Chapter 1 - Ten Minutes
If my daughter fell, the court would laugh.
If she stayed standing, a king might lose his crown.
I knew that before Mathurin even turned the key.
For sixteen years, nobody had opened my cell in the Sainte-Agathe tower without three guards, a lantern, and an order bearing the royal seal. That morning, I heard only one set of footsteps. Fast. Uneven. Then the lock clicked.
Mathurin slipped inside and shut the door behind him. He had been a broad-shouldered stableman when they brought me here. Now his hair was white and his hands shook.
"She's on the Wheel, Madam," he whispered.
My throat closed. "Elise?"
He nodded, already crying. "You have ten minutes. Maybe less."
Sixteen years disappeared in one breath. My daughter had been five the night Chancellor Vautrin's men dragged me away. The last thing I had taught her was how to stand on an old wheelbarrow wheel in our farmyard while I spun it with my foot.
The world can turn as fast as it wants, I had told her. You don't move.
I crossed to the north wall and pushed my fingers into a crack beside the bed. The stone bit my knuckles, but the little brass tube was still there.
Inside were three things: Queen Aveline's signet ring, a strip of paper covered in numbers, and a key no jailer had ever known existed.
Mathurin stared at it. "You kept it all this time?"
"I kept the reason they buried me."
A bell rang below us.
Once.
Mathurin went pale. "The Wheel has started."
I closed my fist around the key.
May you like
Then, far beneath the tower, the palace crowd roared.
And I knew Elise had stepped onto it.
