My son was named for a constellation.

Kael — in the old Valdenne tongue it meant *the steady star*, the one that didn't move when the others wheeled. I hadn't known that when I named him. I'd just known it sounded like a beginning.

I hadn't known, at the time, how much I needed to believe in beginnings.

He was five now. He had my dark hair, my stubborn jaw, my habit of asking questions in multiples when one would do. He had, from his father, the silver-grey eyes that the Valdenne royal line had carried for three hundred years. Eyes so specific they appeared in the history paintings, in the state portraits, in the photographs that still circulated in the tabloids I'd stopped reading when I left.

He had no idea he was royal.

He thought he was a botanist's son. Which was also true.

We lived in the village of Harren, three hours north of the Valdenne capital, in a house at the edge of the forest where I cultivated medicinal plants for two regional pharmacies and one clinic that paid on time. I had a garden that Kael considered his personal kingdom. I had a neighbor named Yola who watched him on the mornings I was in the greenhouse. I had, in the broad sense, a life.

A quiet life. A life built deliberately, layer by careful layer, on the understanding that quiet was what kept us safe.

"Mama," Kael said, at breakfast.

"Yes," I said.

"Why do plants know when it's dark?"

"Because they have circadian rhythms," I said. "Like us."

"Do they dream?"

"Not that we know of," I said.

"I think they do," he said. "Small dreams. About rain."

He ate his porridge.

I watched him and thought — as I did most mornings — about whether what I was doing was right. Whether the life I'd built around our safety was also the life I wanted him to have. Whether there came a point at which the protection became a limitation.

He was five. He had time.

I had time.

That's what I told myself at breakfast on the last morning before everything changed.

At ten o'clock, Yola knocked on my door.

She had the expression she used when something had happened that she didn't know how to say.

"There are two cars at the end of the lane," she said. "Black ones. Very clean. They have a flag on the side." She paused. "The Valdenne flag."

I set down the seedling tray I was holding.

"How many people?" I said.

"I could see four," she said. "Maybe more."

I looked at my greenhouse. At the late-autumn garden, the last of the harvest in, the beds mulched and waiting for spring.

At the life I'd built.

"Take Kael," I said. "Please. Take him to your house."

"Priya—"

"Please," I said. "I'll come explain later."

She took him.

I watched the window.

And then the knock came.