Once Upon a Broken Heart

Chapter 1: The Girl Who Knew Better

The summons arrived on a Tuesday in November, which was the wrong day and the wrong month for a thing like this.

Isla Vane had always believed, without much evidence, that terrible news arrived in dramatic weather—storms, eclipses, the particular gray of certain Novembers when the sky seemed to be genuinely reconsidering. What she hadn't accounted for was the specificity of bureaucracy: the royal court delivered its summonses at nine in the morning, regardless of atmospheric conditions, by a courier in a yellow coat who knocked three times and then once more and looked apologetic.

The morning was bright. The air smelled like cut wood and the particular cold of water that was thinking about becoming ice. Isla opened the door with ink on her left hand and found the courier holding a cream-colored envelope with the royal seal pressed in black wax.

She knew it was bad before she broke the seal. The courier's expression—apologetic in the specific way of people who have been asked to deliver things they didn't choose—told her everything she needed to know about the category of news. She broke the seal anyway, because not knowing seemed worse.

Her twin sister Petra had been arrested the previous evening on suspicion of murdering the crown prince of Aravel.

The evidence, according to the formal language of the summons, was significant and in the process of being formalized. The trial date was set for three days hence. Given the nature of the charge—crime against the crown—the presiding magistrate had determined that bail was inappropriate. Petra Vane would remain in custody until the trial.

The sentence for conviction: death.

Isla read the summons twice. The courier had already gone. The morning continued to be unreasonably bright.

She went inside and sat at her father's desk—her desk now, technically, though she still hadn't fully adjusted to the possessive—and she looked at the atlas open in front of her, which was a map of the southern coast of Aravel her father had drawn sixteen years ago, with careful notations in his particular handwriting: tidal variation significant here, shoals unreliable after autumn storms, here, the known world ends.

He'd taught her to map before he'd taught her to read. Not because reading was less important, but because mapping was how he thought—the process of converting the shape of a place into marks that other people could use, the responsibility of notation, the ethics of naming where knowledge stopped. His maps were famous in Aravel, not for their artistry (though they were beautiful) but for their honesty. He never pretended the borders were more certain than they were.

He'd died three years ago, in the spring, quickly, without warning, from a heart that had decided it was finished. He'd been sixty-one and had never considered that he might be. Isla had been eighteen, and Petra twenty, and they had continued running the shop between them because there was nothing else to do and nowhere else