1. June 13, 1505: Lancaut, England June 13, 1505 Lancaut, England
The girl dies in silence.

She stares into nothing, eyes unfocused—one the rich brown of the Wye’s banks after a spring flood, the other blue gray, like the skies over Lancaut on a late-winter morning. At least, that is what her father told her when she was young. Assured the entire village when the famine came. Insisted to the boy’s father, even as he paid a dowry far too large for his eldest daughter’s hand. The heavens and the earth, God’s greatest creations, reflected in his daughter’s gaze.

It did nothing to stop the whispers.

One for this realm, one for the realm of the faeries.

The villagers whispered to each other, cast wary glances her way as she walked to the river, a basket of washing digging into her hip. Her gaze never strayed from the narrow path ahead of her.

The nuns whispered to the parish priest every Sunday as she bowed her head and passed through the arched door of St. James’s. She doubted even they prayed for her.

Her parents whispered together in the dying glow of the fire. They thought she was fast asleep, tucked into the bed with her sisters, but she heard them, worrying late into the night.

She heard them all.

A changeling.

A faerie.

Cursed.

The girl clings to life now, as tightly as those whispers clung to her, her breath shallow, her heartbeat slow.

Fading.

She does not want to die, not here, not like this—in her own blood, in her own bed. She is afraid, but most of all, she is angry.

Amor vincit omnia. “Love conquers all.” The boy had whispered it to her in the churchyard, engraved it into the ring he slipped onto her finger, and promised her it was true.

But she is dying, and it is a lie.

Love cannot conquer all. It cannot conquer death.

The girl wishes for the whispers now, if only to know she is not alone. She wishes for the boy who loved her—who still loves her—and for the baby she will never hold. She wishes to feel the cool river splashing against her bare skin, to see the sun rise over the ancient oak forest again.

With all of her dying heart, the girl wishes to live.

The whisper drifts to her ears on the back of a midsummer breeze. Not the whispers of her parents or her sisters, her village or her church. This whisper is as ancient as the forest, as timeless as the river itself. Only the words are the same.

The same words uttered at her birth. The same words that have followed her like a shadow for twenty-three years of her life, now echoing in her death.

The question deciding her worth. Deciding her fate.

What to do with Beatrix?