This book won the 2025 Colorado Book Award for Historical Fiction.

I was a girl. My hair was plaited, my nose slightly upturned. I did not like the sight of my wolf’s tooth in the glass. I fought to keep it lipped.

My mother died when I was born. I was her murderess.

My father never spoke this fact. It shaped the silence between us. Not that he didn’t love her. He did, I am sure, in his own way. But my father was not a man who showed love. What must such love have looked like?

I grew up under his foot. Under his brand of love— needy, demeaning love that did not love back. He loved others. Women slid through the house like eels. A few of them took interest in me. I was the granddaughter of a former king, after all. An old king of whom people spoke with reverence, when they remembered hi

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