glamours. They did not manipulate the people around them.
Winter didn’t want to be like her stepmother or the thaumaturges.
She wanted to be like the people she loved.
She stepped close to Jacin, because no one else could hear her now. Because her decision would go against everything their society stood for, everything they valued.
“I will never use my gift,” she whispered. “Not ever again.”
* * *
It was easier than she expected it to be, once the decision was made. It required some changes of habits, no doubt. If she wanted a servant to bring something, she had to ask, rather than simply impose the request into their mind. If she wanted to look extra pretty for a party, she would call up a stylist to tint her cheeks and glitter her eyelids, rather than create the illusion in her mind’s eye first.
She never once forgot her vow, though. She stayed true to her word.
Master Gertman was confused as all the progress they’d made in the past years dissolved over the course of a single week. Winter was persistent with her excuses. She pretended to try. She was very convincing. But after every fake attempt, the servant would crease her brow and shake her head, as confused as the tutor.
A month after Winter had sworn off her gift, she passed that servant girl in between sessions and, for the first time, the girl smiled at her in a way that suggested a shared secret.
She wondered if the girl knew that Winter was only pretending. She wondered if the girl was grateful for her weekly respites from whatever manipulations were done to her by the rest of the tutor’s pupils.
“It’s called Lunar sickness,” said Jacin as they whiled away an afternoon in Winter’s chambers. Though rumors had begun circulating about the two of them and how they spent more time alone with each other than was proper, Winter and Jacin refused to be cowed by the passing scowls and snide remarks from the court. Besides, she knew her guards would never say anything. They respected Jacin’s family too much to add fuel to such shameful gossip.
Jacin slid his hand through the medical-studies holograph that shimmered in the center of the room. There had been a time when they would call up adventure stories and virtual reality games using the holograph node, but now more often than not Jacin wanted to study anatomy books and psychology texts instead. In a year he would be applying for an occupation, and his heart had been set on a doctor’s internship ever since Winter could remember.