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stood in front of the mirror, facing her own reflection—her mismatched eyes, her inconsistent skin, her slightly lopsided face. Normally, Violet wasn’t much of a mirror-gazer. “I already
know
what I look like,” she’d say impatiently. And she knew that she was ugly. No amount of mirror-gazing would change that, ever. But on this day, her reflection caught her attention, arrested her on the spot. She stared at the ooze of tears making its way down the edges of her cheeks, at her lips weighting into a frown.
    Selfish
, she thought.
    Dull
, she thought again. She closed her eyes, her heart caught between wishing that she was useful enough to have been invited on her father’s excursion and wishing that she was clever enough to have convinced him to stay.
    She opened her eyes and stared at her reflection.



Not pretty enough
, a voice whispered in the back of her mind.
Not enough for a
real
princess
, it said even more quietly. It was a thought that had been surfacing quite a bit lately. Violet shrugged it away.
    “Yes I am,” she said to no one in particular. She glared at her reflection. Her reflection did not glare back. “I’m
real
.” No one answered. She closed her eyes, turned away, and hurried down the hall.
    Violet didn’t notice that there was something…
odd
about her reflection in the mirror. If she had been paying attention, she might have seen that her reflection did
not
—as reflections typically do—mirror her movements and vanish into the limit of the mirrored space.
    No. Her reflection remained.
    It
remained
.
    And as Violet—the
real
Violet—reached the end of the hall, wiping her tears away as she did, the reflection in the mirror—the
wrong
Violet—spread its lips into a cruel yellow grin.



CHAPTER ELEVEN
    The hunting party had been gone for a double phase of the Lesser Moon when something that was once known only to a select few became known to all: The Queen—our dear, beautiful, and wise Queen—was expecting another child. Given the sorrowful conclusion of her other pregnancies (besides the miraculous birth of Violet, that is) and the increasing danger to her life and health, we worried for her. Every breathing soul among us.
    Still, the entire castle was under strict orders not toenlighten the King—not even when a supply team was sent to replenish the dwindling stores of the hunting party. “The King must not know,” she said.
    “He has been searching for a dragon for as long as I have known him, and he may never have another chance,” she reasoned. “Why give him cause to worry? Either the child will live or it will not, and there is nothing that the King can do about it.”
    And perhaps that was true. But
oh
, how we
worried
! And though she pretended not to, so did the Queen.
    Violet, for her part, became like a shadow to her mother. She went where the Queen went, ate when the Queen ate, slept when the Queen slept. She fetched drinks and foodstuffs and reading material. She sat in on meetings and hearings and councils—even those that were the
most
boring and the
most
tedious.
    The Queen indulged this, calling Violet “my little apprentice.”
    “Remember, my darling,” she said seriously, “the more tedious the meeting, the better the training for later. I wish I could tell you that the tedium becomes enjoyable as one grows old, but alas, I cannot.” She laughed at this, but thenthe laugh became a grimace, and the grimace became a cry, and our gray-faced Queen found herself beset by physicians once again.
    After a particularly long meeting, the Queen retreated to her chambers to lie down. Violet remained at her mother’s side for a bit to tell her a story—a tale about an apprentice storyteller who had fallen in love with a painting, and how the painting tried to take over the world. But her mother didn’t hear the ending, for she drifted off to sleep somewhere in the middle. Violet leaned against the pillows, holding her mother’s hand.
    How can a painting