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Iphis woke up on her sixth birthday when her twin rolled over on their bed and jostled her with a squeal of excitement. Corona always squealed. It was gross. Corona’s hair was radiant and golden and curled like woven sunlight, and though Iphis could not put those feelings to words, she was fully familiar with the nauseating envy that rose up in her throat every time she saw her sister. Iphis’ hair was not radiant, or golden, or long enough to even think about curling. Her pale hair was buzzed short in the military style of the traditional Cohort, which the Third had adopted for all its young Princes. She hated it.
“It’s our birthday!” Corona announced with another squeal.
“I know it’s our birthday,” Iphis snapped, still sleepy-eyed. “I’m not stupid. What will he look like?”
“Who?”
“The cavalier, dummy. We meet him today.”
“I knew that!” Corona protested. Her eyes were wide and teary and stupid, just like they always were whenever her feelings were hurt. Iphis could make better use of those eyes. Iphis could make better use of everything her sister had.
“You probably forgot,” Iphis said, and tossed her head the way she’d seen her twin do last week. Corona laughed at her. “What?”
“You look silly,” Corona said. “You need long hair to look good.” She was stupid. The two of them were alone. They never had any secrets, alone. They never needed to pretend, alone. Corona’s eyes widened at what they saw in her sister’s. “What’s wrong?”
By the time the guards responded to the screaming, it was finished. Iphis watched with a glittering smile as the governesses tended to the bawling baby that was her sister. It was stupid. She hadn’t even drawn blood. The necromancers called to fix the situation couldn’t regrow the golden hair that lay all around Iphis’ bed, or clung to the bloodsweat on her face and arms. That was good enough. Iphis had wanted more, had wanted that golden hair for her own, but she couldn’t figure out how to replace her pale and lifeless buzz with the hair she’d slashed clear of her sister’s head. She rubbed her wrist. It was still sore from where she’d turned cartilage into a thin razor. Not for the first time, the secrets of bone magic seemed worth pursuing.
“Prince Iphis,” one of the governesses was saying, “you could have hurt the Princess Coronabeth.” Iphis rolled her eyes. Of course she could have hurt her. She was a necromancer. Corona was a stupid girl who played with swords. “You need to learn discipline.”
“Stop,” said Iphis. “I want to see what they’re doing.” The governess stopped. They all stopped, when she spoke like that. She watched the necromancers work, memorized the theorems, applied them to herself. She could feel the magic settle into her scalp. Corona’s hair would grow more quickly, now, until it was at its desired length. But Iphis was better than the necromancers. She was smarter, too. Corona’s hair would grow quickly. But hers would grow faster. “We’re not cutting my hair short any more,” she informed the governess.
Corona had stopped sniveling by the time the cavalier-to-be arrived. He was young and ugly. “I’m Naberius Tern,” he said. It was an ugly name for an ugly boy. “I’m going to be your cavalier, Princess Coronabeth.”
“You are going to be the cavalier for both of us,” Corona said, haughty still despite her short-cut bob. “Iphis is your Princess too.”
Naberius stared at Iphis. “But he’s a boy,” he said.
Iphis decided that she would kill him, one day. She hadn’t killed anyone before, but she’d read about it in books. It was easy enough. He wasn’t even a necromancer. All she needed to do was stop him from moving, then take his sword, and he’d be dead. She’d do it.
Before that, though, she had work to do.
Iphis woke up on her twelfth birthday to the sound of her twin singing quietly to herself. Corona could always sing perfectly. Iphis had never tried to learn. She’d been caught singing once, years ago, and Corona had never let her forget how bad she sounded. Corona was taller than she was, now, and extending her lead every day. The governesses had told Iphis that this was normal, that Iphis would begin to change later, that she’d be taller and more muscular and hairier and more disgusting in every way. She wondered when the first hair would show on her lip, or on her chin. She avoided mirrors. Naberius had already begun to grow. His voice was changing, getting lower as it stumbled down breaks and squeaks to a slick and whining tenor. She avoided Naberius, even moreso than usual. Corona was beautiful and perfect in every way on the outside, though she was naive and easily taken advantage of. Iphis wanted to avoid Corona, but that would leave her twin unprotected. The governesses had tried to separate them, talking about how it was improper for them to share a bed given their age. Corona had lasted all of two days before, puffy-eyed from exhaustion and weeping, she had ordered that she be reunited with her twin. The governesses had relented.
Corona’s song was a lullaby one of the old governesses had sung. She was brushing her hair while she sang. Golden, radiant waves. Iphis thought back to a birthday years ago and smiled slightly.
Her twin caught sight of her in the vanity. “What has you so happy so early in the morning?” Corona asked her.
“Just admiring your hair,” Iphis said easily, in the casual blending of truth and lie that she had already begun to master. “I wish I had it.”
Corona sat down on the bed. “Sit up. Let me brush yours. Yours is so beautiful, Iphis. If you just would take care of it—”
“It would still look like limp, pale vegetables.” She let Corona brush her hair. It felt nice. Sometimes, when someone was brushing her hair, she could close her eyes and pretend that she was like her sister, that she could simply be without any extra work on her part.
“It looks like moonlight,” Corona said. “Poets write about the moons all the time.”
Iphis opened her eyes. “There are hundreds of moons. There’s only one Dominicus.”
“There’s only one necromancer in this room,” Corona said in response. Her voice was quiet. The two of them were alone. They never had any secrets, alone. They never needed to pretend, alone.
“Mm.”
“Are you still going to do it?”
Iphis tossed her hair contemptuously. “Of course I am. I’ve been studying for years.”
“Nobody else has done it.”
“Nobody else is me.”
“And you’re sure about the soul? That there won’t be rejection? You can still go to the chirurgeons. They have medicines.”
Iphis thinned her lips. Corona knew what Iphis told her, but she didn’t understand. Still, while Iphis knew the flesh magic inside and out—it was what half of the medicines were based on, anyway—the spiritual part concerned her. She’d gone so far as to write to the Fifth House, but the Lady of Koniotos Court was so disgustingly cloying that Iphis had never deigned to reply to the first simpering response. Even her ambitions had limits. At least, she assured herself that they did, when the thought troubled her. The thought troubled her increasingly less often.
“Iphis?” Corona pressed.
“It will be fine,” Iphis snapped. “I’ll be monitoring it, just like we planned. A year of stagnation, and then development. I’ve already begun taking care of the primary organs.”
“And you’ll know if there’s a spirit problem?”
Iphis quirked a small smile and pecked her twin on the cheek. “That’s what I have you for.”
Corona beamed in response, and Iphis managed not to wince. Her sister was becoming radiant. Corona's smile dimmed. “Will the King and Queen approve?” They hadn’t seen their parents since their last presentation to court, when they were eight. They wouldn’t see them again until their formal debut to society at sixteen. Governesses and other specialists cared for them and taught them the ways of the world. Corona had taken to practicing the rapier with Naberius. Stupidity, but it kept her occupied, which was useful. Iphis had real work to do.
“I’ll handle our parents,” Iphis said.
She woke up on her sixteenth birthday to their bedroom door slamming open. “Let me see him!” their father shouted. She propped herself up lazily. Corona leapt out of bed with a start and curtsied perfectly.
“Your Majesty,” said Corona. “It is an unexpected honor—”
“Be silent, Coronabeth,” said the King of Ida, and he cleaved Corona’s tongue to the top of her mouth with a dismissive flick of his hand. The Crown Princess panicked. The young woman lying in bed narrowed her eyes as she heard her twin whimpering in fear. “You,” he said to her.
“Release her,” she said.
“You dare to command me, you insolent whelp?” the king roared. A vein bulged in his forehead. “Do you have any idea how many years we have spent planning around a Prince? Change yourself back, at once!”
She thought about explaining to her idiot of a father exactly how adolescence worked, but her idiot of a sister was about to wet herself in fear. So she let Corona’s tongue loose.
“Your Majesty, I can explinnnghghhhh.” Corona clawed at her mouth. So that’s how it would be.
“Your plans will survive. Tell my future spouse they’re getting a Princess, instead.” Her twin gasped for breath as her mouth was freed again, then yelped as her tongue, teeth, and lips all fused together. Sloppy. It would have been better to interfere with the nerves directly.
“They have preferences,” their father growled.
“A trait I happen to share,” she said. “One that does not involve being a Prince.” Corona’s lips popped free of each other, along with her teeth and her tongue. She took the opportunity to scrabble towards the door. She made it halfway there before her legs gave out. There was the nerve block that he should have started with.
“Boy,” the king started, then trailed off as she got out of bed. Corona’s legs were hers once more, and she darted out of the room before the petty battle over her faculty of speech could escalate further.
The “boy” looked down at herself, then at the man in front of her. “I’m afraid not, father dear. Not for many, many years now.”
“Change yourself back, or I’ll do it myself.” His voice was flat. She felt the probing start, felt the distant, alien attention to her body. There wasn’t time for rage. The assault was too immediate, too personal, too profound. There were parts of her that she had simply turned off, inverted, repurposed—and then left alone, never to be thought of again. And now someone else was thinking of them. Making her think of them. Attempting to change them.
What aborted rage left in its absence was a cold and dispassionate lethality. She felt mild pain as tendons tore themselves free of her wrists and impaled her father through the shoulders. Agony bloomed in her abdomen, and she vomited blood. He’d ruptured her stomach. It took moments for her to piece it back together. It wasn’t time she had. It wasn’t energy she had. Her knees buckled. Bloodsweat ran in streams down her skin as the tendons fell free from her wrist and withered away. She saw her father approach her, and then the world went sideways as his fist connected with the side of her head.
“Get up,” he said. She didn’t. She couldn’t. It couldn’t end here. She tried to claw thalergy from him, as she’d read in Second House training, but he interrupted the attempted with a kick to her side. “Get up, boy.” No. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen—
“Excuse me,” came a hatefully slick and whining voice from the doorway. “But I’ll thank Your Majesty to step away from my necromancer.”
“What?” Her father turned to stare at Naberius Tern, whose rapier was leveled squarely at him. “You insolent whelp. I’ll have my cavalier flense your skin from your bones.”
Naberius whistled tunelessly. “You’ll want to fix his calcaneal tendons, first. They look extremely painful, all rolled up like that.”
Her father’s astonishment was all she needed. The theorems came together in her head, and she threw them at him with every ounce of energy she had left. She felt the harpoons of thanergy latch into his soul, and then his thalergy was pouring into her like a draught of heady wine. She picked herself up off of the ground as he crumpled.
“Thank you, Babs,” she said, and cursed herself for how badly her attempt at sounding casual went. He simply winked at her before sauntering off. She looked down at her father.
“Kill me and you’ll never see freedom again,” he rasped. It pleased her to see how blood-slick his own skin was. Good. He’d been pushing himself, too.
She rolled her eyes. “I can see where Corona gets it from. No, Your Majesty. I have no plans to kill you. You have an important announcement to make tonight, after all. Don’t you?” She’d stopped draining his life energy, but the hooks remained firmly latched inside his spirit, ready to begin the infusion at her whim.
He bared his teeth in something like a smile. Well. That’s where she got it from, at least. “What do you have in mind, daughter?”
She smiled back in perfect imitation. “How very kind of you to ask.”
Twelve hours later, arm in arm with her twin, she stood in front of a massive door wrought of ancient wood and gold. The sounds of the ball behind it were muffled by its enormous weight. Corona smiled radiantly at her. She smiled back. This was good. This was right. The two were dressed in matching gowns of regal purple. Corona’s hair spilled forth like the light of Dominicus upon the Third. Her hair ran limply down her shoulders like pale, pearlescent water. They weren’t alone, now. There were secrets to keep. There were pretenses to maintain. The door opened.
“Presenting,” rumbled the King of Ida, “to the society of the Third House, and to the Undying Empire, the Crown Princess Coronabeth and… the Princess Ianthe Tridentarius.”
With a smile like a gleaming jewel, Ianthe strode forward, with her sister, into the light and noise.