Chapter 1: The Second Morning
Rowan's hand closed around his throat first, and the moonlight through the tall windows of the Ashworth study came second, a pale wash over the carpet where Kael had once bled without a sound. He felt the pressure again in memory, the specific cruelty of his own brother's grip, the way Rowan had leaned close enough that his breath had touched Kael's ear before everything went dark and stayed dark for what should have been forever.
Then the memory tore loose, and Kael opened his eyes to sunlight.
Not the grey, filtered light of the room where he had died. Morning light, warm and gold, falling through gauze curtains he had not seen in three years. He lay still for a long moment, listening to his own heartbeat hammer against his ribs, and understood, before he understood anything else, that the ceiling above him was the ceiling of his childhood bedroom in the Ashworth townhouse, the one with the hairline crack shaped like a bent river that he used to trace with his eyes when he could not sleep.
He was alive. He was young again, or young still, twenty and unmarried and breathing in a house that had not yet thrown him away.
Kael sat up slowly, his hands pressed flat against the mattress as though the bed itself might tip him back into the dark if he moved too fast. Outside, a bell was already ringing somewhere across the rooftops of Elmsgard, a bright, ceremonial sound that took a moment to place, and when he placed it his stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with recognition.
The Choosing of the Moonwreath. Today.
He had lived through this morning once before. He remembered every hour of it, the way a person remembers the last ordinary day before a disaster, catalogued and preserved with terrible clarity because his mind had returned to it so many times afterward, searching for the moment he might have chosen differently. Today he had thrown his silver wreath to Dorian Vale, heir of Frostmere, golden and beautiful and utterly convinced that Kael existed to be arranged around his convenience. Today had been the first day of three years that had slowly closed around Kael like a well-tailored coat that never quite let him breathe, three years of smiling at banquets while Dorian decided which rooms he could enter, three years of being praised as the most fortunate Omega in Elmsgard while feeling, more each season, like a piece of furniture with excellent bloodlines.
And at the end of those three years, his own brother had strangled him in the dark, whispering that it should have been Rowan's glory, Rowan's marriage, Rowan's applause, as if Kael's suffering had been a theft rather than a life.
I am not doing that again, Kael thought, and the thought arrived with more steadiness than he expected, given that his hands were still trembling against the sheets. Whatever else happens today, I am not walking into that same cage and calling it a triumph.
He did not yet know what he would do instead. That frightened him more than the memory of dying had. A man could resolve, in the abstract, not to repeat his worst mistake, and still have no idea which of a hundred small choices, made in a single hour in a crowded square, would matter.
A servant knocked and entered without waiting, the way servants always had in this house before he had lost the right to expect otherwise, and informed him that his lord father wished him at breakfast within the half hour, dressed for the ceremony. Kael thanked her in a voice that came out steadier than he felt, and dressed himself in the pale green coat he remembered wearing, buttoning it with fingers that no longer shook by the time he reached the collar. He caught his own reflection in the tall glass beside the wardrobe and studied it the way he might have studied a stranger: the same face, unlined, unmarked by three years of careful smiling. He had forgotten how young he had looked, once.
The breakfast room smelled of tea and hot bread, and his father was already seated at the head of the table, going through a stack of correspondence with the particular briskness he reserved for mornings that mattered to his ambitions. Rowan was there too, and it was Rowan, more than the room or the bread or his father's correspondence, who made Kael stop just inside the doorway.
He remembered his brother at twenty as sullen, easily bruised in his pride, quick to sulk when their father praised Kael's marriage prospects over his. He did not remember Rowan like this: upright, almost buoyant, talking over their father before the man had finished his sentence, a confidence in his voice that had no history behind it, as though he had woken already certain of a victory he had not yet won.
"Father, I intend to be first in the line today," Rowan was saying, buttering bread with more force than the task required. "I've thought about it, and there's no reason the eldest son should always claim the first throw simply by custom. I want to throw before Kael does."
Their father glanced up, faintly amused, the way he might be amused by a dog performing an unexpected trick. "You've never cared for the order of the ceremony before, Rowan."
"Things change," Rowan said, and smiled, and something about the smile made the hair rise on the back of Kael's neck, because he had seen that exact curve of mouth before, three years from now, in a dark room, right before a pair of hands closed around his throat. Things change. Kael had not told anyone that he remembered dying. There was no possible way his brother could know it too. And yet.
"Good morning," Kael said, because someone had to say something, and he took his seat before his legs could betray how carefully he was choosing every word this morning, the way one might choose footing on ice.
Rowan's eyes flicked to him, and for one unguarded instant Kael thought he saw something calculating behind the brightness, gone as quickly as it had come. "Good morning, brother. Sleep well? You look pale."
"Well enough," Kael said. He reached for the tea without asking to have it poured for him, and noticed, distantly, that his hand was steady now. "I imagine everyone sleeps poorly before the Choosing. There is a great deal riding on one silver ring."
"Not for me," Rowan said, too quickly, and their father chuckled into his correspondence as though his younger son had made a joke rather than a confession.
Kael watched his brother butter a second slice of bread he clearly had no intention of eating, watched the restless energy in his hands, and turned the wrongness of it over in his mind without letting his face show anything at all. In the life he remembered, Rowan had approached this morning with his usual mixture of envy and resentment, certain that whatever happened, Kael would somehow end up the more fortunate of the two of them, and furious about it in advance. This Rowan was not envious. This Rowan was already sure of something, the way a man is sure of a hand of cards he has already seen.
He is behaving as though he knows how today ends, Kael thought, and set his cup down very carefully so that it made no sound against the saucer. That is not possible. Unless it is.
He did not let himself finish the thought. There would be time for it later, in whatever quiet corner of the day he managed to find. For now there was breakfast to survive and a father to endure.
Their father set aside his letters at last and regarded them both with the particular gravity he brought to matters of family advancement. "You both understand what today means for this house," he said. "The Ashworth name has stood for three generations without a marriage that reached beyond the earldom. Whichever of you secures an alliance with real weight behind it, Frostmere, or higher, does more for this family in one afternoon than either of you has managed in twenty years of being polite at dinner parties." His gaze settled on Kael a beat longer than it settled on Rowan. "I trust you remember your duty, Kael, whatever fancies keep you up reading legal texts until midnight."
"I remember it," Kael said, and did not elaborate on which duty he meant.
He ate what he could, which was little, and answered what he was asked, which was less than his father wanted, and all the while some cooler, more distant part of his mind, the part that had spent three years learning to watch a room without appearing to watch it, catalogued every strange thing about the morning. Rowan's restlessness. The particular hunger in his voice when he spoke of being first. The way he kept glancing toward the window, toward the direction of the square, as though counting down toward something he had already decided must happen.
In his previous life, Kael had walked to that square with his eyes fixed on the middle distance, already resigned to whatever alliance his father arranged, already halfway into the smiling, careful, contained man he would spend three years becoming. He had thrown his wreath because it was expected, and Dorian had caught it because Dorian caught everything he wanted, and Kael had told himself, for three years, that contentment and happiness were close enough cousins that a person could learn to mistake one for the other if they simply stopped comparing.
He was not going to make that mistake today. He did not yet know what he would do differently, only that when the silver wreath left his hand this time, it would go where he chose to send it, and not where habit or duty or a well-tailored coat told him it belonged.
When the carriage was called and his father swept ahead of them toward the door, already composing in his head the conversations he intended to have with other families at the square, Kael lingered a moment on the front steps, looking out over the pale morning rooftops of Elmsgard toward the direction of the central square, where the crowd was already gathering, where somewhere among the nobility and the merchants and the idle crowd there would be, he now remembered with sudden clarity, a masked figure standing at the very edge of things, someone he had barely noticed the first time, too consumed with his own approaching cage to look twice at a stranger in rags.
He remembered nothing else about that figure. Not a name, not a face beneath the mask, nothing but the fact of having seen him and dismissed him.
This time, Kael thought, climbing into the carriage after his brother, watching the city slide past the window as the horses began to move, I will look properly. This time my hand will hold the wreath for myself, before it holds it for the family.
The carriage rolled on toward the square, toward the bells and the crowd and the choice that had already ruined one lifetime, and Kael sat with his hands folded very still in his lap, and did not let himself hope for anything he could not yet name.