LITMIR.BIZ

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was about to explain this to Anara. But she stopped herself when she saw the eager look on her nurse’s face.

      “Come on, get going,” Anara said.

      “Okay!” Pretia said, leaping off the bed. She smiled over her shoulder at her nurse, then sprinted out of her room, down a large marble staircase and into the Hall of the Gods, where the flame in front of Hurell’s shrouded bust was still burning. Pretia didn’t stop to put it out. The shoes felt too good on her feet for that.

      She raced through the Atrium, down the Grand Staircase. She gave a quick wave to the marble statues of her ancestors. Then sprinted down the steps onto the castle grounds. She took a deep breath of the fresh air. The sky was a perfect lapis blue—the same hue as the sea. The sunbaked earth was the color of golden clay, and the crystal and limestone embedded in the ground glinted.

      It was like magic, the way she took off from the bottom step and sprinted around the edge of the stadium. It was almost as if the shoes were enchanted. It was as if they were moving her feet for her.

      She darted past the castle gates and into a thick grove of fig trees. Normally she would stop to pluck a few of the ripe, dusky purple fruits and spit the stems as she ran. But not this time.

      She wanted to keep moving. She needed to keep moving. The wind blew her black hair behind her. Her arms kept time with her feet, everything urging her on, on, on. Pretia looked down to see the dazzling blur of the golden running shoes speeding across dusty clay earth, moving faster than she had ever thought possible. It was as if her feet didn’t belong to her at all.

      What had Anara done to these golden shoes? What magical spring had she dipped them in? Who had she asked to bless them? It was as if they had given Pretia superpowers. It was as if they had given her grana.

      Pretia skidded to a stop, tripped over a tree root, and went head over heels until she came to rest, her knees streaked with reddish dust.

      What if it wasn’t the shoes? What if it was grana? Finally, after all this time.

      Pretia lay on her back and looked up at the sun through the craggy branches of an olive tree. For the second time that afternoon she began to take stock of her body. Her fingers were tingling. Her muscles were twitching. She could smell different things in the air—the scent of the figs, the warm earth, the seawater hundreds of feet below the cliffs. And she could hear, too, the sound of individual waves crashing, the individual songs of dozens of different birds, the underground river that fed the castle’s lakes and reservoir.

      Pretia clapped a hand over her mouth. It was finally happening!

      Her grana had arrived.

      She could rule Epoca. But even better, she might become an Epic Athlete after all. And now, most certainly, her invitation to Ecrof would come!

      She leaped to her feet. And once more, she was off. Faster this time. Faster and faster and faster. And then the strangest thing happened—it was almost as if she were watching herself run. It was as if she were standing back and another Pretia was sprinting on ahead, doing all the work, feeling all the pain that should have been in her legs and chest after so much exercise.

      But before Pretia could figure out what was happening, a chorus of kids’ voices rose over the woods. She stopped running—the illusion of being two people ceased. Then she tucked herself behind a tree at the end of the Royal Woods and peered into a clearing along the edge of one of the towering cliffs that dropped down to the sea. A group of castle workers’ kids were chasing one another around the grass and laughing.

      Suddenly one of them caught sight of Pretia and stopped running. Soon the entire group was staring at her.

      “I’m sorry,” Pretia said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

      The kids all looked at her, unsure about how to address the princess.

      “You can keep playing,” Pretia said.

      The kids exchanged glances. Finally, one of them—Dinara, the Games Trainer’s daughter—spoke. “You’re not going to tell, are you?”

      “Tell what?” Pretia asked.

      “We’re supposed to be helping after the, er, your birthday party. Not playing around.”

      Pretia’s heart sank. She would always be the princess, treated differently because of her royal birth. “I’m sure there are enough adults to handle that,” she said. “Anyway, if they want to throw boring parties, they can do all the cleanup.”

      The kids looked at each other, unsure whether to laugh.

      “I mean, you guys probably don’t have to sit around and listen to speeches about the tradition of our great land on your birthdays.”

      “Absolutely not! I’d rather jump in the sea,” Davos, the son of the Royal Cook, exclaimed. “On my birthday, my father cooks everything I could possibly imagine eating and invites all of my friends over and we stuff our faces until we are sick and then stay up all night.”

      Pretia shuffled from foot to foot. She was itching to keep moving and to test her grana. “What are you guys doing?” she finally asked.

      Once more the kids exchanged curious glances. Finally, Davos spoke. “Playing tag.”

      “Oh,” Pretia said, feeling incredibly stupid. Of course that’s what they were doing. Only someone who had never played tag before would ask such a dumb question. Only someone like Pretia.

      “Do you want to play?” Dinara asked.

      At ten years old, Pretia had never played with other kids before—at least not normal games like tag. First the golden sneakers, then her grana, and now a chance to play tag. Her birthday was certainly turning around.

      “Sure,” she said, stepping into the clearing.

      The kids surrounded her. “Okay,” Davos said, tapping Pretia on the shoulder. “You’re It.”

      Immediately the kids scattered. Pretia stayed put. She swiveled her head, looking at the group spread out across the clearing.

      “Don’t you know the rules?” Dinara said. “Chase us!”

      “I was just—” Pretia began. But instead of inventing excuses for why she hadn’t moved, she began to run. The first person she caught was Christos, the son of the Royal Gardener. He screamed when she tapped his shoulder. He whispered to Pretia, “You’re supposed to say ‘You’re It’ when you tag someone,” then sprinted away after the twin daughters of the Keeper of the Scrolls, who were near the edge of the forest.

      The game whirled around and around the clearing. Pretia mostly avoided getting tagged. Occasionally someone got her, but in no time she had tagged someone else. After a while, Pretia grew distracted, paying more attention to the new sensations summoned by her grana than to the game of tag itself. Everything from the earth beneath her feet to the smell of the salty sea air felt heightened. When she tagged another player, she could feel a transmission of energy in her fingers. From what she’d overheard from her distant cousins, these sensations would settle as her grana developed and as Pretia learned to control them. But for now, they were pinging around in her head, coursing through her arms and legs, making her run faster and jump higher.

      Dinara was It again and quickly tagged Pretia, who had momentarily stopped running, listening to the leaves rustling in the Royal Woods behind her. Do the leaves always make this sort of noise? she wondered. Would they always sound like an orchestra being played by the wind?

      “You’re It!” Dinara cried. “Princess Pretia, come on!”

      It took Pretia a moment to snap back to reality. “You don’t need to call me Princess,” Pretia said. But by then the other kids had spread out across the field except for Davos, who stood smack in the center, challenging her. “Come and get me,” he said, laughing. He was dancing from side to side, smiling. “Pretia, come and get me.”

      Pretia stood at the edge of the woods

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