One daughter was warded to live.
The other was raised to burn.
June 1536. The falcon queen is dead on the scaffold, and Mary Tudor waits to feel free. The freedom never comes. Something was sealed that morning in her stepmother's blood, and it has folded itself into her own.
In a country nursery a red-haired child grows up bastardized, forgotten, and impossibly hard to harm. Fevers break in the night. Blades turn aside. Elizabeth calls it luck, and God, and her own quick wit, and never learns what her mother paid to buy it for her.
For seventeen years the daughters of Henry Tudor circle one another through stepmothers, scandals, and a dying boy king. One is warded and unknowing. The other hunts in the dark for a curse she cannot name, and rides east at last to take a crown.
