Once upon a time, there was a king who married a witch. Together, they had four sons and one daughter, and they were very happy as long as the king lived.

When my father the king died and my oldest brother was crowned king, life went sideways for me, my sister, and our mother.

The new king, our oldest brother, decided to use our sister as coin to buy our country’s safety. He planned to marry her to the king across a perilous border to our south.

When Mother protested, he locked her in her room. He had forgotten her witch powers, but I hadn’t. As a fourth son in a country where only the first three sons mattered—one dedicated to the crown, one to the military, one to the church—I was of no use unless one of my older brothers died.

My sister and I had spent our childhoods studying with our mother. My older brothers assumed my sister was learning how to be a princess, and they didn’t care what I did with our mother; they only mocked me for studying instead of fighting. They never wondered whether we were learning other skills.

The night before my sister set off with her retinue to meet her new husband, I snuck into my mother’s room, as I had been doing since she was imprisoned. She gave me the locket she had prepared, and put on the one she’d made for herself. I slipped mine on.

The locket changed me from a scrawny prince into a sturdy girl.

My mother’s locket changed her from a tall, warm, attractive woman into a muscular, shorter, square-faced woman.

In the morning, we dressed in servants’ clothes, shouldered our satchels, and joined the other servants leaving with my sister.

My sister’s servants were startled when we joined them, unsure of how strangers had arrived. My sister said we were gifts from her husband-to-be.

The others gave us the most menial jobs. We did them without complaint.

I spent the journey growing accustomed to my new body and dress. I felt strange and stronger in my new shape, a more solid self. Strange also was the way others treated me—fewer tests, less respect, easier connections with women, more uneasiness in the presence of men. I learned how to cook for a small group of moving people. Some things my mother had already taught me—peeling and chopping, spicing and cooking, cleaning up, all skills we used to craft spells. Only the intent had changed.

• • • •

The kitchen in our new castle looked much like the old one: mortared stone walls; a mullioned window; a hearth big enough for a fire that could roast a hog, sheep, or deer, with room for hanging cauldrons over the fire to make stews; a clay oven for baking bread; tables and shelves for work space and storage; racks from which hung pots and pans and spoons and knives; a scullery for washing up. Drying bunches of herbs spiced the air with thyme and rosemary, and crushed rushes underfoot gave off a fresh scent. We arrived when everyone in the kitchen was rushing to prepare the welcome meal for the new princess. Mother and I joined in the preparations, and the cook was glad of the extra hands.

Later, after the feast ended, the dishes had been washed, and the leftover food shared between the servants, the cook gave us straw pallets. Mother and I settled near the hearth. The banked embers muttered in small crackles, making a song with the snores of others sleeping nearby, letting out a leak of light. I held my locket as I stared into my mother’s eyes. Her eyes were a different shape and a paler color now. Her lips were fuller, her hair straw instead of shadow.

A tiny shuffle in the rushes warned me. My sister knelt beside us, a hooded robe hiding her. I made space for her between us. She lay face-up and whispered like the faintest breeze. “The king is not terrible.”

“Will you stay?” breathed Mother.

We lay in silence.

If we stayed, I would remain a girl.

I remembered my first kiss, back home, with a knight’s daughter by the woodshed, our mouths sweet with the berries we’d picked, tentative, tender, and swift.

I remembered my second kiss, when my sister’s guard caught me during the night on the journey here. He had covered my mouth with his hand to keep me quiet and dragged me away from our fire, pressed his mouth against mine and shoved his tongue into my mouth, groping through my clothes to squeeze my breasts so hard he left bruises. He tasted like force and ale and tooth-rot, and if my mother had not come, he would have hurt me much worse than he had.

I stroked my thumb over my locket. I could take it off, and be a skinny boy with no status again. The cook might take me on as a kitchen worker. Or she might cast me out, and I would lose what family I had left.

Mother knew powerful spells. She had used one on the guard who had kissed me. He would never get any woman with child. Even to think of it would make him burn.

She might be able to give me other protections.

“Here is better than home,” whispered my sister.

I remembered sword-fighting practice in the castle courtyard in the cold dawn with my older brothers, them swatting me with the flats of their blades and laughing. Talking about whom they could marry me to, what advantages they might gain.

“Are you comfortable?” whispered my mother.

“I have my own room, and the door locks from the inside,” my sister whispered.

“That will change when you marry.”

“The king was kind. He cut my meat, and gave me a sharp knife with a silver handle in a leather sheath to hang on my belt.”

He had given her a weapon she could protect herself with.

“I want to stay,” whispered my sister.

After my sister left, my mother asked me, “Will you stay?”

“Will you?”

“For now.”

I lay in the kitchen darkness, the locket in my hand. I had a person to be and a place to stay. Both strange to me.

I could learn them.