Aurelie Chantelune had no business comparing herself to a bard. She was to be a soldier, not a musician, and yet her face tightened at the notes she coaxed from her lyre—sharp and staccato, a far cry from her mother’s effortless melodies.

“You’re thinking too much,” Myrah instructed, her voice matching the quiet of the archives. She sat poised in a high-backed chair, eyes glinting in the low candlelight as she watched her ­daughter play. “The ­music should come naturally. Feel it, and let it flow freely.”

Aurelie’s calloused fin­gers danced upon the strings, white hair spilling over her shoulders as she bent over the instrument. She sat on an ornate crimson rug, her tongue pressed against her teeth in concentration.

“You’ll never learn to play properly if you sit curled like a boiled whelk.” Her­ brother, Orion, dropped his head back to peer at Aurelie, misty blue eyes narrowing. “You look half feral.”

Orion had the same stark white hair that marked him as a Chantelune. It made him appear almost otherworldly as he sprawled sideways in his chair, sketchbook balanced atop his knee. His sleep shirt hung open at the collar, exposing skin tanned several shades darker than Aurelie’s own fair complexion.

With a flourish, he twisted his sketchbook ­toward her.

“Behold. This is what ­every boy sees when he looks at you.” The drawing was a twisted mockery of her likeness—wild-haired, hollow-eyed, lips a dev­ilish sneer. Her posture, too, was horrific, hunched and contorted at impossible ­angles.

Aurelie reached for the nearest book to hurl at his head, but their ­mother caught her wrist.

“We do not throw books,” Myrah chided with a lilt of amusement. “Orion, stop tormenting your ­sister.”

“It’s hardly torment.” Five years her ­senior at the age of ­ eighteen, Orion was lean and toned, with a deep voice that had appeared overnight. Yet with his hair mussed and his body folded awkwardly in the chair, he looked more like the boy he’d always been. “Someone has to tell her the truth. How else is she ­going to find a husb—”

The tolling of a bell cut him off mid-sentence. The sound rolled through the castle like thunder underfoot, shaking dust from the rafters and knocking several loose scrolls from a nearby desk.