Legacy and the Queen - Annie Matthew Legacy and the Queen

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on backward. Leo’s sneakers were on the wrong feet. And it must have been Hugo who combed Zaza’s slippery, tangle-prone hair.

      But they all looked so proud of the effort. Someone had even found a hunk of wild honey and placed it at the center of the table for Legacy to spread on her corn cake. Seeing that, Legacy smiled wider. So many wild bees had died in the fire. Now the fruits of their labor were rare. It had been months since anyone had found wild honey.

      Anticipating the sweet, warm taste of the honey, Legacy sat down at the place they’d set for her. Beside her plate was a large rectangular box wrapped in brown paper.

      Before she opened it, she glanced up at her father. He was sitting quietly at the head of the table. There was that white in his hair, and his shoulders were a little more stooped than usual. But when he smiled, Legacy could almost remember how he looked when her mother hadn’t yet left.

      He used to play with her in the garden. He’d thrown tennis balls for her to chase, and she’d laughed and laughed while she retrieved them.

      Now Legacy looked back at the box on the table.

      “Open it!” Van urged, standing beside her with a goofy grin.

      Once again, Legacy flushed. She hesitated. But there was nothing she could do now. She opened the package and drew out the heavy book.

      Ink let out a squeal. “Cora stories!” she cried, lifting her cape in excitement. “We’ll start a new play this afternoon!”

      When Legacy finally faced Van, she saw that his face had crumpled like a used napkin. His glasses had gone crooked again. This time he didn’t make the effort to fix them.

      “Did you even ask?” he said. “Did you even ask for the racket?”

      Legacy tried to swallow the stone in her throat. It wouldn’t go down. She couldn’t answer.

      “You won’t go, will you?” Van said. Tears were welling at the corners of his eyes. “You won’t even try.”

      “Van,” Legacy started, but he was already running off toward the staircase. He moved as quickly as he could, but his bad leg was slowing him down, and he must have been blinded by his tears, because he tripped on the first stair, and again on the second, and this time he didn’t try to make it seem graceful. He only pulled himself up and kept running.

      CHAPTER TWO

ornament

      THE FOREST OF CORA

      After breakfast, Legacy spent a few hours entertaining the littles. They gathered around her, sitting cross-legged on the tumbled stone floor, and Legacy read to them from the book of Cora stories.

      It was a bit battered by time, its corners softened and its pages yellowing at the edges. It would have been impossible for her father to find a new copy, because newer copies didn’t exist. Under Silla, in the months after the Great Fire had been put out, the senate had banned worship of the old gods. Too many acts of destruction had been perpetrated in their names.

      But enforcement was not as strict in the provinces as it was in the city, and there were ways to find old books and relics. And what harm could there be, Legacy thought, in reading some stories to keep the littles distracted? It wasn’t as if she were invoking the gods to use their powers. She wasn’t asking the gods to alter the weather. She was only describing their adventures for the entertainment of the littles.

      The old book was as heavy as an armload of bricks. And though the pages were dusty and torn, the illustrations were painted with luminous mineral pigments: gold, aquamarine, vermilion, and pink. Most of the stories were set in the Forest of Cora. It was unburned then, and the trees in the pictures—nipperberries and cycapresses, but most of all the glorious drammus trees that used to be the pride of the forest—were verdant and teeming with life, nothing like the burnt husks that now lined the hillsides. The trunks of the drammus trees were gargantuan, composed sometimes of six or seven trunks braided together, and their branches cascaded down, trailing leaves like shredded green banners.

      In the pictures of the forest, you could see the occasional pyrus, one of Cora’s winged horses. They were furry and gray, with white markings, gentle eyes, and enormous pink wings. There were also illustrations of the lurals that stalked the forest undergrowth, savage animals with the spotted coats of leopards and the blue eyes and sickled fangs of wolves.

      Sometimes, the pictures showed lurals leaping toward pyruses, who reared away, breathing fire as they did when threatened.

      At the ends of the stories, in complicated calligraphy, there were always strange, inexplicable morals, their lettering illuminated in gold: phrases like

Anger fed is quickly dead. A self disguised is a death surmised. A dream come to life is the end of all strife.

      Legacy didn’t always understand these morals, and she imagined the littles didn’t, either, but they liked the sounds of the words. They liked the big, brilliant pictures. Before long, Ink was rushing around in her cape, ordering the older littles to take their places onstage.

      “You’re Metus, the God of Fear!” Ink was saying to Leo when Legacy finally stood and headed off to the stairs. “And I’m Cora, the Goddess of Love!”

      “Why am I always Fear?” Leo grumbled, and Legacy started to smile. But then she remembered Van’s face when she hadn’t pulled out the Tempest. She remembered the way he’d tripped on the stairs.

      She hoped he’d found his way to the attic. That was where he went to read about the history of the republic in dusty old volumes, snacking on the bits of stale corn cake he was always pulling out of his pockets. He liked to sit in a nest of old, moth-eaten tapestries, dropping crumbs on the tasseled silk pillows.

      All the dusty artifacts in the attic were relics of the days when the orphanage had been a country estate. Now the tapestries—once displayed on the walls—had been wound into thick bolts. The throw pillows were discolored by mildew, and the books were warped and water stained. But the attic was still Van’s favorite place in the orphanage. He spent hours up there every day, reading about the old ways: the noble senators who ruled in the peaceful years before the civil war and the tennis champions who came to the city from the provinces and pledged their loyalty to whichever senator most inspired their trust.

      As she climbed the stairs, Legacy assumed Van had taken refuge in a dusty tome, so she was surprised when she ran into him in the hallway instead. He was standing outside her father’s bedroom.

      When she approached, he put a finger to his lips. He gestured to the crack in the door.

      Legacy took a step forward. Through the crack, she could see a stripe of her father. He seemed to be kneeling before a small table that Legacy had never seen. On top of it, there was a figurine, a woman who herself was prostrate in front of a pyrus, her forehead resting on the ground.

      “Dear Cora,” her father was saying. “Please guide me.”

      Legacy’s mouth dropped open. Was this what a prayer looked like? She’d never seen her father pray. She’d never seen anyone pray, outside of the old books. Prayer, for one thing, was illegal. And her father had always been a believer in balance and reason. The gods were invoked in moments of strong feeling or passion. How could her father be calling to Cora?

      “Help me, Cora,” he was saying, “to have the strength to send him to work.”

      “Him?” Legacy whispered to Van, but Van lifted his finger again.

      “Help me,” her father said, “to know that by sacrificing one, I’ll be able to look after the others.”

      Legacy leaned in closer to the crack. She didn’t like this at all. Who did her father plan

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